An Obituary for Settlement Politics

The End of Settlement
by Damien Freeman
Connor Court, 2024, 134 pages, $29.95

As the anniversary of the Voice referendum defeat is upon us, our right-thinking media and political elites—I’m sorry to report—are getting ready to lament the existence of 61 per cent of the electorate, resume whining about alleged misinformation, and then acknowledge country with even more frequency and sanctimony than usual.

Quadrant readers should use the occasion to recall the campaign’s most significant moment—the week of brief but merciful silence from “Yes” leaders in the aftermath of the loss. Unfortunately, that peace and quiet ended with the Voice supporters having a public hissy-fit, though fairness obliges me to note that it came in the form of an open letter. On the one-year commemoration, that letter is very much worth re-reading, as it remains both a vindication of rejecting constitutional change and a guide to post-referendum politics.

Of course, you first have to skim the paragraphs devoted to the authors’ scorn for “No” voters and our “shameful act”. Also, if you can, fight the urge to roll your eyes at the self-pitying blather about yet another blow in “the process of colonisation”. But then, I promise, you get to the interesting stuff, like the grievance and radicalism that always made up the Voice leaders’ worldview.

In the spirit of accidental truth-telling, the letter-writers finally dispense with the mendacity that the referendum was simply about reconciliation, or a modest change, or an act of generous gift-giving on behalf of indigenous Australia. It’s still hard to locate anything resembling recognition, either, at least as most people understand that term. “We do not for one moment accept that this country is not ours,” they write. “It is the legitimacy of the non-Indigenous occupation in this country that requires recognition, not the other way around. Our sovereignty has never been ceded.”

So much, then, for an effort to unite the country and make it whole; the Voice leaders, by their own admission, are unconvinced of Australia’s legitimate standing as a nation-state. This ought to be the most salient fact for retrieval in the approaching October 14 write-ups and discussions, though I admit that’s about as likely as a commemorative week of quiet reflection on the part of embittered and vengeful Voice advocates.

This time around, I expect there to be a bit more huffing and finger-wagging, alongside, of course, renewed calls for treaty-making and Makarrata. The preferred cliché, which has been rehearsed since the votes came in a year ago, goes something like this: the Australian people—curse them—may have unwisely rejected the Voice, but the rest of the Uluru Statement is still ripe for implementation, though without as much democratic input if possible, thanks very much.

It looks all too obvious now that the Voice elites wouldn’t learn the right lessons from their well-earned defeat. It would be a shame if the Right copied that approach and misused our victory. Unfortunately, Damien Freeman may have set himself that very task in his new book, The End of Settlement: Why the 2023 Referendum Failed.

Freeman, a lawyer and academic who helped contrive the Voice in the first place, seems like a suitable candidate to write its post-mortem. Along with Julian Leeser, he co-founded Uphold & Recognise, an organisation that sought to bring fellow conservatives around to indigenous recognition via the Voice. Thankfully, the group’s enlistees never quite expanded beyond the number of its founders, as the rest of the Right cheerily joined the “No” campaign. Freeman, then, rushed to be wrong about both the referendum and his own political side, so one shouldn’t read The End of Settlement anticipating a belated outbreak of good sense.

In his book, Freeman seeks to explain the nature and history of settlement politics in Australia as well as make the case for its preservation. The first goal, to be fair, he achieves with lucidity and fair-mindedness. Settlement politics, he writes, “is the form of reaching political agreement through a form of compromise”. It is not, he emphasises, each faction winning a bit of what they want, or a politics of cuddliness, where everyone gets along nicely. Instead, settlement politics permits rivals to become co-architects of major reform, justify such a policy to their disparate constituents, and then continue disagreeing and even disliking one other.

Freeman draws upon Paul Kelly’s book The End of Certainty to remind readers of the most successful example of settlement politics in action: the Hawke and Keating economic reforms of the 1980s, which were essentially supported by Howard as shadow treasurer, and then maintained during his own prime ministership. Both sides came to agree on the necessity of reform and managed to bring their parties and the electorate along with them—a feat achieved while squabbling and condemning each other at the time and in subsequent years.

What makes settlement politics possible is a commitment to a shared national project and a view of one’s political opponents that stoops no lower than a healthy disrespect. Freeman almost topples into sappiness as he writes: “Settlement politics is predicated on tolerance. It assumes that although I might not have the same thoughts as you, or feel the same way about something as you, or share your desires for the future, I am prepared to accept and accommodate you despite these differences.” That may work well enough for difficult but manageable undertakings like deregulation and market reform; however, settlement politics, Freeman worries, loses its persuasive appeal on weightier aspirations, like indigenous recognition.

