ABSTRACT
In Australia in the 1990s, ‘reconciliation’ emerged as an organizing discourse for political debate and policy-making in relation to Aboriginal affairs and the unfinished business of decolonisation. Unlike in countries such as Chile and South Africa, however, reconciliation was not pursued in the wake of a new constitutional settlement. Rather, reconciliation was proposed as an alternative to a treaty (between indigenous people and the state), which had been pursued by Aboriginal activists (at least) since the 1970s. Conservative and Labour governments entertained the proposition of a treaty or ‘Makarrata’ in the 1980s. By the 1990s, however, the claim to Aboriginal sovereignty, which underwrote the demand to negotiate a treaty, was deemed unreasonable by both major political parties. During the debate about a treaty in 1988, John Howard (Australian prime minister, 19962007) declared: ‘It is an absurd proposition that a nation should make a treaty with some if its own citizens. It also denies the fact that Aboriginal people have full citizenship rights now’ (Howard 1988, 6). In this chapter, I take Howard’s notion of an ‘absurd proposition’ seriously as a characterization of the ‘agonic relation of colonial governance vis-à-vis indigenous resistance’ in Australia (Tully 2000, 13). In particular, I unpack the sense in which the clam to Aboriginal sovereignty might be characterized as an absurd proposition in terms of Lyotard’s conception of the differend and Jacques Rancière’s conception of disagreement.
