The politics of state-sanctioned violence in Australia : racialized constructions of nation

Violence towards the traditional occupiers of the land and those who more recently came across the seas is endemic and harm-inducing. In Australia it has not always been acceptable to question violence against Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers in tandem, as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have challenged policy and discursive formulations that fail to have their distinctive rights recognized and that fuse their status with immigration and multiculturalism. Times have somewhat changed, and with an emergence of solidarity arising from shared oppression, Indigenous Australians are now expressing disquiet at the treatment of people experiencing forced migration. The convergence became apparent through Aboriginal leader Lowitja O’Donohue’s insightful statement in 2003: ‘How is it that this nation’s First Peoples, and its last peoples, should suffer similar indignity?’ New discursive spaces provide opportunities for contemplating both arenas simultaneously. To do so enables a challenge to assertions that past policies of exclusion, violence, oppression and domination are the domain of the past alone. Through normative assumptions of rights and justice, and shrouded by fear factors, racism that permits ongoing violent responses is masked in Australian society where dominant constructions are privileged and insidious assimilation tendencies prevail. Whiteness as ‘the invisible omnipresent norm’ determines how the ‘Other’ is positioned and treated, and how practices that discriminate, exclude and harm become normalized. Erasure of human rights flows from violence within a nation. Human Rights Watch condemns Australia’s abrogation of human rights responsibilities through increasingly punitive policies for asylum seekers and the lack of access to adequate healthcare, housing, food and water for many Indigenous Australians, despite Australia being one of the world’s wealthiest nations. As Donnelly argues, ‘for the foreseeable future, human rights will remain a vital element in national, international and transnational struggles for social justice and human dignity’