The Voice, Freeman argues, began with great promise as a settlement project: oppositional groups agreed on the urgency of reform and made gestures towards a compromise; if that compromise could be sufficiently ambiguous, all parties could sell the proposal to their constituencies and harness political bipartisanship for victory, as this is the only means by which a referendum in Australia can pass.

A settlement, Freeman laments, failed in October 2023, and he apportions blame to just about everyone. The Voice advocates became trapped by their identity politics. They argued for constitutional change simply because indigenous people had asked for it, and they never really bothered to add anything further to their case. Freeman also chastises the opponents, who succumbed to right-wing populism, resiled from the course of recognition, and came to view the Voice as an elite endeavour, far removed from the interests of ordinary Australians.

Freeman, though, has no regrets: “It was right to embark on constitutional recognition of Indigenous peoples as a settlement project. Its failure should serve as a warning.” He thus ends the book rather lamely, fretting about Australia’s polarisation and arguing for the restoration of settlement politics as the only sensible path forward.

Conservatives should eschew such a temptation. This, I suspect, will be relatively easy, as it begins with a built-in scepticism as to whether the Voice and constitutional recognition in general could ever belong to a politics of settlement. After all, it’s delusional to think any kind of compromise is possible with an activist and political elite unconvinced of Australia’s legitimacy in the first place.

While I enjoyed the Voice losers’ temporary vow of silence, I liked even better the embarrassment and ridicule they faced during the campaign, at the moment their real agenda became more fully exposed. The Uluru Statement, especially its supplementary pages, rightfully became, in the minds of many Australians, a far-reaching, even revolutionary, plan. With its giddy talk of the Voice as a mechanism for treaty, which would culminate in self-government, autonomy, and special jurisdictions for Aboriginal law, the task of recognition, though muddied, was certainly no longer about showing good manners.

What, exactly, would settlement politics look like with interlocutors like Megan Davis and Thomas Mayo? Perhaps one could make the case for a smaller percentage of GDP for the next round of Aboriginal reparations, or lighter punishments for non-indigenous trespassing on “sacred” sites. A settlement, as applied to the Voice and recognition in 2023, was always a hopeless endeavour, and it was degrading to make the effort, despite Freeman’s lonely wondering about what might have been.

To understand our present discontents, we ought to put aside Freeman’s settlement framework and borrow a different one from political science. The everyday parliamentary fights that consume so much attention seem pallid and small when set against regime politics, which concerns itself with a more fundamental dispute about the nature and legitimacy of political rule. The American political thinker Charles Kesler writes of the danger inherent in regime politics, which “unsettles any existing political order, as well as its limits. It raises anew the basic questions of who counts as a citizen, what are the goals of the political community, and what do we honour or revere together as a people.”

Voice, treaty, truth—as their advocates constantly remind us—belong to the domain of regime politics: the Voice, with its insistence on separatist, race-based institutions of governance, sought a fundamental restructuring of our political system; a demand for treaty begins with the assumption that the nation’s sovereignty is illusory and requires re-negotiation; and truth-telling, though better understood as fabrication, is a project to contemn Australia’s origins and denude our history of any achievements.

From this vantage point, the elites’ desire for the 2023 referendum was not to reconcile the nation, but to re-found it: the Uluru Convention would transmogrify into Australia’s true founding, the allegedly racist and shameful federation of 1901 would be supplanted, and treaties and Makarrata would complete the work. No wonder, then, that so much of the media and political class is still cultivating its contempt for the “No” voters who tried to halt these plans.

Writing in the Monthly immediately after the loss, left-wing journalist Rachel Withers perfectly captured this cast of mind. After a few paragraphs of requisite moping, Withers declared that the result left Australia still bereft of a “national identity”. She continued: “It’s sad to be confronted with the fact that 60 per cent of Australians like it this way, and are not interested in walking with First Nations people to create a new nation.” ABC Indigenous Affairs reporter Isabella Higgins appeared on Insiders to whinge about the result and make bleak predictions for the nation’s future, if there was to be one. She said the rejection of the Voice would provoke “black anger”, as well as alternative routes to Aboriginal sovereignty, all of which would pose a threat to “the Australian regime”.

