ABSTRACT
Parliamentary second-reading speeches. This figure is the ‘abused Aboriginal child’, and she has been significant to the production of myths of the Australian nationstate, and to the rule of law. She is being used to justify the continued administration of Aboriginal communities, and simultaneously the continuing suspension of the rule of law and the violent instrumentalisation of law. Earlier iterations of this figure were the occasion for the regulation of indigenous people through the various state Aborigines Protection Acts, producing significant acts of state violence whose harms have been documented in the Bringing Them Home report,1 and in cases at common law.2 On 21 June 2007, this figure was revived to animate neoliberal technologies, activating a new kind of governmentality, when the Howard Government announced the Northern Territory Intervention. The Intervention was implemented through a set of laws that permitted the seizure of local community land leases by the federal government, the deployment of the army into Northern Territory communities, the use of extra police powers, and the quarantining of welfare benefits.3 This regime ended in 2012, when it was replaced by a similar set of laws implemented by the Labor Government.4
