Formal recognition, freedom, and power: the case of Australia’s First Nations

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the case of Australia’s First Nations’ rejection of the federal government’s desire to provide symbolic, formal recognition of their original habitation in the Australian Constitution. In a number of respects, this case exemplifies the point made by North American Indigenous scholars Audra Simpson and Glen Coulthard that, in the particular circumstances of colonialism, recognition––as opposed to misrecognition or nonrecognition––can lessen, rather than increase, Indigeneous freedom. Australia’s First Nations did not, however, reject “recognition from above” outright as both Simpson and Coulthard recommend. Instead, they proposed a more substantive form of political recognition by including an advisory voice to the Federal Parliament in the Australian Constitution along with a treaty-making process. Although the government initially rejected their proposal, it has not had the final word on the subject. Australia’s First Nations have effectively transformed the terms of the debate and put substantive recognition from the state on the table for the first time in Australian political history. Thus, rather than rejecting the politics of recognition or replacing “recognition from above” with “recognition from below,” I argue it is necessary to attend to the different forms of “recognition from above” and “recognition from below” that exist and often interact.

KEYWORDS:

• Recognition
• Australia
• Indigenous politics
• Aboriginal politics
• Glen Coulthard
• Franz Fanon
• colonialism
• sovereignty

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jim Tully both for hosting my visit to the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria in Canada and for his many helpful suggestions regarding the critical literature on recognition, which were an important inspiration for this paper; Avigail Eisenberg for very kindly providing me with departmental facilities during my sabbatical at the University of Victoria; and Xavier Marquez for his generosity in reading and commenting on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author).

Notes

1 Paradoxically one could nonetheless see this desire for non-recognition as the preferred form of state recognition.

2 See Kate Schick’s contribution in this Dialogue for a detailed analysis and critique of Patchen Markell’s rejection of the politics of recognition.

3 I borrow these useful terms from Singh (2014), but I disagree with seeing these forms of recognition as exclusive alternatives.

4 No appendix exists in the Referendum Council’s Final Report detailing the precise details of the attendees based on age, gender or occupation. However, viewing the videos of each of the Regional Dialogues confirm that considerable attention was paid to gender and age diversity. See: https://www.referendumcouncil.org.au/dialogues.html. The range of local organizations involved and the locations of the Regional Dialogues also show that both rural and urban-based Indigenous people were involved.

5 For further information on this landmark case see AIATSIS (2019).

6 The Australian Federal Parliament is bicameral with 150 House of Representatives and 72 Senators. In 2015, there were only two Indigenous members in the Federal Parliament, Ken Wyatt (Liberal Party) in the House of Representives, who was the Chair of the Committee, and Senator Nova Peris (Labor Party), the Deputy Chair of the Committee. Both are Aboriginal. Since the 2016 election, there have been an unprecdented five Aboriginal members: Ken Wyatt and Linda Burney (Labor Party) in the House of Representatives, and Senators Patrick Dobson (Labor Party), Jacquie Lambie (Independent), and Malanrdndirri McCarthy (Australian Labor Party). There has never been a Torres Strait Islander Member of Parliament. Senator Neville Bonner was the first self-identifying Indigenous member from August 1971 to June 1983, but for 16 years from July 1983 to July 1999, and again from July 2005 to August 2010, when Ken Wyatt was elected as the first Indigenous member of the House of Representatives, there were none (Australian Parliament 2019a, 2019b, 2019c, 2018). The Indigenous population as of June 2016 constituted 3.3% of the Australian population (798,400 people), while Tasmania with a population in 2018 of 520,630 people has twelve Senators by virtue of its status as a state and five members in the House of Representatives (Population Australia 2019; Tasmanian Government 2018).

7 Captain James Cook first declared the land mass of Australia terra nullius on an exploratory trip in 1770 (Aboriginal Heritage Office 2019).