ABSTRACT
The final chapter analyses the role that settler anxiety plays in shaping Australian public policies that are designed to support Indigenous people to achieve health and socio-economic equality. In particular, the current federal framework, Closing the Gap (CtG), is driven by statistics. Statistics are biopolitical instruments that render subjects visible to the state. The methods through which one comes to recognise a population generate particular relations to those people, and thus can direct for what, and how, one cares. Indigenous disadvantage and inequality become a set of managerial problems for governments to deal with: what is conceptualised as the management of care. The chapter examines how the management of care orientates non-Indigenous people’s perceptions of Indigeneity, their sense of obligation and responsibilities and limits good white people’s political engagement with issues of structural inequality. Is CtG a set of activities that reproduce colonial relations? The analysis draws upon critical Indigenous studies, feminist ethics of care and actor-network theory. It argues for the importance of unsettling care and drawing upon alternative genealogies and archives of care for generating new political practices and relations.
