Australia has a history of settler colonial politics and attempts at decolonisation have routinely been met with measures which reinforce the power and authority of the settler state. This has created a situation where there is an ongoing tension within Australian policy between normative commitments to decolonisation, racial equality or citizenship rights and attempts to preserve the nationhood of the settler society and the legitimacy of the settler state. The relative imperviousness of settler colonialism to decolonisation is brought about by the willingness of political actors to consistently rework policy and political discourse. The effect of this revision of political discourse is to legitimate colonial forms of governance, reinforce settler privilege, and to maintain settler cultural values as the basis of norms within the nation's political institutions and political
processes. Settler colonies were founded on the displacement and replacement of Indigenous populations and modern settler colonialism continues the project of replacement or extinguishment by seeking to assimilate Aboriginal people into settler society. The scholarship on settler colonialism posits that the settler colonial project still holds an appeal and continues to exercise a strong influence on discourse.231 My
analysis of the NTI in this chapter demonstrates the strength of that influence.
My analysis of the approaches and language of the Coalition and Labor governments demonstrates that colonialist conceptions of Aboriginal culture and community played a prominent role in justifications for the NTI. Earlier ideas about the primitiveness and backwardness of the Aboriginal race are reinvented in modern examples of settler
colonial ideology to refer to the problems of Aboriginal culture and to suggest that Aboriginal ways of life are incompatible with the present day economy and society. In the debates on the NTI the Coalition Government emphasised the dysfunctional characteristics of Aboriginal communities and portrayed Aboriginal communities as unsafe places for children. The danger to Aboriginal children was not just the danger of physical or emotional abuse but the broader danger of being brought up as Aboriginal children and therefore inheriting a culture which was seen, by the government, as maladapted to the modern world. While the Coalition Government developed a discourse of Aboriginal failure the Labor Government was more circumspect in their descriptions of Aboriginal culture and typically framed their justifications for the
Intervention in terms of their commitment to human rights and Aboriginal development. However both the Labor and Coalition governments, in their support for the NTI, ultimately oversaw an assimilationist policy which was widely recognised for its failure to observe human rights standards. In keeping with a settler colonial mindset, both governments positioned the norms of the settler society as the benchmark against which to evaluate Aboriginal communities. Both sought to enforce a transformation of
Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory through the interventionist and highly prescriptive measures of the NTER legislation.
Chapter Four: A Liberal Governmentality
In the introduction to this dissertation, I suggested that an analysis of the NTI would assist us in the development of a better understanding of authoritarian liberal politics. So far, I have demonstrated that there can be a relationship between the production of knowledge about Aboriginal culture and the justification or acceptance of authoritarian policy techniques for governing Indigenous peoples. In the remaining chapters, I extend our understanding of the authoritarian character of the NTI by arguing that the NTI is as much a product of liberal political ideas as it is a product of a settler colonial mentality. At first glance, this may be a controversial statement. Liberalism is typically perceived to be a doctrine of individual emancipation, and liberal political institutions and
constitutions often focus on restraining the powers and scope of State activity in order to maintain a space for personal liberty. It is therefore difficult, from this perspective, to understand the role that liberal ideas may have played in the development of the highly interventionist policies of the NTI. This chapter, however, makes the case for
incorporating an analysis of liberal politics into our understanding of the Intervention's authoritarian role for government. The full evidence in support of my argument about the interrelationship between liberal and settler colonial politics in the case of the NTI is developed in Chapters Five and Six.
This chapter has three parts. In the first section I make the case for broadening the analysis of the NTI beyond the settler colonial understanding developed in Chapter Three. I review the idea that liberal politics has historically been associated with justifications for imperialism and demonstrate that, while it is not the main focus of the scholarship on settler colonialism, a good case can nonetheless be made for the
compatibility of settler colonial and liberal democratic forms of politics. In the second section of this chapter, I introduce the concept of governmentality, which I employ to develop an understanding of the authoritarian elements of liberal politics. Michel Foucault's conception of liberal governmentality conceives of liberal freedom as
something that is actively produced by government and civil and economic society. The last section of this chapter considers how the insights of the scholarship on
chapters. According to scholars of governmentality, the production of free liberal citizens involves a combination of facilitative and coercive forms of government. This, of course, has special relevance for Indigenous citizens because governments are likely to view Indigenous people as insufficiently prepared for the rights and obligations of liberal citizenship. I suggest a better understanding of the liberal aspects of the NTI – and its relationship to authoritarian and colonial government – can be developed if we analyse its role in the production of the conditions of liberal social and economic life in remote NT Indigenous communities.