Global Masculinities and Manhood

7. Representing Aboriginal Masculinity in Howard's Australia

7 r epresenting Aboriginal Masculinity in Howard’ s Australia SHINO KONISHI introducing Howard’ s Aboriginal Policy On November 24, 2007, Australia’s conservative Coalition government was voted out after eleven years in office. Its loss was so decisive that the prime minister, John Howard, suffered the ignominy of being only the second prime minister in Australian history to lose his electoral seat. A contributing factor to his downfall was his determined march towards the neoliberal Right through his economic and industrial policies. For good or ill, he will be remembered for his attempts to return the nation to the ostensibly halcyon days of the 1950s, arguably, a time when the hegemony of white patriarchy was untroubled by the clamor of political correctness (Bonnell & Crotty, 2008). In eulogizing Howard’s government, his supporters celebrated his economic management and strong stance against political correctness and minority rights, continuing the Australian “culture wars” that raged throughout his term. In an essay for the conservative magazine Quadrant, John Stone applauded Howard, claiming that his second-greatest impact on national debate was to remain “immovable” against the charges of “black armband” historians who lamented the “alleged atrocities” committed against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (Stone, 2008, p. 48). Stone’s emphasis on Howard’s Indigenous policy is not surprising. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who have a long history of exploitation and exclusion from mainstream Australia, only represent 2.5 percent of the population, so were an easy target for Howard’s divisive politics. Within his first year of government, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commis- sion (HREOC) released Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Enquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (1997). This was an investigation into the decades’ old government practice of removing thousands of Indigenous children from their parents and placing them in government institutions or with non-Indigenous adoptive and foster parents. The report charted a litany of physical and emotional traumas suffered by the “Stolen Generations”: one in every ten experienced sexual abuse, and 28 percent were subjected to severe “physical brutality” (HREOC, 1997, pp. 163–64, 194). The head of the inquiry, Sir Ronald Wilson, labeled the removal of children over several generations “genocide”; drawing on Article 2[e] of the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide, he claimed that the outcome, intended or otherwise, was to eradicate the children ’s connection to their culture and their Aboriginal identity (pp. 266–73). Howard’s refusal to either countenance this charge or offer an apology or compensation as a form of redress was a stark demonstration that he had little sympathy for the suffering inflicted on Indigenous Australians by past governments in the pursuit of creating a white Australia. Indeed, he failed to see Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as anything more than colonial subordinates, eternally subject to the whims of government. He systematically dismantled the programs and mechanisms that preceding governments had implemented with the aim of achieving Indigenous self-determination and guaranteeing collective rights to Aboriginal lands. His government disbanded the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), a democratically elected Indigenous representative and governing body (Cunningham & Baeza, 2005). While ATSIC had a troubled history, its demise, according to Aboriginal academic Boni Robertson, meant that Indigenous Australians no longer had a role in “controlling [their] own destiny” (cited in Rintoul, 2006). Howard’s government also diluted Native Title rights, amended the Commonwealth Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act of 1976, introduced Indigenous policies that contravened the Australian Racial Discrimination Act (1975), and refused to bow to the global shift towards decolonization and recognition of Indigenous rights by failing to ratify the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Sanders, 2006; Stringer, 2007; Dodson, 2007). Howard and his constituents abhorred the so-called special treatment that Indigenous Australians had received under previous governments in measures aimed at righting past wrongs, and elevating their socio-economic status to the same level enjoyed by non-Indigenous Australians. By employing wedge politics, Howard’s government mobilized middle-Australia’s 162 . SHINO KONISHI economic anxieties and envy of perceived minority privilege by fostering resentment towards Indigenous Australians, even though they represent the most marginal and impoverished sector of the Australian population (Bonnell & Crotty, 2008, pp. 149–50). Perhaps the most instrumental factor in the Howard government’s campaign to wind back Indigenous self-determination and collective rights was...