The Denial of Separate Rights: Political Rationalities and Technologies Governing Indigenous Affairs as Practices of Whiteness

It has been a political imperative of the current Australian Federal Government to respond to what are seen as the excesses of previous Federal policy in the area of Indigenous affairs. The discursive construction of the pendulum having swung too far in the direction of Indigenous Australians has legitimated intervention (Howard 1997). Political objective has been to wind back the perceived benefits that Indigenous rights and self-determination had unfairly bestowed on Indigenous Australians. Reform is based on the assertion that all Australians be treated equally, ensuring that no one group of Australians is privileged over another. In the paper, I establish that the discursive construction of separate rights as privilege achieves a particular end. Here an essentialising epistemological whiteness operates through the denial of separate rights. Whiteness as a set of discursive practices renders as natural what is an historical and contingent social construction.