This chapter does four things. First it provides a brief history of Australian Indigenous policy in the modern era demarcated by the 1967 Constitutional Referendum. Next it looks at contemporary Indigenous policy – in particular, Closing the Gap strategies – and its unrelenting focus on a form of convergence and structural adjustment based on Western economic institutions and norms as measured by statistical indicators. Governments of all political persuasions favour such thinking. This particular form of governmentality justified by a neoliberal trope focused primarily on easily targeted and highly dependent segments of the Indigenous population living remotely is then outlined. Finally, alternatives better suited to diverse Indigenous circumstances and aspirations are articulated and defended.

A brief history of Indigenous policy

Indigenous affairs is a complex policy field because the Australian settler colonial state was largely built on a denial of Indigenous property rights or political and citizenship equality. It was only in the 1960s that Indigenous Australians became fully incorporated into the mainstream provisions of the Australian state and only in 1992 that the myth of terra nullius was legally buried by the Mabo High Court decision recognising native title at common law. Wolfe (2006) has theorised that Australian settler colonial society is predicated on a logic of elimination, the dissolution of native societies so as to gain access to territory. Thus settler colonisation is structural and ongoing – because both original settlers and later arrivals are here to stay; colonisation is not an historical event that can be limited to a particular time as in 1788, or particular place, like Sydney. Settler colonialism has negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, its forces strive for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, a new colonial society is created on the expropriated land base that members of native societies can eventually join as citizens if they meet certain criteria.

This possibility for integration was identified definitively over 50 years ago at what was called the Native Welfare Conference, where Indigenous policy was outlined in the following terms: