Neoliberal Indigenous Policy

Settler Colonialism and the 'Post-Welfare' State

Elizabeth Strakosch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137405418
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines recent changes to Indigenous policy in English-speaking settler states, and locates them within the broader shift from social to neo-liberal framings of citizen-state relations via a case study of Australian federal policy between 2000 and 2007.

1

Introduction

Indigenous social policy in English-speaking settler states is changing. For the past 40 years, there was broad government consensus around a self-determination approach that aimed to secure Indigenous rights and entitlements, support self-governance and facilitate social reconciliation. But over the last 15 years, this consensus has slowly eroded (Lea et al. 2006; Te Atu O Tu MacDonald and Muldoon 2006; Bargh 2007). Emerging policies are less concerned with rights and relationships, and focus on reforming Indigenous behaviour, intervening in community ‘dysfunction’ and driving economic integration through mainstream employment (Preston 2013; Bargh 2007; I. Watson 2005; MacDonald 2011; Humpage 2005, 2008; Walter 2007; Altman 2007, 2010; Macoun 2011).

In Australia this policy shift is particularly marked. Governments have abolished Indigenous representative institutions and reformulated Indigenous welfare provision in line with the ‘responsibility’ and ‘post-welfare’ agendas. But there are smaller corresponding changes in Canada, New Zealand and the US. Increasingly, political leaders and state agencies directly question Indigenous rights institutions (see, for example, the 2008 National Party commitment to abolish Maori seats in the New Zealand parliament; Tahana 2008) and focus policy attention on Indigenous ‘welfare dependency’ and community behaviour (see discussions of the Indigenous impacts of Canadian and US welfare reform, the latter through the Personal Opportunity and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996; also federal government moves to takeover designated Indian communities for child safety reasons; Brown et al. 2001; Pulkington et al. 2010; Childress 2012). There are new policies emphasising mainstream economic participation and a discursive move from collective rights to individual equality of opportunity (see, for example, the 2012 US HEARTH Act of 2012 [‘Helping Expedite and Advance Responsible Tribal Home Ownership’] and Obama on Native American opportunity 2014).

How can we make sense of this shift? In Australia it has been going on for some time, and there are multiple interpretations. Domestic political conditions play an important role, given the impact of a long period of conservative government (Sanders 2006). Some interpret the decline of the self-determination paradigm in terms of that paradigm’s internal contradictions and limitations. For example, they suggest that it was driven by misguided non-Indigenous investment in a particular kind of Indigenous cultural stasis. This meant that it failed to take account of the increasingly porous and transgressed boundaries of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous worlds, and the diverse aspirations of Indigenous people (Lea et al. 2006; Sullivan 2011; Rowse 2012; Austin-Broos 2011). Finally, there is academic focus on changing public ideas, and the impact of prominent Indigenous and non-Indigenous critiques of the existing order. Such critiques came from all political directions – some challenged self-determination’s carefully circumscribed remedialism and others its corrosive welfare economies (see Bradfield 2006; Kowal 2008; Pearson 2000; Sutton 2009; Johns 2010).

This book seeks to add another dimension to our understanding, by locating the Indigenous policy transition in the context of broader domestic social policy changes. Of particular significance is the shift from social to neoliberal framings of citizen–state relations. Indigenous self-determination policy was conditioned by post-war social liberalism, and its vision of a benign, multicultural, enfolding state that recognised and secured citizen entitlements. The decline of the self-determination paradigm in Anglophone settler states can be partly understood in terms of the neoliberal critique and reconceptualisation of this social liberal welfare state. From this perspective, the Indigenous policy transformation is not just a move away from a particular approach, but a move to a new liberal paradigm that has been dominant in other social policy fields for 30 years. The four Anglophone settler states are wealthy liberal democracies that each embraced the neoliberalisation agenda, and this goes some way to accounting for the transnational character of the Indigenous policy shift.

But while Indigenous policy is part of the domestic social policy world, it overflows it. In the settler colonial context, domestic Indigenous policy is a crucial site of political encounter. I suggest that neoliberal Indigenous policy constitutes a contemporary example of the longer historical imbrication of liberalism and colonialism. Both of these political forces are changing in the contemporary world, and neoliberal domestic policy in settler states forms an important but under-examined site of intersection. I use the case study of Australian policy to reconstruct the interaction between the intellectual projects of neoliberalism and settler colonialism, and argue that ongoing settler colonial hierarchies have been rearticulated through, rather than revived or transcended by, neoliberal frameworks.

Importantly, this book does not aim to give a comprehensive account of how particular policies with neoliberal dimensions operate, or to examine the problems and opportunities for Indigenous people enmeshed with such policies (see Altamirano-Jiminez 2013; Te Atu O Tu MacDonald and Muldoon 2006). Both of these are important projects, and do not allow easy moral and political judgements. In their day-to-day operation, policy programs cannot be pre-emptively condemned or celebrated, but must be considered in terms of their concrete interactions with the diverse life projects of individuals and communities. Instead, I build on critical Indigenous theory, social policy scholarship and settler colonial studies to explore the ways in which changing policy logics in Indigenous affairs reflect and drive broader changes in dominant understandings of political relationships in liberal and settler colonial contexts (for others engaged with these themes in Australian scholarship see Howard-Wagner 2010, 2012; Stringer 2007; Lovell 2011; Morris and Lattas 2010; and Moreton-Robinson 2009). Ultimately, I seek to offer a set of analytical tools that might facilitate more detailed empirical articulations, and more open debate, of neoliberal Indigenous policy in its diverse manifestations.

