The Bureaucratic Control against Indigenous Australia

Article Author: Andrew Crichton

Colonisation and the Desolation of Aboriginal Rights

Captain James Cooke arrived on Australian shores in the year 1770. After charting the east coast, he officiated that Australia was uninhabited, desolate and belonged to no one, identifying Australia as terra nullius and acquiring it authoritatively for King George III . The savages, as Captain Cooke elucidated, were primitive, uneducated and uncivilised, roaming peripatetically, consuming what the land bared, and showed no motivation to cultivate, construct, or build upon their soil . As far as the European settlers were concerned, Aboriginal Australians were nothing more than a plague which lived among the fauna and flora , and if they couldn’t breed them out, they must be sanctioned, controlled and oppressed by the state to eliminate any possibility of them ever gaining power, or worse, acquiring their stolen land back. The bureaucratic control, present throughout the past 200 years, has demonstrated the Commonwealth Government’s actual intentions towards indigenous Australians. Although much has changed since European colonisation, indigenous treatment has only regressed negatively. And, even though indigenous welfare recently attained a voice in parliament, the guise which racially-targeted intervention has been implemented has been merely altered. Furthermore, despite the fact that there has been an emergence of individuals who are willing to defend the rights of the marginalised, the government has attempted rigorously to disadvantage, beleaguer, and eventually eradicate all Aboriginal rights.

In 2007, the Howard government employed new sanctions to “protect” Aboriginals, known as the ‘Northern Territory Intervention’, which granted additional power to the sovereign to undermine public law, diminish equality, and limit aboriginal rights. According to Dr Ross Kidd, an outspoken specialist in Aboriginal rights and affairs, the government legislated to control every aspect of the life of any person of Aboriginal descent targeted for state ‘care’. This included where they lived, who they could marry, and [who attained] guardianship of their children . The Australian government, although masquerading under the premise of ‘good intentions’, clearly has shown a continuation of Bureaucratic control, observed throughout Australia’s history, and although public law has supposedly been implemented to maintain social standards, as a mendacity to harbor such derisory terms such as equality, it undoubtedly has failed. Aboriginal right desolation, such as the abolition of the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act (Cth), is a key fundament of power being abused to the deficit of singular marginalised group. Where another takes advantage through the exploitation of the vulnerable, no excuse can ever be made for the acts committed, and although all existing society possess a history of class struggles and racial complexity, no government should ever be conceded unaccountable for such actions . The racial dispossession, cultural abuse, class antagonism and enslavement throughout the past two hundred years deserves more than an apology, which although was rightfully received in 2008, is a short-coming to the pain and suffering endured by the many that have not, and never will be, recognised.

Effectiveness of Public Law in Australia

Australian public law is ineffective. It is difficult to contest this statement when the public law system of Australia lacks initiative suppressing crime, is deficient in providing public security, where in most cases litigation surpasses the financial means of all except those gratuitously affluent, and where normal citizens find themselves unable to enforce their basic human rights through court proceedings . The history of public law, in relation to indigenous treatment, portrays a clear image of dispossession. Through the colonisation of Australia, white male dominance, and the presentiment influence of their yardstick, has left laws which encourage the maltreatment of the existing culture and that of the people. As Ngiare and Alex Brown stated in their article on the Northern Territory intervention, the significance of our current federal government’s refusal to ratify the United Nations Declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples has not been lost on Aboriginal people and their advocates. On the one hand, the government purports to be taking action to protect vulnerable Aboriginal children, yet on the other, it fails to support any national or international requirement or responsibility to recognise and acknowledge native title, cultural integrity, self-determination, and preservation of Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty, as set out in the UN Declaration . By showing direct dissent to adopt laws which encourage equal opportunity, and rather engaging in others such as the Northern territory intervention which promotes inequality, the Australian government has merely furthered a history of ineffective public law.

To implement the Northern Territory intervention the government required further mendacity and support from the community. To fuel the ideologies behind their scheme the government issued public commentary; which was swift and damning, editorialising the suffering of Aboriginal communities. In many respects, a new (or rekindled) language emerged, the language of “Aboriginal deficit”. The media were awash with claims of “paedophile rings”, of a culture that “accepted and protected” the raping of children, of “customary law being used as a shield to protect abusers”. The inference was that all Aboriginal men are “perpetrators”, all Aboriginal children are abused, and that these abuses — fuelled by alcohol, petrol and kava — are compounded by social dysfunction that is largely the consequence of a “primitive” and “barbaric” culture . The fact that merely holding one’s peace about anything does not constitute concealment, but concealment consists in trying for your own profit to keep others from finding out something that you know, when it is in their interest to know, which is what the Australian government initiated in conceding anecdotes to employ their further abuse of power .
A recent inquiry into the health and welfare of indigenous communities sparked outrage when it discovered that from the 3,000 Aboriginal children screened; 80% suffered from chronic ear, throat and nose conditions, and all were directly related to inadequate and overcrowded housing circumstances . According to Susan Allan, this is a direct condition from an inadequate form of public law, whereby, individuals of Aboriginal decent, who were initially shepherded into small makeshift townships for enslaved labour, now find themselves in similar conditions after being forced to relocate to isolated townships, in an endeavour to form sustainability after foreclosure of Community Development Employment Programs, which inexorably prolonged existing communities . Similar to 1904, when Aboriginal labour was comparable to concubinage, the living conditions of Aboriginals have deteriorated to the point of unrealistic fatality. The implications for Indigenous people and their communities are bleak, and as townships continue to be sanctioned as unsustainable, fewer jobs and opportunities appear to be in the main concession.

