From the Barrel of the Gun: Policy Incursions, Land, and Aboriginal Peoples in Australia

Abstract

This paper focuses on the enduring traces of colonialism within the Australian nation-state and the ongoing challenges to Aboriginal peoples' rights, especially land rights. We try to make sense of contemporary federal government and New South Wales state, or provincial, government policy changes which connect land use, access and ownership to social welfare, and which target Aboriginal peoples in remote, or outback, areas and the inner city. We connect these two policy initiatives by pointing to the tension between social and planning policies, conceptions of landownership, and the notion of Aboriginal self-determination. We try to understand the rationale and enactment of these policies through the idea of policy incursions. We argue that policy incursions represent a constellation of settler nationalism, the enactment of a white national imaginary, and the exploitation of crisis that reinscribe Aboriginal people in 21st-century Australia as objects of state policy, while marginalising them as subjects of the state.