This section argues that a settler colonial and liberal democratic politics are broadly compatible but posits that the settler colonial scholarship – including my own analysis of the NTI in Chapter Three – provides an insufficient conceptual framework for investigating this relationship. I begin with a brief summary of my own analysis from a settler colonial perspective. I then discuss some of the reasons why it is useful to investigate the role of liberal politics in the development and justification of the interventionist politics of the NTI. Political philosophers often focus on the role of liberal politics as a guarantor of personal liberty but recent scholarship on both settler colonialism and the history of liberal thought suggests that there may be a close relationship between liberal and colonial ideas. In this context, it is reasonable and necessary to broaden the analysis of the NTI in this dissertation to consider the role of liberal politics in the NTI and the relationship between contemporary liberal norms and the settler colonial mentality.
Up to this point in the dissertation, my analysis has employed the scholarship on settler colonialism to highlight the centrality of a settler colonial mentality to Australian politics and to the official discourses surrounding the NTI policy. Utilising the concept of colonial time, I have sought to demonstrate that ideas about the backwardness of Aboriginal cultural life formed part of the justification and mindset of both the Coalition and Labor governments. This mentality manifested in different political discourses
including the Coalition Government's discourse of Aboriginal cultural failure and the Labor Government's discourse of development. It also played a role in the justification of the suspension of Australia's human rights commitments and of anti-discrimination legislation in regards to the NTI policy. Overall, these discourses supported a political environment in which politicians allowed themselves to interpret authoritarian, or at least highly prescriptive, policy as an ethical and necessary choice. This analysis is, however, able to provide only a partial explanation for the authoritarian character of the Intervention. A settler colonial analytical framework does not lend itself to an
investigation of what relationship – if any – there may be between this settler colonial mentality and the liberal norms of Australian political society.
Liberalism is typically understood as a political doctrine that privileges the liberty of the individual and seeks to limit the role of the State in individuals' lives. From this
perspective, it would be natural to interpret the NTI as an illiberal policy that is out of step with the liberal democratic values of contemporary Australian society.232 There is
some evidence that supports this interpretation of the Intervention. Since at least the time of J.S. Mill liberals have valued individual liberty for its potential benefits to both the wellbeing of individuals and the progress of society in general and condemned excessive government that unnecessarily restricts this liberty.233 Some contemporary
multiculturalist theorists have extended ideas about the protection of the liberty of individuals against the incursions of the State by defining rights for cultural minorities within a liberal State. William Kymlicka, for instance, argues that culture provides a vital resource for individual choices and for the development of individual autonomy. A liberal politics, from this perspective, would protect Indigenous and other minority cultural groups from the nation-building aspirations of the State by, for example, developing participative forms of democracy and power-sharing arrangements.234 As I
described in Chapter Two, the NTI involved a high degree of government intervention in Aboriginal individual's daily activities and community governance and was
232 For example, Boyd Hunter, "Revisiting the Role of Rhetoric in Economics," Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research Topical Issue, no. 7 (2008): 3.
233 Mill, On Liberty, 28-32, 68, 120.
234 Will Kymlicka, "Culturally Responsive Policies," (Background Paper for Human Development Report: United Nations Development Program, 2004), 9-11.
developed without consultation with affected communities. This highly centralised approach clearly involved a significant imposition on Aboriginal citizens' liberty and autonomy.
While many liberal commentators on the NTI found the policy unpalatable this does not mean the policy was an illiberal one. Scholars of liberal thought have drawn attention to the historical connection between liberal forms of politics and – depending on the particular critic's political orientation – imperialism, colonialism, or class oppression. As Uday Singh Mehta points out, while we rightfully associate liberalism with an agenda of securing human dignity and individual liberty, the liberal doctrine has also been intimately connected – in both theory and in practice – with ideological projects that legitimated and authorised imperial government.235 J.S. Mill's utilitarian defence of
imperialism exemplifies the complicated interrelationship between liberal ideas and imperialism. Mill defended imperialism, including the settlement of British colonies, on the basis that these colonies would become civilised, prosperous political communities and bring civilisation to 'backward' people. 236 Since the development of liberal ideas in
the nineteenth century, liberals have numbered among the most prominent defenders of imperialism but have also been sharply critical of imperial politics.237 It is entirely
feasible, given the history of liberal imperialism and colonialism, that the NTI is based on a combination of liberal and settler colonial ideas.
