Why New Zealand Has a Treaty and Australia Doesn’t

If you have read the Uluru Statement from the Heart, or listened to iterations of the ubiquitous Acknowledgment of Country, or watched an episode of QandA discussing reconciliation, you’ve probably heard or asked yourself the question, ‘Why did Australia never sign a national treaty with the Aboriginal population’? Especially when New Zealand, discovered by the same explorer and answering to the same colonial overseers in London, signed a treaty with a large minority of their own Maori population. So, why not Australia ?

The comparison between Australia and New Zealand is pertinent and the subject of the historian Bain Attwood’s new book Empire and the Making of Native Title (Cambridge University Press, 2020). What follows are ten reasons why Australia never formed a national treaty with the Aboriginals in light of Professor Attwood’s research.

1. Aboriginal People Were Divided
   

The Crown could not form a national treaty with Aboriginal people because they were divided by…