Staircases, pyramids and poisons: the immunitary paradigm in the works of Noel Pearson and Peter Sutton

The recent focus on the category of culture provoked by Peter Sutton's The Politics of Suffering (2009) has revived questions of the meaning and utility of indigenous alterity in Australia. The end of the liberal consensus, contemporary with a declared end of ideology in Australian Indigenous† public policy, has been doubled in post-ethnic academic work harbouring a renewed suspicion of what Dombrowski (2010, 21: 129-140) has called indigeneity's distinctive sympathy. Within a cultural economy of commensurability, the fact that political claims are often contingent on the indigenous people themselves maintaining sufficient alterity to warrant the special treatment afforded them is taken by some as proof of voluntarism and bad faith. In order to gauge this immanent reorientation of indigeneity in Australia, this paper surveys the works of two prominent figures in policy debates-the anthropologist Peter Sutton and indigenous public intellectual Noel Pearson-who have both argued that remote Indigenous communities suffer from a cultural pathology. This paper presents a conceptual critique of their popular press works between 2000 and 2011. Within the context of post-ethnic government policy after self-determination and scholarship after identity, this paper contends that we are witnessing the (re)appearance of an equalitarian humanism which proposes, following Esposito [2008 (Orig. pub. 2004)], to immunize indigenous polities and the settler-colonial state against the historical frames and alterity of indigeneity.

Keystone media: the Australian and Indigenous affairs

This article conceptualises The Australian as the nation’s ‘keystone media’ on Indigenous affairs.Nielsen’s term ‘keystone media’ captures the critical importance of particular news outlets that play what he terms an outsize role in defining the state and structure of wider media and politicalenvironments. The article analyses the factors at play in The Australian’s sponsorship of a particular political agenda for this complex field of social policy. The argument is illustrated through an examination of Indigenous health coverage from 1988 to 2008, textual analysis of 137 columnswritten by Noel Pearson, and research interviews with key actors in the Indigenous policy realm, including journalists, public servants and Indigenous commentators. Through this examination of its reporting and collaboration with Pearson, we contend The Australian has advanced a range of neoliberal and interventionist policies to government and the public.