A settler colonial consensus on the northern intervention

In June 2007 the Australian federal government initiated a policy program that aimed to transform Aboriginal communities in Australia's Northern Territory (NT). In the months following the NT Intervention, several commentators and scholars remarked on the similarity of the policy to the coercive and assimilatory politics of Australia's colonial past. These authors argued that the Intervention represented a 'lack of capacity to abandon past thinking about colonialism'. This article contributes to a settler-colonial analysis of the Intervention by providing the first substantive comparison of the political discourses employed by the Liberal National (Coalition) government and the Labor government on the subject of the NT Intervention. By drawing on the emergent field of settler-colonial studies, I am able to identify the settler-colonial mentality that is shared by the Coalition and Labor governments.