Are Indigenous Rights Inconsistent with Australian Political Traditions?

Abstract

In Australia, conservative opponents of Indigenous rights often assert a fundamental incompatibility between the claims of First Nations peoples for land, sovereignty and culture on the one hand and Australian political traditions on the other. To those who assert a fundamental incompatibility between Indigenous rights and Australian political traditions, I argue that we can respond by appealing to aspects of those traditions themselves. This paper points to two features of Australia’s constitutional order – its approach to defining citizenship and its commitment to federalism – to show how Australian political traditions might be drawn on in the service of Indigenous struggles.

Undertaking this task of rethinking Australian political traditions is one way that settler Australians can take responsibility for own law. That means taking responsibility for understanding and challenging the role of settler law in supporting and legitimating colonialism in the past and present. Taking responsibility for our own law also means using what power we have to support Indigenous struggles aimed at transforming that law in less oppressive, more emancipatory directions.