The scholarship on the history of settler colonialism occasionally provides a brief commentary on the interrelationship between liberal and specifically settler colonial political imperatives. Wolfe, for instance, considers the role of the 'liberal-bourgeois
235 Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire. A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2-5.
236 Some scholars do, however, argue that he became increasingly disillusioned with imperialism later in his life as he became more aware of the atrocities of colonial violence. See Duncan Bell, "John Stuart Mill on Colonies," Political Theory 38, no. 1 (2010); Katherine Smits, "John Stuart Mill on the Antipodes: Settler Violence against Indigenous Peoples and the Legitimacy of Colonial Rule," Australian Journal of Politics & History 54, no. 1 (2008); Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire
(Princeton: Princeton University Press 2003), 279.
237 Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire. The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 4.
ideology' within colonising discourses of land and property ownership. The eighteenth century saw a discursive struggle between the aristocratic concept of hereditary land estates and radical liberal ideas about individual enterprise and the efficient utilisation of land. The concept of Terra nullify – based on 'liberal-bourgeois' conceptions of property and land use – was part of a land policy or regime which sought to dispossess Indigenous people of their land and assimilate Indigenous people into European settler society.238 Wolfe's analysis suggests that there is a relationship between liberalism and
settler colonialism just as other scholarship has highlighted the relationship between liberal politics and imperialism more generally.
However, the scholarship on settler colonialism generally provides little guidance on how to characterise the possible connection between liberal and settler colonial politics. A useful exception to this is Bruyneel’s history of settler colonial politics in the United States. Bruyneel suggests that the American political system is neither singularly liberal democratic or colonial but, rather, that the American settler state is comprised of both of these political systems.239 The main dilemma for scholars of U.S.-Indigenous politics is
that Indigenous tribes are 'neither fully foreign nor seamlessly assimilated' in American society. Indigenous individuals are denied the full rights of American citizenship and Indigenous peoples are collectively denied the sovereign rights associated with independent nationhood. In other words, the constitutional position of Indigenous people is one of both ongoing exclusion and partial inclusion within the liberal democratic State.240 Crucially, Bruyneel argues that liberal democratic and colonial
impulses can actually be compatible because both impulses are born of attempts to impose the American political system on Indigenous peoples and to legitimate the American political system.241 The idea that liberal and colonial politics can be
compatible impulses within contemporary liberal democratic politics is an important one because it provides a starting point for investigating the possible interrelatedness of
238 Wolfe, "Logics of Elimination: Colonial Policies on Indigenous Peoples in Australia and the United States," 12-14.
239 Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty, 5. 240 Ibid., 5-6.
liberal and settler colonial politics in other contexts including the Australian one. If, as Bruyneel has argued, liberal democratic and settler colonial politics are
compatible, then our understanding of settler colonial politics can be extended by an analysis of the liberal aspects of the NTI. The settler colonial scholarship, as I have mentioned, rarely engages with the influence of liberal forms of politics within settler societies. I therefore draw upon the insights of another field of scholarship –
governmentality studies – for my investigation of the liberal aspects of NTI governance. In the next section of this chapter I provide a brief summary of Foucault's concept of governmentality. In the last section of this chapter I outline the ideas of scholars such as Mitchell Dean and Barry Hindess who have used and adapted Foucault's ideas about liberal governmentality to investigate the apparent contradictions between the
authoritarian and libertarian strands of liberal politics. I employ these ideas to develop an analytical approach for understanding the contribution of liberal politics to the authoritarian components of the NTI policy.