Reconciliation and the Quest for Economic Sameness

Deploying the lenses of economics, this chapter considers why the Australian government has proven so incapable of progressing the process of reconciliation after setting up the statutory and institutional mechanisms to do so in 1991. My argument is that in policy thinking there is a perceived logical correlation between reconciliation and the quest for economic sameness. For decades now the nation’s Indigenous policy framework has been framed as a project for ‘Closing the Gap’. Such framing makes prospects for reconciliation difficult. This is because the very logic of reconciliation as progressively codified and emptied of substantive meaning presumes the eradication of difference settler society looks to move from the elimination of the different to the elimination of difference. This elimination of difference is founded on an evolutionary moral sentiment of socioeconomic salvation discursively couched as neoliberal reason. As long as reconciliation is predicated on such a state-imposed project of economic sameness it will fail. Successful reconciliation will require a broader acceptance of the plurality of Indigenous aspirations and the diversity of Indigenous circumstances. Such national embrace of ‘post-colonial’ economic plurality that focuses on livelihood (not just statistical) improvements is a necessary first step to improved relations between Indigenous and other Australians. Optimistically, if the reconciliation process can embrace the notion of economic plurality or hybridity inclusive of ‘difference recognition’, prospects for reconciliation, whether defined as a process or as an end point, will be enhanced.