State Labor’s law-and-order push on kids: a return to the White Australia policy?

The Andrews government did everyone a service five years ago by trying to ram through a stretch of asphalt to make it easier for people to get to (or more likely out of) Ararat, intending to demolish what have become known as the Djab Wurrung trees. These had a sacred cultural significance for the Djab Wurrung people of the area.

One’s first sight of the trees would tell you why. They’re in a single line and have an unusual symmetry of form and majesty. The first people to see them, however many thousands of years ago, would have been equally struck by such presence, in more immediately spiritualised terms. But across the aeons, we could all be as one in their presence.

That didn’t matter a damn to the branch-stacked goombahs and hacks who run the Andrews government. They were happy to make nicey-nicey noises about First Nations heritage, find one local leader to say yes to their destruction, and then get ready to pour asphalt across the land from where they would have been removed. Asphalt, charcoal grey sludge, poured mastery, suffusing everything and then hardening into nothingness.

The whole process was given its coup de grâce by the Andrews government parading around as the party making treaty with 80 First Nations groups blah blah blah. Treaty without sovereignty, and 80 leaderships — allowing the government to shop around until it found a leadership pliable enough to put its mark on whatever the government wanted. 

Fast-forward to referendum year, and state, territory and federal governments are still doing it. Dan Andrews is getting progressive kudos for threatening to unilaterally raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14, if federal agreement can’t be reached. But he hasn’t yet, and he’s left in place a bail system locking up First Nations, Islander and African-Australian adults and teenagers in high proportion, and a criminal justice system doing the same, in archaic and sadistic institutions.

The system has already resulted in the death of Veronica Nelson, a First Nations woman, and there will be, and may already have been, more. The “criminal responsibility age” throat-clearing looks like classic Victorian Labor “rainbow bulldozer” stuff: make a progressive gesture to mark the maintenance or extension of a repressive corporate state. 

Labor’s progressive-regressive two-step

Now the Queensland Labor government has announced it will criminalise breaching bail conditions by young children, an apparent response to a sharp rise in various types of street crime in mid-size cities like Townsville, and a perception the disorder associated with the Northern Territory is spreading outward. This is despite multiple voices pointing out that such new laws will disproportionately criminalise First Nations kids. Can anyone not hear them? The state and federal governments can. Yet it is doing this at the same time as it emphasises something called “a Voice”. 

The realpolitik truth is, of course, that Labor has “no choice” but to maintain a punitive regime in all its states — either to stay in power or to preserve the large majorities on which it is banking to give it an era of power. To do so, it will make a sharp division between its large-ish potential base and an “excluded class”, who must be sharply controlled, surveilled and disciplined.

State Labor parties have had decades of continuous power, in NSW, Queensland and Tasmania, on this progressive/regressive split. Queensland was one of the world’s first jurisdictions to abolish the death penalty, under Labor, a century ago. The regime it would have been running for Black people accused of crimes doesn’t bear thinking about.

What’s different now is the party across all states is allegedly thoroughly progressive, and knows exactly what it is doing and whom it is impacting. Labor, then, was a proud exponent of the White Australia policy, and saw its division along racial lines as essential to its conception of social democracy. Famously, it steadily dismantled it, from the great 1948 migration wave onwards, an achievement Labor continually points to.

But here it gets complicated. The dismantling of that policy occurred at the same time as a wider process of progressive institutional liberalisation was launched, based on relatively optimistic notions of reform, rehabilitations and the like. Youth detention and “training” centres from the 1950s onwards were pretty ghastly, even for white kids, but the “arrow of progress” was towards some idea that spending money on better facilities with education, skills and counselling might make a difference. 

In Victoria, that more or less stopped under former Liberal premier Jeff Kennett. When Labor returned in 1999, it was on a different basis. This was not a working-class party seeing crime as a product of social oppression and capable of some steady remedy, a party that once connected collective social liberalism to the idea that kids born into ghastly circumstances could, through the application of state action, be given a chance for meaningful lives. 