Regulations and Controls

Successive Queensland governments have profited extensively through their handling of the wages and savings of generations of indentured pastoral labourers during the twentieth century. Autocratic controls introduced in 1897 and refusal to allow either personal or external scrutiny facilitated frauds, incompetence, negligence and illegal dealings which deprived workers of millions of dollars . Thousand of Aboriginals were forced to work for decades without pay, many were skilled, and if they hadn’t been purloined by the state, could likely have been hired on their own accord . The protection regime, whereby Aboriginals involuntarily surrendered all benefits until a time when the “fiduciary trust” governed by the state would pass to them, never transpired, and due to this, settlement should be an option for each and every individual exploited by those imposed to protect. Evidently, through the acceptance of the trust, the government undertook to ‘look after’ those interests and Indigenous account holders of necessity “relaxed their self-interested vigilance or independent judgment” . This is an inexplicable abuse of power, and concordantly, should be rectified at the cost of the state.

Protection of Aboriginal Rights

Public law initially envisaged to protect aboriginal rights through sanctions to seclude and isolate Aboriginal communities. The Northern Territory intervention, although implemented under a semblance to protect the vulnerable from abuse, conceals the real agenda which elucidates of the closure of so-called unviable townships, whereby, Aboriginals who are now dispossessed and vulnerable, can be transported into cities and exploited for remedial cheap labour. In the case of Mabo v Queensland (1988), it found that the Crown owns all of Australia’s land, which itself is a feudal concept, dismissing the preconception that individuals can hold entitlement, rekindling ambivalence and strengthened concerns that Aboriginal land would be cleared for mining, pastoral, waste disposal or tourism projects .

Australia has not taken reasonable precautions to protect individuals from excessive state intervention, which although was characterised and accepted at the time, has failed in protecting these communities from excessive state intervention and abuse. Aboriginals were hostage to the extraordinary discretionary powers of their colonisers. Until 1972, every Indigenous Queenslander was vulnerable to the extinction of their rights and freedoms as individuals in the general community, on the reserves and as workers and wage earners. The Queensland government controlled child/parent and marital relationships, locality and conditions of living, nature and earnings of labour, availability and security of private savings . As per the Northern Territory Cattle Industry Case (1965) protection was not granted even by law. The case concluded that for economic reasons they could not afford to employ aborigines on award rates. The employers concede that some aborigines are almost as good as whites and that aborigines enjoy working on cattle stations because it is closely related to their earlier nomadic life and it keeps them living in their own country. But if aborigines are to be paid the same as whites, then employers would prefer to employ whites because they could employ far fewer with the same results . This is clear racism, and although it managed to evade prosecution on such ground, it is an obvious occurrence of the era.

The Howard government, in their 2007 report, ‘Little Children are Sacred’, imposed the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act 2007 (Cth) advising new laws to reduce welfare payments, ban alcohol, kava and many other sanctions. This is a form of inequality in the mere allocation of such specified laws, which surely would have contravened the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) .

Effectiveness of Public Law in Australia

Public law within Australia is ineffective, especially if it is unable to protect the most vulnerable and exploitable of society. This mistreatment can be seen through the exploitation of Aboriginal rights throughout Australia’s history, having been marginalised in place of white male superiority, and the furthering oppression from an Anglo Saxon yardstick, bureaucratic control over indigenous communities has only hindered where it should have embedded justice, equality and defensive rights. The Northern Territory intervention is a clear continuation of Bureaucratic control over indigenous communities, not just through its similarity to past egalitarianism deficient systems, but its lack of effectiveness to protect and encourage inclusion of marginalised groups. According to Rosalind Kidd, 140 years have passed since William Walsh averred; ‘it is as much the duty of government to render prompt justice against itself, in favour of citizens, as it is to administer the same between private individuals’ and the Queensland parliament voted to allow individuals ‘as nearly as possible’ the same rights to remedy in claims against the government as would pertain ‘in any ordinary case’ between two persons or entities at law or in equity. It is time Indigenous Queenslanders were accorded this right . Law within Australia should incorporate equality, individual freedom and independence likable to John Stuart Mills’ version of Liberty . An autonomous society which uplifts individuals through clear equality, within its law, seems befitting at the least. It is impossible for a society to be expected to respect differences, when the very laws initiating such virtues instil years of inequality, dispossession and maltreatment. When a law has failed to pervade its desired cause surely it must be abolished. And just because a law was created under the guise of “protecting the innocent”, it doesn’t engender any strength in protecting its veracity.

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