Case study

The Australian situation is characterised by its long tradition of framing domestic welfare policy as the ‘solution’ to settler colonial conflicts. In this context, neoliberalism has had swift and comprehensive effects. Australia’s tentative social liberal movements towards sovereign negotiation were delegitimised and dismantled in a matter of a few years (Walter 2007). New marketised policy approaches took their place, and when these faced problems, the Australian government moved to unilateral intensive intervention in Indigenous ‘dysfunction’.

This book offers an empirical and analytical account of Australian federal Indigenous policy making between 2000 and 2007. At the beginning of this period, the formal structures of self-determination and reconciliation policy were still in place, including the elected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC). At the end, the conservative Howard federal government had just initiated the dramatic and coercive Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER). Major policy changes occurred in the intervening time which conditioned the NTER, and fundamentally reformed the way Indigenous policy problems were understood and approached. This period of policy adjustment is often referred to as the ‘New Arrangements’. It involved the mainstreaming of Indigenous policy into existing social policy departments, the attempt to coordinate these departments through a centralised ‘whole-of-government’ approach, the rise of the rhetoric of Indigenous–government ‘mutual obligation’ for redressing disadvantage, and the use of quasi-contractual partnership mechanisms (Walter 2007; Humpage 2005, 2008; Hunt 2008; Arabena 2005; Sullivan 2010). The government termed these mechanisms ‘Shared Responsibility Agreements’ (SRAs), and sought to link them with broader Regional Partnership Agreements (RPAs) that would establish ‘organic’ representative institutions.

Australian neoliberal Indigenous policies have intensified since 2007, with the continuation of paternalistic intervention in the Northern Territory, the extension of welfare ‘quarantining’ linked to particular Indigenous behaviours such as school attendance, and the constant reformulation of whole-of-government service delivery projects (most recently via the relocation of Indigenous-focused bureaucrats to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, where they oversee a streamlined ‘Indigenous Advancement Strategy’; DPMC 2015). Policy remains framed around Indigenous socio-economic ‘needs’ rather than broader political recognition, and has become more explicitly normalising with the remedial ‘Closing the Gap’ agenda (Kowal 2015). However, the early transitional policy phase remains an important case study. Such periods involve encounters, and hence expose the differences, between social and neoliberal policy paradigms. Governments experiment with multiple tools before institutionalising processes, and actors articulate and contest neoliberal ideas with particular clarity.

This case study suggests that neoliberal settler colonialism is more rather than less likely to take place in the depoliticised policy register, and through decentralised economic and social processes. In its distrust of state juridical procedures, in its suspicion of rights claims, in its deconstruction of the collective into atomistic individuals, in its valorisation of ‘organic’ market processes, in its focus on the ‘defective’ subjectivities of the disadvantaged, neoliberalism pushes Indigenous–settler relations out of the visible spaces of sovereign encounter. However, by locating this phase of political relationship in the context of the broader entwinement of liberalism and settler colonialism, this book traces the ongoing sovereign dimensions of neoliberal Indigenous policy.

Argument

Historically, the rise of colonialism coincides with the rise of liberalism in many of the key colonising states (Ivison et al. 2000: 2; Ivison 2002; Duffield and Hewitt 2013). The relationship between these two forces therefore bears close examination. At the same time as European societies were developing notions of individual rights, democracy and the illegitimacy of absolute authority, they were initiating some of the most hierarchical and destructive political encounters ever seen. This apparent contradiction was at first managed by excluding Indigenous peoples from the category of capable individuals, and hence from citizenship and its associated rights (Hindess 2001). The classical liberal claim to provide equal rights to all capable individuals could therefore be sustained, despite the routine exclusion of women, non-white people, Indigenous people and workers.

During the twentieth century, excluded groups demanded recognition of their capacity, and such categorical exclusions became less acceptable. In the social liberal era,¹ citizenship was extended to Indigenous people, and their inclusion in the liberal order is often viewed as the end of colonialism. It is true that, in circumstances where Indigenous people constituted majority populations, liberal enfranchisement led to the overthrow or transformation of colonial regimes. If we only consider these cases, it might seem that the full enactment of liberalism dissolves colonial relationships.

Yet the settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US undermine this widely accepted story. Here, Indigenous peoples constitute minorities. In the social liberal era, they too were granted recognition as capable citizens, but this inclusion has not led to formal decolonisation or even to substantial institutional reform. As I argue in the following chapter, distributions of land, jurisdiction and political authority remain largely the same. In fact, because these states tend to see the extension of liberal citizenship as ending colonialism and foreclosing further Indigenous claims, such inclusion entrenches rather than dismantles existing settler authority. Indigenous demands for decolonisation beyond inclusion in the settler order continue, but appear anachronistic to the settler majority. In such circumstances there is a more complex and facilitative relationship between liberalism and colonialism.

