Racists on the rampage against Indigenous rights
In the nearly eighteen months since the defeat of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament proposal, there has been a sharp shift to the right on Indigenous issues in Australia.
Anti-Aboriginal racism, which had largely been in abeyance since the end of the Howard era, has made an aggressive comeback. Emboldened by the defeat of the Voice proposal, conservative forces have launched numerous attacks on Indigenous rights. In the face of this offensive, the Labor Party has raised the white flag, either joining in on the attacks or offering no resistance to them.
This racist offensive seeks to undermine the social gains won by Indigenous people and their allies over many decades of campaigning. It also aims to undermine anti-racist attitudes by discrediting or sidelining anti-racist views on Australian history, politics and culture. Any official acknowledgement of the exploitation, dispossession and violence that Indigenous people have been subjected to is being questioned or scrapped.
This year’s Invasion Day highlighted this shift. For the last ten years, the focus of 26 January activities and discussion has largely been on the day’s significance to Indigenous people and the damage done by European invasion. In 2014, the official Australia Day march in Melbourne was disrupted by anti-racist protesters, and since then Invasion Day protests, rather than flag-waving parades, have gridlocked major cities on the day. In 2018, youth radio station Triple J changed the date of its Hottest 100 countdown as a sign of respect to Indigenous people. Rules for local councils were loosened in 2022, giving them the ability to hold citizenship ceremonies on days other than 26 January without financial penalty, and in 2021, NSW Liberal Premier Gladys Berejiklian even organised an Aboriginal flag waving ceremony with the cringe-worthy opener that we are “all one mob”. For many progressives, and not a few reactionaries, changing the date seemed as inevitable as same-sex marriage.
This year was very different. “Australia Day is a celebration of the greatest country in the world”, proclaimed Liberal leader Peter Dutton in a social media video in January, “and we shouldn’t be afraid of celebrating it”. Dutton has pledged that, if he is elected, local councils will be forced to hold citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day or suffer cuts in federal funding. The month before, in an act of racist pettiness, Dutton told the media that he will not stand beside Indigenous flags because multiple flags were “dividing our country unnecessarily”. In 2024, Dutton whipped up a hysterical campaign against Woolworths for allegedly not stocking Australia Day merchandise. This year, the supermarket chain made sure to have its shelves stocked to the rafters with obnoxious nationalist merchandise.
Instead of attacking Dutton and denouncing racism, Albanese’s response to all this was to evade and cede ground. He criticised Dutton for focusing on culture war issues rather than the cost of living, but refused to commit to maintaining the current rules for local councils and reiterated his support for celebrating Australia Day on 26 January.
The unchecked right-wing offensive has shifted attitudes. Support for keeping Australia Day on 26 January has risen from 47 percent to 61 percent in the last two years, according to a Resolve Political Monitor survey. The fact that a majority of younger people still support changing the date is positive, but it also indicates that the shift among the rest of the population is even sharper.
The racist backlash has also been happening at the state level. The newly elected Country Liberal government in the Northern Territory has announced it is ending the treaty process that started in 2018. The Queensland state government has repealed the Path to Treaty Act and shut down the Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry and the First Nations Treaty Institute.
Labor state governments have not been much better. After the defeat of the Voice referendum, NSW Premier Chris Minns walked back plans for a state treaty and pushed back proposals for any reconciliation process until after the next state election. The Western Australian Labor government does not support a treaty. Only the South Australian, ACT, Victorian and Tasmanian governments remain committed to any sort of treaty process.
Treaties, much like the Voice and other largely symbolic gestures like reconciliation, are entirely inadequate responses to the grim reality of Indigenous oppression. More often than not, they provide window dressing for governments more than they help improve Indigenous people’s lives. But the trashing of these forms of recognition has to be understood within the broader context of the racist offensive going on against Indigenous people. The retreat from treaty and reconciliation has gone along with toxic law and order beat-ups aimed at Indigenous youth.
This has been most striking in the Northern Territory and parts of Queensland. The Country Liberal party won the Northern Territory election last year on the basis of winding back some of the limited reforms to the incarceration of Indigenous youth. The new government has lowered the age of criminal responsibility to 10 years and has reversed the previous government’s decision to ban the use of spit hoods on children. Similarly, the newly elected conservative government in Queensland has had to suspend the state’s Human Rights Act in order to push through a wave of racist laws targeting Indigenous youth, including removing detention as a last resort from police guidelines and introducing mandatory sentencing for 10-year-olds.
