Rethinking Social Justice: From Peoples to Populations

In the early 1970s, Australian governments began to treat Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders as “peoples” with capacities for self-government. Forty years later, confidence in Indigenous self-determination has been eroded by accounts of Indigenous pathology, misplaced policy optimism, and persistent socio-economic gaps. This record accounts for this shift by arguing that Australian thinking about the Indigenous is a continuing, unresolvable tussle between the ideas of “peoples” and “pop...