Originally published in late 2023
I cannot emphasise enough the extent to which this country is the same settler-colonial outpost of the British Empire that it was 100 years ago. I don’t know how anyone deludes themselves about it, really. Just on the most surface level possible, this is a country which speaks nothing but English, pays allegiance to the King of England and maintains a Union Jack on the corner of its national flag. However, this is an issue which goes much deeper than vulgar republicanism.
Indeed, Australian libs have long attacked the ‘cultural cringe’ of Australia’s parochial monarchist mainstream. Of course, it should irk them: how can one on any level maintain the notion that Australia is a ‘liberal democracy’ dedicated to ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘a fair go’ when its very institutions were established on the stolen land of a genocided Indigenous population with an explicit and continuing deference to the very motherland which carried out that genocide? Nearly a third of incarcerated people here are Indigenous and over half of the kids in gaol are Aboriginal. This is the most incarcerated population in the world, and it didn’t happen by accident.
Naturally, republicanism is considered the ultimate solution to this unhappy present. Indeed, we must drag Australia into the bright and beautiful future of 1776. But it will be a drag. A slog. Hard yakka. It never seems very easy to move forward in this country. To move this country forward. It’s almost like it doesn’t want to move. Or perhaps, that nobody will commit to moving it…
No. How brash of me to suggest. Don’t I remember that one prime minister in the 70s? Don’t I remember when he flew into the desert and poured some dirt into a black guy’s hands? Silly me. What a guy.
Pollies basically gave up on the republic idea after they did a referendum on it in 1999. It didn’t pass, in case you’re unaware. The majority of prominent Australian pollies this century – including the entire current government – have been nominal republicans, but on some level everyone knows that it’s just symbolic nonsense, so there hasn’t been much of a push. Oh, the tension between embracing your role in a racial hierarchy and the pretense that the hierarchy doesn’t exist. I call it Whitefella’s Paradox.
Still, 20th Century boomer idealism has been driving the corpse of the Australian Labor Party for several decades now. Last year, the ‘Vote for Albo’ movement apparently culminated in their return to power (note that they actually got the same vote share as the previous election, and much like in 2007, the Coalition vote share simply collapsed due to Rupert Murdoch taking his hands off the wheel), so that’s something. I wonder which investment property he celebrated in.
Apart from incredible policy masterstrokes such as continuing tax cuts for millionaires in a recession, continuing to pretend trans people don’t exist and continuing to send refugees and asylum seekers to detention centres, Anthony Albanese’s government has mainly sought to define itself by the upcoming ‘Voice Referendum’. As with most of Labor’s policies, the Voice to Parliament was originally proposed by the Coalition. Not only was the passage of legislation establishing an Indigenous voice to the government agreed to by the Morrison Government, but that government itself suggested holding a referendum on whether to recognise Indigenous people in the constitution. The Albanese Government has simply reformulated the proposition so that the referendum is about enshrining a ‘Voice to Parliament’ in the constitution.
There have been numerous Indigenous advisory bodies to the Australian government in the past, so the constitutional change is really the only significant thing here. Despite Albanese’s popularity, however, the referendum he’s defining his legacy on looks set to flop. What a fuckwit.
Australian liberals, which in my experience are either over the age of 50, terminally online or almost completely disengaged from politics, have been seemingly dumbfounded by this state of affairs. In spite of their smug middle-class insistence that Australia is actually much more cool and open and progressive than the United States, it seems that time and time again Australians are happy to prove them wrong. And I mean honestly, who wouldn’t be happy to prove them wrong. Rightists have been saying the exact same things they always say; ‘waste of money, woke activism, racism against whites’, blah blah blah, you know the playbook. They know it works, I guess. I could do some kind of in-depth analysis on the ‘intersectional neo-reaction’ of promoting Aboriginal people that espouse neo-colonial views, but I really don’t think it’s necessary.
Aussie leftists have been typically invisible from the discourse. I think they tend to know that, as almost anyone could’ve predicted, the actual referendum question has become ‘do you like racism?’, and are voting on that basis. I don’t know why I’m even bringing leftists up, they don’t actually exist outside of inner city cafes and a couple of Trotskyist orgs for uni students and old people. You see, to the relief of everyone that isn’t from Melbourne, Australia avoided the false hope of Corbynism and the DSA. Almost nobody thinks they’re gonna fall into parliament and do a socialism.
With that being said, most millennial lefties support the Greens, and are just as tribal about it as their parents are about Labor. And then, why wouldn’t they be, when the Greens fill that irresistible reformist urge for ‘Keynesianism with an environmentalist twist’ so convincingly. Yeah, I’m doing something. I’m doing an activism. Voting. Voting for Good Party.
Good Party had a senator called Lidia Thorpe for a couple of years, but then she had an opinion and they had to sound the Independent Thought Alarm. I’ve naturally been sceptical, but at this point I am convinced that she’s probably the only based person that has ever served in the Australian parliament. She consistently promotes the interests of marginalised communities, at her own expense, and she’s pledged to represent Blak Sovereignty. As I understand, her position on the referendum is essentially that, without the treaty and truth-telling which the Voice was proposed with, it seeks to further legitimise the settler-colonial domination of Indigenous Australians.
I would ask why the government has forgotten about the ‘treaty and truth’ part of voice, treaty and truth, but it’s not even worth a rhetorical question. We know why. The Australian state cannot sign a treaty with Indigenous people, because it cannot acknowledge that Australian land is stolen. The Australian state likewise cannot acknowledge the truth, that it’s a settler-colonial enterprise established through the exploitation of Indigenous peoples and their resources, because those peoples are now apparently its citizens. I speak as though these are technicalities, but of course in reality states can work around this sort of thing. Australians certainly don’t want to, though. Even ‘progressives’ don’t like to be reminded that they’re on Aboriginal land when they’re not virtue signalling about it.
Many people here don’t realise, but across the entirety of New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, Aboriginal people were battled, rounded up and locked into missions and reservations. This also occurred in the other states, but not to all of their Indigenous peoples. Then the kids were stolen. Now, this occurred right around the country, and continues to occur to this day in remote communities thanks to the NT Intervention.
Now, we know that in the 2007 Intervention, the federal government suspended the Racial Discrimination Act, and all Aboriginal claims not only to their own land, but to their own autonomy. But the Intervention didn’t end in 2007. So many of its explicitly white supremacist measures are still in place. Welfare quarantining is more commonplace than ever across the disadvantaged communities of this country. Community policing and youth incarceration are more prevalent than ever. There’s much to be said about how the Mabo court case acknowledged Australia’s status as an ‘inhabited settled colony’ directly subject to the crown1, but the idea that it fundamentally changed how Indigenous communities were negotiated by the state seems like little more than mythology.
We’re all vaguely aware that nuclear weapons were tested on Aboriginal land. This continent has been the testing ground for many things. Neutralisation of union influence, such as when Bob Hawke colluded with American diplomats to accelerate a ‘de-radicalisation of the labour movement’ as ACTU President2, the transatlantic third way political project – even government slogans. And of the ‘five eyes’ security partners, Australia is ground zero for testing exciting new surveillance laws.
Australia has no national identity beyond the American military outpost which it consigned itself to in the 1940s. Australia has no cultural identity beyond the discount Anglo-Saxon colonial sludge which its institutions were set up in. If ‘Australia’ is a coherent concept in any sense, it cannot be reconciled with anything even remotely worthwhile.
Endnotes
Leave a Reply