Australian Indigenous Policy at the Intersection of Bureaucracy, Colonialism, Neoliberalism and Race

This chapter interrogates the key themes of this book in more depth, focusing on the relationship between bureaucracy, neoliberalism and colonialism. It argues that bureaucracy is implicated in ongoing practices of colonisation and racialisation – not in an incidental way but because modernist bureaucracies have always been a key technology mobilised as part of these projects. In Australia, both bureaucracy and colonialism rest on fundamental assumptions about the neutrality of the settler state, the state’s assumed authority over Indigenous land and lives, the necessity of ‘social improvement’, the denial and attempted erasure of Indigenous sovereignty and the categorisation of the social world in hierarchical ways. We argue that there is a critically important intersection in the present moment as neoliberalism reshapes and intensifies bureaucratic occupation of First Nations worlds. First Nations people continue to resist this and exercise their sovereignty – including in policy spaces usually understood as neutral or technical.