Again, these attacks are not being made only by conservative governments. In Queensland, the previous Labor government suspended the Human Rights Act twice in eighteen months in order to criminalise children who violated bail conditions and to allow children to be jailed in adult watch-houses. Last August, Victorian Premier Jacinta Allen walked back her government’s previous commitment to raising the age of criminal responsibility to 14 by 2027. The NSW Labor government introduced changes to youth bail laws last March that stiffen sentences for even minor crimes and has ruled out any changes to the age of criminal responsibility, which is currently 10 years old.
In the face of all these attacks, the persistent poverty, discrimination and hardship faced by Indigenous people are intensifying. This year’s Closing the Gap report revealed that rates of suicide, youth and adult incarceration, the removal of children by social services and children development for Indigenous people have all gotten worse. Other targets such as the gap between life expectancy of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and income inequality have stagnated. Only five of the nineteen Closing the Gap targets are on track to be met by 2031.
The conservative campaign against Indigenous people aims to put the blame for this on Indigenous people rather than the racist system and its treatment of Indigenous people for more than 200 years, at the same time as it sweeps under the carpet any understanding and awareness of this history.
What is motivating the conservative right to do this? Part of the explanation is that the Voice defeat demonstrated the potential electoral advantage of drumming up racist sentiment. Albanese’s incompetence in the face of the right’s “No” campaign only reinforced the point. Given the Liberal Party has little else to offer the mass of voters, this is a valuable weapon in its arsenal.
It also has the obvious advantage of potentially being an area in which cuts can be imposed should the Liberals form government, freeing up money for the military, tax cuts and other conservative priorities.
But it also reflects the changing priorities of Australian conservatism. For years, Liberal talking points in election campaigns revolved around vilifying different racial groups, mostly refugees. While Dutton still takes every chance he can to slander asylum seekers as terrorists, the steam around this issue has dissipated due to the barbaric reality of “fortress Australia”, which has largely stopped refugees from arriving here by boat.
Dutton has also periodically made appeals to broader anti-migrant racism, most notably in regard to the cost of housing and international students. But there is a tension here because large sections of Liberal Party’s base, including both big business and many small businesses, are heavily dependent on high levels of immigration. This dependency is greater than in almost any other advanced economy in the world. So for the right, attacking Indigenous people has all of the benefits, and few of the drawbacks, of attacking migrants and refugees.
Indigenous people do not form an important sector of the workforce for corporate Australia and are severely marginalised from the levers of economic and political power. Under the influence of the resurgence of the far right in Trump’s America and the long history of racist anti-Aboriginal campaigns in Australia, the conservatives can use Indigenous people as a punching bag and demonise them with little immediate blowback.
Developments since the defeat of the Voice proposal tragically confirm the arguments made in Red Flag at the time of the referendum: that whatever the limitations of the Voice proposal, a defeat for it was going to embolden the racist right and legitimise a new round of attacks on Indigenous people. They also discredit arguments made by the sovereign or “progressive” No campaign at the time. This campaign argued for anti-racists to vote against the Voice on the basis that its defeat would be a blow to the moderate centrist approach to Indigenous issues advocated by the Labor Party and open the space for more radical perspectives.
In a statement on her website after the referendum, independent Senator Lidia Thorpe argued that the “result marks an end to the era of powerless advisory bodies. It is a win for the Blak Sovereign Movement and First Peoples” and that there were many people who “voted no out of love and solidarity with First Peoples fighting for justice”. The Black Peoples Union argued in a social media post that “Yes campaigners are out of touch with reality if they think a No vote is going to embolden racism”.
In reality, an Accent Research Report found that when No voters were asked about their number one reason for voting No, only 1 percent said because the Voice doesn’t go far enough. The most popular reason No voters rejected the Voice was that it “will divide Australia” (82 percent), the key talking point of the racist right. Nearly one in three No voters agreed it would give Indigenous people “too much power”, which was the more openly racist argument of the far right. Rather than opening up radical new horizons for Indigenous liberation, the No vote resulted in the terrain of politics around Indigenous issues moving sharply to the right.
In line with much of the rest of the world, Australian capitalism is becoming nastier. There is less official concern to uphold values like multiculturalism and reconciliation and more viciousness towards the oppressed and exploited. Indigenous people are facing the sharp edge of this, but the attacks are coming thick and fast on many fronts: the rising cost of living, the climate crisis and the expanding war machine.
In order to begin to turn this around, we need to be prepared to stand up and fight racism and conservative reaction wherever they emerge. The grovelling capitulation of the ALP and those influenced by it to this onslaught is contemptible and compounds the problem. We need a political approach to all of this that is not centred on winning parliamentary seats and appealing to any backward sentiment to do it, but on uniting workers and the oppressed in a collective fight for a society of genuine equality and freedom for all.
