IMPRACTICAL RECONCILIATION

Abstract

This article examines the events and texts of the Huggins–Bell debate, in view of the revival of Bell's ‘everyone's business’ position in the current context of the Northern Territory Intervention. I argue that while there are disjunctures between the position Bell espoused and the measures taken in the Intervention, the Intervention's policy approach of ‘practical reconciliation’ shares the signature features of Bell's position. As in Bell's work, the discourses supporting the Intervention use an ideology/practice binary to defend the morality of intervention, refuse to treat issues of lateral violence and racism intersectionally, and claim to bolster the authority of Indigenous women while in practice undermining that authority.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was initially presented at the Challenging Politics conference in June 2010, organised by the Postgraduate Feminist Reading Group, School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland. I am grateful to the conference organisers for their invitation and useful feedback, and extend particular thanks to Alissa Macoun, Barbara Sullivan and Geoff Dow. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their astute appraisals of my earlier draft.

Notes

1. The Northern Territory Intervention, or ‘Closing the Gap in the Northern Territory’ as it is now officially titled, was initiated by the Howard Liberal government in June 2007 and upheld by the incoming Labour government led by Rudd and now Gillard. The Intervention negates existing policies of land rights and self-determination, enacting government takeover of the lands and resources of 73 ‘prescribed communities’ (remote and very remote Indigenous communities living on ancestral lands, comprising a population of approximately 40,000 persons). Individuals are controlled through an array of coercive measures including the quarantining of welfare payments to prescribe individual expenditure, while communities and their resources are controlled by Government Business Managers promoting a new coercive system of exchanging resources for long-term government leases over land. In order to target Indigenous persons specifically, Intervention policy suspended the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, enacting ‘positive racism’. In the context of the Intervention its measures are defended as morally compelled by high rates of child sexual abuse and other forms of lateral violence in the targeted communities. The original stated intention of the Intervention was to ‘stabilise, normalise and exit’ the communities, rapidly transforming them over a five-year period. Successive progress reports indicate policy failure, showing higher rates of reported child abuse, domestic violence, suicide and attempted self-harm (Altman 2011), rather than rapid decline in lateral violence. Reflecting this failure, the policy focus has shifted towards ‘long term progress’, with the Gillard government currently petitioning to intensify the Intervention and extend its term a further 10 years. The Intervention is twice cited by the United Nations for human rights abuses, and critically contested by groups including the Prescribed Area Peoples’ Alliance, the Working Group for Aboriginal Rights, the Intervention Rollback Action Group, Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation, the Australian Indigenous Doctors’ Association, and individual commentators in academia and the media. See Stringer (2007) for fuller discussion and critique of the measures taken in the Intervention and the configuration of morality and power in the discourses supporting it.

2. I draw the term ‘lateral violence’ from Marcia Langton (2008), who defines it as ‘the expression of anomie and rage against those who are also victims of vertical violence and entrenched and unequal power relations’.

3. Bell's anthropology also contradicts that of Sutton. Sutton (2009, 87–114) claims violence against women in Aboriginal communities is an ancient cultural problem, while Bell argues it is a product of patriarchal colonialism (Bell and Nelson 1989, 409).

4. A comprehensive account of these is given in Moreton-Robinson (2000, 111–25; 2003).

5. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer who alerted me to the uncertain meaning of ‘everyone’ in Nelson's statement.

6. On the representational separation of ‘traditional’ and ‘contemporary’ Aboriginal women, see Moreton-Robinson (1998).

7. Huggins et al. share the view that the consequences of colonisation for Aboriginal men differ from those for Aboriginal women in significant respects, yet challenge Bell's narrative by putting white women back into the story: ‘We realise that our internal conflicts have been exacerbated by colonisation and white women have always been a part of that process’ (1991, 506).

8. See the extensive bibliography of Judy Atkinson's work in Atkinson and Woods (2008, 17–19).