Economic policies use biopolitics to bring Indigenous people into the fold of neoliberalism

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.