As we know, white people, real white people, aren’t ethnic, aren’t racialised. Thus the Law Council felt free, in its Senate submission on the Crimes Amendment (Bail and Sentencing) Bill 2006, to continually distinguish between “people of multicultural backgrounds” and others. It doesn’t mean that one parent is French and the other German. This is multiculturalism at its finest.

public policy is class war continued by other means
The apparent speed of the intervention, the manufactured need for haste rather than discussion, the hundreds of pages of legislation rushing through parliament, what does this tell us, the pace of this intervention, the lack of build-up?

More than anything, I think it says that Indigenous people were already viewed by many as at best irresponsible children, already positioned at the margins of visibility and of citizenship, if not humanity, so that only a short burst of moral panic and implicit racism was necessary, rather than any substantial period of campaigning for their new status, of preparing the category of the outback Indigenous population as the people who need to be dominated, for their own good, with overwhelming surveillance, virtually total control of spending and consumption and no ability to appeal the content of this control, forced labour as punishment and because idle hands are the devil’s work, the seizure of land and property with which they cannot be entrusted, omnipresent police, and, significantly and so far without much media attention or comment, dictatorial management by one person appointed by the feds with wide-ranging powers over institutions, over services, over policing and over the lives of those to be controlled.

I keep repeating and re-formulating this list as if somehow these pieces might fall into a different shape.

The ease with which this intervention gained bipartisan support, with which people succumbed to Protect The Children hysteria, the credulity about governmental motivations - if the path of this intervention runs smooth, if nothing disrupts this consensus, if no solidarity beyond the “affected areas” can develop and touch the untroubled domination of these occupied territories, then the field of the possible can only expand. If this massive, intentional governmental ramping up of authoritarian, institutionalised racism against Indigenous people was difficult to imagine only a few years ago - for many, only a few months ago - then the unchallenged ’success’ of such an experiment in violent social engineering can only open the door for much worse, for Indigenous people and for many others also. This ease is truly frightening.

I received an e-mail today criticising me for my posts on the NT intervention, on the basis that I was dissing the idea that the secret motive underlying the intervention, and the central theme which nothing should be allowed to contradict or complicate, was the theft of land in relation to mining and nuclear waste dumping. The writer noted that the only place in which I talk about nuclear waste dumping in is criticising the Northern Land Council and quoting the NLC’s boast about negotiating about the waste dumping project. It seems I wasn’t on message enough.

The criticism seemed disproportionate at the very least, since even if true I hardly think that my blog is influential enough for considerations of political expediency to determine anything. The only stake involved in what I write on my blog, at least in this instance, is my own attempt to understand the political dynamics at work - and maybe my attempt to argue - to the few who read and to whom I am addressing my posts, insofar as they aren’t simply notes for myself - about what the intervention actually is.

For the record, I think in the short-term the intervention is in part about land, in the sense of attempting to reconstruct, by force and coercion and inducement - not much carrot for most except the chance to minimise the stick - the social relations constituting and mediating people’s relations to land/property i.e. a key part of the project of normalising people into a particular fantasy of capitalist social relation. And in the longer term sense this attempt to erase the Indigenous from the political landscape concerns mining and the like as outback Indigenous people, the political existence of same, are perceived as a barrier or potential barrier to future projects. In other words, the long term agenda seeks to remove everything considered inconvenient about the Indigenous, the haunting of Australian politics by the spectre of the Indigenous, which is something to be exorcised - no mean feat, an ambitious goal, but I think the goal nevertheless.

When I talk about erasure in this way I don’t simply mean the attempt to efface or finally abolish the existence of some reified and exotic authentic existence, but the federal government’s project of erasing what it believes to be troublesome about the forms of life of Indigenous people now, in all of their varied relations to history, tradition, struggle etcetera. And I think that this is what is going on, and what amounts to the meaning of Noel Pearson’s definition of civilised to effectively equal law-abiding conformity with a liberal capitalism perceived as culturally neutral.

I think I am genuinely open to arguments that this is really entirely about seizing land for such purposes, and not at all about using child abuse moral panic to re-impose capitalist social relations while avoiding what the NLC tried to convince the federal government that the NLC could help prevent, if only the feds would give them the chance to prove it: “High Court legal action, international complaint, and universal opposition”.

The first is being avoided, or at least a challenge at the High Court is unlikely to succeed, it seems. But whether people globally can be made to view this as not merely misguided benevolence about the welfare of children, but vicious, authoritarian Third Way politics as warfare against the lives of outback Indigenous people - well, I think people outside of Australia might be easier to convince than people here, who seem all-too-ready to view Indigenous people as a category to themselves who should be aggressively normalised into civilisation/capitalism (and into the category of the normal poor, therefore, who should also be controlled and kept under close observation and put to work), and largely indifferent to their fate. When all of this has happened, then we can all be treated equally - the equality of money…which is truly what is meant by a fair go, mate.