Existing Indigenous and anti-colonial critiques of social liberal inclusionary regimes are persuasive. They challenge the postcolonial self-image of settler states in profound and productive ways. However, such critiques remain focused on the ‘rights-bestowing’ social liberal order, and have yet to take account of the decline of these regimes. The progressive multicultural state that recognises and dispenses entitlements to morally authoritative claimants already seems like a figure of nostalgia.

Over many decades, neoliberal logics have undermined this construction of the enfolding state that can extend its benefits in potentially infinite directions. Neoliberalism relies on a language of economic insecurity as justification for comprehensive reforms to increase competitiveness, efficiency and responsibility, and to delegitimise claims on the state. It celebrates the self-reliant, capable individual and denounces state regulation of such individuals as unproductive. However, it simultaneously allows increased coercion by the state where individuals or groups are deemed to lack appropriate capacity.

Along with most domestic social policy, Indigenous programs in the Anglophone settler colonies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US are increasingly less concerned with ensuring entitlements or extending Indigenous rights. Instead, they focus on individual economic participation, and operate through networks, markets, contracts and disciplinary ‘workfare’ regimes. In some cases, such as in the 2007 Australian Northern Territory Emergency Response, the state actually suspends certain Indigenous citizen entitlements, and unilaterally compels Indigenous people to act in particular ways.

This book traces the shift between social liberal and neoliberal political regimes in these settler colonies. How is the relationship between Indigenous peoples and settlers changing in this new liberal configuration? What does settler colonialism look like as the social democratic, inclusive state transforms?

It is tempting to see the shift to a neoliberal settler colonial order as a return to Indigenous exclusion. Certain pathologising, paternalistic and racially based neoliberal practices are all too familiar; analysts diagnose a regression to early liberal policy regimes such as protectionism and assimilation. Progressive responses, therefore, tend to focus on defending Indigenous social liberal entitlements against the neoliberal encroachment, and rescuing a progressive liberal teleology from the neoliberal ‘wrong turn’. Yet this response elides the fact that neoliberal practices of exclusion are often temporary and take place on the terrain of formal Indigenous citizenship – they constitute de facto exclusion despite de jure inclusion. An unreflective defence of social liberalism also forgets that inclusion itself is a powerful and subtle colonising practice.

Rather than equating neoliberalism with exclusion, I draw on the work of governmentality scholars such as Barry Hindess to argue that neoliberalism brings a newly flexible relationship between inclusion and exclusion. In the neoliberal era, citizenship detaches from secure, categorical inclusion and permanent recognition of capacity. Where previously citizenship largely coincided with capacity, neoliberalism introduces the figure of the incapable citizen. This ambiguous position allows a subject to be formally included as a citizen, and simultaneously excluded from regimes of freedom for being temporarily ‘undeserving’ of this existing citizenship.

Like other neoliberal social policies, neoliberal Indigenous policy operates between the two poles of autonomy and control, and its power lies in this liminality. Indigenous selves are asked to perform their capacity in real time, and are governed through freedom or coercion accordingly. Reallocation is constant and rapid; being assessed and governed differently becomes a threat or a promise, and hence a lever. Neoliberal Indigenous policy intensifies the ambivalent position of Aboriginal people as simultaneously inside and outside the settler order, while always continuing to frame them as legitimate subjects of state policy authority.

Therefore, while neoliberalism reframes the political relationship between Indigenous and settler people in important ways, it continues to facilitate settler colonialism. Like social liberalism, it formally includes Indigenous people as citizens and therefore claims to have resolved colonialism, but like classic liberalism, it allows the selective coercion, racial pathologisation and exclusion of Indigenous subjects in order to maintain settler privileges. It does this while emphasising economic necessity and individual welfare, and erasing the political dimensions of its actions. Neoliberalism, therefore, depoliticises and technicalises colonial hierarchies, framing them as the result of natural economic processes and individual capacity failures (Altamirano-Jiminez 2013: 4; Bargh 2002). Recuperating the political dimensions of Indigenous policy becomes especially important in these circumstances.

Colonialism and public policy

This book explores the relationship between neoliberalism and settler colonialism in the often-neglected realm of public policy. Against a general scholarly tendency to locate sovereign encounters in juridical spaces, I argue that domestic policy is a crucial site where collective political identities are contested and formed. This dynamic is particularly pronounced in settler colonial environments. The aggressive domestication of the ‘Aboriginal problem’, and its (attempted) confinement to a social policy issue, is itself a profoundly political act with sovereign implications (Wolfe 2015: 31). As others have noted, colonisation is a practical process (Borrows 2004: 1) and bureaucrats are on the front line. It is not only in some imagined agoric centre that the struggle for control of Indigenous bodies, lives and politics takes place, but in day-to-day confrontations over welfare, administration and order.

Despite the common distinction between internal and external spaces of settler colonial states, in reality, lines of sovereign conflict run like roadmaps throughout the apparently domesticated s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• Part I  Theories
• Part II  Practices
• Notes
• References
• Index