Public ideas
What dispossession means to Aboriginal Australians
It’s a terrible upheaval to be thrown off your land, particularly if you had never even imagined the possibility.
A weak justification for seizing land from aboriginal people is that human history has always involved conflicts over land ownership. What settlers did to previous landholders in the New World was just an upscaled version of what tribes had been doing to one another since they first arrived.
On Late Night Live David Marr interviews Shayne Breen, who has written a history of Tasmanian aboriginal people, covering the generally overlooked period from around 40 000 years BCE to 1803. In itself it’s a rich history, covering a people who actively managed the land and coped with changing climates. Breen’s most striking point, however, is that Australian aboriginal people – not just those in Tasmania – had no concept of land changing ownership. There were intertribal conflicts about some matters, but not about land ownership. This puts a whole extra layer on the significance of dispossession.
Ideas that surprise
In his interviews with public intellectuals Joe Walker finds eight ideas that surprise him.
Joe Walker has drawn from his policy salon series of long podcasts 8 ideas that surprised him. They are strictly on-the-spot learnings during the podcasts. For example, until he interviewed Andrew Leigh, he had never imagined that rampant gender discrimination had contributed to the high quality of teachers in our schools.
He provides edited extracts from interviews with prominent public intellectuals across the ideological spectrum, including Andrew Leigh, Judith Brett, Richard Holden, Peter Tulip, Abul Rizvi, Ken Henry and others.
Seven of the eight ideas are about Australia, particularly how our own history and path dependence have shaped the country we live in today. He even finds a unifying logic in different governments’ immigration policies.
Collectively these surprises provide an antidote to some of the gloomy narratives about our present-day problems. For example at first sight it’s hard to reconcile the idea that Australia has a high level of state capacity with findings of failure in child care regulation, worsening road fatalities, and bureaucratic entanglements suppressing innovation and worsening housing affordability. But maybe we are complaining because we expect governments to perform and we know governments can reform, as they have done in the past: we haven’t given in to Ronald Reagan’s pervasive idea that government is intrinsically incompetent.
If there is a bias in these positive findings, it’s because many of the comparisons are with the USA. As we are learning, that’s not a high benchmark for good public policy.