This admixture of self-loathing and radicalism goes back a long way among Australian intellectuals. Manning Clark imagined a day when the non-indigenous would be forcibly removed from the continent, deserved victims of a kind of payback: “The Europeans had been robbers. Would they perhaps one day be fleers? Would that be the punishment for the sins of the fathers against the first tenants of the soil in Australia—the Aborigines?”

Our present class of elites would likely nod at Clark’s idea in theory, if not quite in practice. That’s why they acknowledge country every five minutes or so and identify as settlers on stolen land, as all that might give them moral permission to stay put. Even that kind of self-abasement won’t be adequate, though; they’ll still have to give the land back and the country away, as the historian Cassandra Prybus advised. “Until we do that,” she wrote, “we shall remain what we have always been so far, a people without integrity; not a nation, but a community of thieves.”

At the Garma Festival in 2018, author Richard Flanagan added a few more conditions, all built around the Uluru Statement. Assenting to its demands, Flanagan said, would finally end Australia’s war with the Aborigines, re-found the nation on a legitimate basis, and—it was implied—obviate the need for the non-indigenous to flee. “We can belong here,” he told the crowd of future “Yes” voters, “if we choose to anchor our identity in Indigenous Australia’s history.”

During the Voice defeat commemorations, I hope we can take a moment to acknowledge Flanagan and his co-aggrieved, remind them of their disappointment, and commit to making it a permanent condition. After all, the elites will never forgive us for voting the wrong way in the Voice referendum; we shouldn’t let them get off lightly, either.

“We are at a decisive moment in Australian political history,” Damien Freeman correctly concludes. “Either we recommit ourselves to settlement politics and we work towards establishing the conditions in which this is possible, or we accept the end of settlement politics and we prepare ourselves for the consequences.”

Should the Right take the latter course, a political and intellectual roadmap would certainly be useful. One of the amusing strengths of The End of Settlement, which makes it worth reading, is how often Freeman himself does this work on our behalf. The trick is to take note of the ideas and methods that he assails, and then have them at the ready for consolation and practical use.

Freeman spends a number of pages worrying about declining levels of trust in the institutions that once united us, or had a measure of social respect. I find it hard to be bothered by this, at least in some instances. Our national broadcaster, via its digital expansion, ABCQueer, recently informed its viewership that the reactionary and outdated gender binary arrived with the First Fleet. Diminishing trust in the ABC, for example, ought to be both a sign of an intelligent public and a cause for cheer. A total institutional collapse—fingers crossed—can’t arrive quickly enough.

The same could be said of our universities, where the nation’s academics rip through taxpayer lucre while finding new ways to be useless. Since the Voice defeat, leaders of our institutions of higher education have doubled down on “decolonising” their curricula as well as the institutions themselves. Renaming buildings and additional smoking ceremonies, I fear, are likely to be the tamest changes. The Australian Catholic University’s law school, to take one dispiriting example, has just committed to excising the Western focus from its compulsory subjects and promised to “indigenise” its degree. Meanwhile, the Australian National University is unembarrassed to announce the introduction of its course on Aboriginal mathematics. All this only adds to my point that declining trust in some institutions and a subsequent campaign of derision could very well be a positive development.

Freeman is most helpful on the question of a viable political strategy for populist conservatives. In the absence of settlement politics, with its ambiguity and compromise, we’re left with a desire to “defeat the enemy” or “fight the opponent to the point of capitulation”. That, to me, sounds like a terrific starting point. If we can add to the to-do list the political and moral humiliation of the activist and elite class, then we just might have the beginnings of a post-settlement agenda for the Australian Right.

At her recent retirement announcement, Linda Burney, the Minister for Indigenous Australians during the referendum campaign, noted that her displeasure at the loss may be a passing thing. The Voice, she asserted, would be “looked on more kindly by history”. On the one hand, that sounds like an early job for a future truth-telling commission, where permissible thoughts on a given topic would be narrowed or mandated. But it was also yet another warning to the Voice’s dissenters that the political fight isn’t over, and the continued post-referendum climate of regime politics demands an even greater tough-mindedness and hostility.

The End of Settlement also leads its readers to such a conclusion, though it is at the author’s ironic expense. None of this is exactly what Damien Freeman had in mind for conservatives to uphold and recognise, but in the spirit of good manners, thanks very much all the same.

Timothy Cootes reviewed Clementine Ford’s I Don’t: The Case Against Marriage in the July-August issue