Introduction: Bureaucratic Occupation: Government and First Nations Peoples in Australia

The stakes of policy making are life and death for Indigenous peoples in Australia, who continue to experience unacceptably high rates of early death, illness, inequality and violent state intervention including incarceration and family breakups. These harms demand attention and redress. However, this book asks what it means to direct attention to the harms produced by colonisation primarily through the lens of policy making and bureaucratic intervention. What happens when Indigenous lives are seen as a ‘policy problem’ that requires new and better state ‘solutions’? This volume steps back from Indigenous policy ‘problems’—however understood—to examine the relationships that produce and are produced by the Indigenous policy making world. This introduction sets out some of the key dynamics investigated in this book: bureaucracy, sovereignty, colonialism, racism and complexity. It introduces the framework of ‘policy as relationship’ and outlines the chapters in the remainder of the volume.