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Irreconcilable differences or a lasting marriage of convenience?: Some thoughts on the relationship between neoliberalism and self-determination in New South Wales Aboriginal affairs policy since the 1980s
In the early 1980s, a New South Wales parliamentary inquiry into Aboriginal affairs recommended that the government implement a policy of self-determination in relation to the state’s Aboriginal people. As it was somewhat ambiguously conceived of in the inquiry reports, self-determination meant giving Aboriginal people increased decision-making authority over matters that affected their lives.
Following the release of the reports, public servants within the newly formed Ministry of Aboriginal Affairs turned their minds to the implementation of the reports’ recommendations. One 1983 report, “Devolution: The Issue of Aboriginal Participation in Welfare”, co-authored by a senior official in the ministry and the director of a social research firm connected the recommendation of self-determination to the rhetoric of another political ideology that was gaining ground in public policy circles at the time—neoliberalism. The authors noted that while NSW under the leadership of Neville Wran was not the UK under Thatcher or the US under Reagan, “the effects on welfare spending are tending in the same direction”, and concluded that implementing the inquiry’s recommendations without significant additional cost would “require increased Aboriginal participation”.
When scholars have considered the interplay between these two influential but nebulous labels they have tended to do so in one of three ways: as neoliberalism thwarting Aboriginal aspirations for self-determination; as neoliberalism incidentally opening up spaces for the practice of Aboriginal self-determination; or, that the idea of self-determination has protected Australian Aboriginal affairs policy from neoliberalism.
In this paper, I will explore the possibility that, at least in the ways the New South Wales Government has invoked, described, and implemented its policy of Aboriginal self-determination from the 1980s until today, there has been a somewhat different relationship between the two concepts, perhaps a more symbiotic one.
17 September 2025, 11am AEST
Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC1.108
Zoom: Click here
Dr Sam Dalgarno is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Indigenous Land and Justice Research Group at UNSW Sydney. As a historian, his research has concentrated on Aboriginal history, history and memory, and public history. His doctoral thesis (Monash, 2023) considered the production, reception and controversy that engulfed Bringing Them Home, the 1997 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s report into Aboriginal child separation.
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