Difference or Disappearance: The Politics of Indigenous Inclusion in the Liberal State

There is a common assumption made in relation to liberal democracies such as Australia, Canada or New Zealand, that they are and should be incorporative. Access to social citizenship is right of all; state has a capacity to include even if it does not always have a willingness to do so. Inclusion implies state will tackle and resolve problems of, for instance, inequality and access, particularly those impeded by state's own structures and policies, but also those produced in public sentiment. Such views of incorporative capacity of state have sustained progressive social policy for decades. It could even be argued that variety of forms liberal state has taken in different parts of world serve to bolster popularity of idea that incorporation is always possible, even incorporation of radical alterities. Yet contradictions are also familiar: it might be common to hear condemnation of but it is not difficult to identify its pervasiveness or its mobilization when legitimating exclusion of certain categories of persons from full social and economic participation. When Poyinelli (2002:11) notes that one the great persuasions of liberalism [is] its seeming openness, its voracious encompassment, she cautions this is not true without reserve. She examines what it is about Aboriginality in Australia that produces a refusal on part of state to encompass that which is abhorrent to it. This paper takes a rather different approach to a similar question. While it is clear there are exclusions by state that are a matter of political choice or expethency, I am interested in identifying characteristics of liberalism, its values and practices, which make acknowledgment or accommodation of difference difficult in that they seem to deny those of liberalism itself. In context, this has implications for inclusion of differences which challenge liberalism's apparent openness. This is particularly case for peoples, whose very definition as indigenous challenges legitimacy of state. What, then, are implications for incorporation of difference?Silverstein's (2002:147) contention that continued ambivalence over espousal and denial of cultural difference within postcolonial period point[s] to perduring character of coloniality within postcoloniality is apt here: that difference is avowed and disavowed, produced and erased at different times is particularly evident in settler nations in relation to peoples. English-speaking settler nations have variously adopted policies of segregation, assimilation, integration and selfmanagement, most of which are eventually deemed unsuccessful or inadequate. At present time, ambivalence of which Silverstein speaks is intensifying. The English-speaking settler nations have refused to support International Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and neo-liberalism, by putting an end to welfare state in favour of user pays philosophy, is increasingly marginalizing those already defined as peripheral, even antithetical, to interests of nation and its economy. In response, concerns about social inclusion have become central in contemporary social policy debate. In this paper I take one example of an Australian Aboriginal society's failed attempt to incorporate (itself one of many such attempts) to ask what it means to incorporate peoples within nation-state? I do so to examine question as to whether a liberal democratic state is able to include and respect difference. While my case study is Australian, I anticipate it will resonate within other settler nations. It begs question as to what incorporation means.Anthropologists have developed various approaches to explain Aboriginal exclusion in Australia, including an Aboriginal cultural incapacity to change (Berndt 1977; Stanner 1979), a self-conscious Aboriginal resistance to change (Morris 1989); racism on part of non-Aboriginal Australians (Cowlishaw 2004); inappropriate policy development (Martin 2001; Rowse 2002); and Povinelli's (2002) work on limits of recognition of what state defines as culturally repugnant practice. …

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