Now Labor is a party of the suburban middle, seeing its asset-poor stable working class as a guaranteed vote, its extended base as a unified, asset-holding, working middle class. This group increasingly thinks of their interests as expressed in a political framework that guarantees assets — housing, super, children’s education — and which has solidarity by asset, rather than by the wage-capital divided. Which is why you can’t persuade people to support franking credits or stage three tax cuts reversal, even if they get absolutely zero benefits from the status quo.

With the focus shifted to a political homo possessus, the notion of a shared interest, fate with or responsibility to the class section variously described as the “under-” or “criminal” class disappears altogether. Indeed, previous social democratic notions that almost everybody except the most incorrigibly violent should have a chance to fight clear of their circumstances are reversed. Labor governments show their commitment to their new base by damning such groups to a remorseless judicial process of social de-citizenship. It’s a progressivist version of De Maistre’s “executioner”:  the merciless, indifferent taker of life whose power is that on which the state is founded. 

Labor’s new White Australia policy

There is surely no doubt that the application of such a process, in our country now, marks the de facto return of the White Australia policy as an instrument. You can’t be a social democratic party, by heritage, seeing social life as collective, and then become an individualist classical liberal when you want to lock people up, and pretend that the colour of the people being locked up is just incidental.

Labor’s move is a steady abandonment of the Whitlamite social liberal heritage, the notion that, within the collective politics, the individual emerges as a person, as worthy of the opportunity for a flourishing life — the spirit of Whitlam’s famous remark about wanting every kid to be able to study in his own room with his own desk and lamp. 

That applies to quite a lot of state Labor policy, and it’s interconnected. The notion of seriously beating down inequality has been replaced by an acceptance of social betterment within a more fixed class banding, for example. Who gets to go to medical, law or art school, and who gets to go to the new JB Hi-Fi on a Saturday morning as a social reward, and who gets thrown into the bastinado, are now accepted as largely fixed. Cities we might once have built to help break that process are now being left to private developers — on the edges, around the Suburban Rail Loop, in the centre — to fill out in such a way as sets it in actual concrete.  

Consequently Labor in Victoria now has a rising youth crime problem. It’s real, not huge, not small either, and not a Hun beat-up. It is making a difference to suburban lives. Like much youth crime, it is the product of a “social denial”. When you are locked out of the process of social recognition and development, “gangs” — or the loose networks that go under that name — form as a provider of such. In Victoria, for the last 20 years, Labor has allowed developers to build such god-awful, non-place, new suburbs, to deliberately remove social spaces where people might actually gather. Consequently, the gangs have become mobile, deterritorialised, conceptual and rhizomatic.

Tarneit and other places are so nice-yet-awful, the kids come to St Kilda to get stabby somewhere where there’s gelato. But they also range through the more proximate western and northern suburbs, in part an assertion that they won’t be sequestered to McMansion banlieues for the convenience of the government’s narratives.  

Inequality and the carceral trap

What’s the answer? Haha, there is none, not one that doesn’t involve real money. Pitching yourself as being the permanent state party of government on service delivery grounds means safe streets, which means the racialised process of the legal system can continue on as a general process, under cover of the political process of recognition and the Voice.

What would change that? A government willing to defend the bail system on the grounds that most people do not abuse it, and to talk back to the notion that the problems of abolishing it cannot be morally justified by the committal of crimes by some within it. Non-penal solutions for non-violent offenders. Better facilities for remand: people on remand are legally innocent, they should be in motel-style accommodation. As should jail proper. The full return of programs inside, and frameworks outside, with some serious money spent. And a willingness to argue for this, against the rabid right, as the sort of real thing progressive governments do, beyond not holding a state funeral for some dead priest. 

Beyond that, without some concerted action to push back against the steady implementation of “accepted inequality” as a social fact, crime is a way for people with no stake in society to get one, and it is far from merely monetary. Labor needs to find a way to make such possible collectively and individually. Otherwise it will only find itself drawn deeper into the politics of exclusion, until it is the carceral party, fully converted to a right-wing suburban corporatism, even as it says the words and signs the treaties.

Still, never let it be said that it is not the party of nation-building. With two new childrens’ prisons on the way in Queensland, the manufactories of human containment and criminality are rising again. We’re turning out hoods like we once did Holdens, in the shade of the sacred (and vanished) tree of Barcaldine.