The alt reinscribes fatalist colonial binaries—reject the demobilizing narrative that all state actions are equally anti-Indigenous.

Despite these powerful contributions, we also identify some important issues associated with SCT in Australian academic debates about the NT intervention. The first is a direct con-sequence of one of SCT’s vital contributions, arising from the theory’s present tense iteration of settler colonialism. By emphasizing continuities in colonial relationships between the past and the present, SCT can depict colonization as structurally inevitable, and can be deployed in ways that re-inscribe settler colonialism. We suggest that SCT’s struggle to narrate its own ending can be countered by approaching the theory as an account of settler desires which makes visible our own frames of reference. This in turn exposes a range of possibilities and political visions outside these frames. Such an approach is significant in countering potentially pro- blematic misuses of SCT that erase its location as a settler discourse. Such erasures problematically empower academics to speak with neutral descriptive authority over bothsettler and Indigenous realities. Firstly, by disturbing settler colonialism’s narratives of progress, SCT attributes a peculiar suspended temporality to the settler project. This can portray settler colonialism as an inevitable structure likely to exist across time– the fact that the past persists in the present implies that this past will also persist in the future. Foundational scholar Patrick Wolfe has been labelled ‘very much a structuralist stuck in a poststructuralist world’. 63 As we have outlined, this structur-alism is particularly useful in identifying the operation of political hierarchies. However, it can also excuse us from human political action in the present by presenting this action as futile or already determined. 64 The role of political activists is to wait for the structurally determined future, and at most to prepare others for its arrival. The particular challenge of SCT’s analysis is that it does not give an account of such a trans-formed future, or of the conditions for settler colonialism’s demise. This can lead to a theoretical and political impasse and result in a kind of colonial fatalism. Such fatalism can be deployed to imply a moral equivalence between different forms of settler political interaction with Indigenous people, and, at its worst, to deny the legitimacy of Indigenous resistances. Structuralist narratives are able to posit radical change, but only if this change is built into the structures they describe– for example because these structures are subject to internal contradictions or are inherently unstable. Settler colonial structures, however, appear as highly stable and‘ relatively impervious to regime change’. 65 Therefore, at the same moment settler scholars finally see the depth and reach of settler colonialism in the present they feel unable to find ‘post settler colonial passages’. 66 This tendency is reinforced by SCT’s capacity to identify significant commonalities in the objectives of conservative and progressive policy approaches, as discussed above. It shows that traditional ‘decolonizing’ pathways such as treaty making, reconciliation and formal apolo-gies may also serve colonial ends by absorbing and extinguishing Aboriginal political difference without disturbing the foundational structures of settler dominance. As Australian anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose notes, this makes it ‘difficult to offer a critique of the colonizing features without calling into question the whole decolonizing project ’. 67 If every settler action is framed as always already colonizing, then individuals are excused from anti-colonial action in the present and Indigenous people are destined to be victims of an unstoppable colonizing state. 68 As bell hooks argues in relation to US race relations, this is useful to those in a position of dominance: ‘so many White people are eager to believe racism cannot be changed because internalizing that assumption downplays the issue of accountability. No responsibility need be taken for not changing something if it is perceived as immutable.’ 69