One of the achievements of the modern doctrinal system is that it allows a society to tell itself a story and believe it, even when the facts are moving in the opposite direction.
In Australia, the preferred story is familiar enough - the fair go, the decent society at the edge of the earth, muddling through but basically humane. It is a powerful self-image, and like all good propaganda, it rests on a grain of truth. There are authentic traditions of solidarity, of public provision, of people refusing to walk past injustice.
However, if we examine the record of the 21st century, what stands out is something different. What we find is a remarkably consistent pattern in which, when choices have to be made, policy is organised around property and control, rather than people and sharing.
What follows is a brief sketch of that record, and of how different the country might look if the opposite principle had been allowed to operate.
The Northern Territory “Intervention”: emergency as pretext
In 2007, the federal government announced what it called a “national emergency response” to child sexual abuse in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, invoking a report that had documented serious concerns. The result was the Northern Territory Emergency Response, which included bans on alcohol and pornography in “prescribed areas”, compulsory income management for welfare recipients, compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal townships, intensified policing, and the deployment of the army for logistics and surveillance.
The measures were explicitly racial in their targeting. The Racial Discrimination Act was set aside in the affected areas. Aboriginal organisations in the Territory proposed alternative responses centred on community-controlled services and long-term development, but these were largely ignored.
If the goal had been to maximise the welfare and autonomy of the people supposedly being protected, the shape of the response would have been different. It might have included long-term funding for Aboriginal-run childcare, health and legal services; housing programs under local control; police and child-protection practices designed with, not imposed on, communities. Instead, the central features were discipline (controls on movement, on spending, on substances) and dispossession (new forms of control over land and townships).
From the perspective of planners in Canberra, this is not irrational. A system that has long regarded Indigenous communities as an administrative problem and their land as a resource to be managed will reach for familiar tools. What is striking is not the choice itself but the ease with which the emergency framing allowed it to be sold as an act of benevolence.
A people-first intervention would have started from a different premise. It would have started with the capacity and authority to protect children and rebuild communities that already existed in those communities, and needed to be supported, not displaced. The state’s role, in that picture, is to supply resources and legal power to those who are already trying to hold things together, not to assume that only distant administrators and police can act.
The difference is not merely moral, it's practical. A policy based on consent and shared control creates the possibility of trust. One based on coercion reinforces the widespread view in remote communities that the Commonwealth arrives only to regulate and punish.
The Apology without reparations
The 2008 National Apology to the Stolen Generations was presented, with some justification, as a historic break. For the first time, a prime minister acknowledged in parliament the harm inflicted by decades of forced child removals and assimilation policies.
It is helpful to ask what did not happen. There was no national framework for reparations, despite clear precedents in other societies and the recommendations of commissions. No legislated right to compensation. No guaranteed, long-term funding for healing services under Indigenous control. The apology was explicitly decoupled from any material obligation.
Again, this is not hard to understand from the perspective of those who manage a system built on accumulated advantage. Symbolic gestures are often inexpensive and can even be beneficial. They burnish a country’s image at home and abroad, and they do not require any serious redistribution of land, wealth or decision-making. The line that must not be crossed is the one that leads from acknowledgment to repair, because repair implies that someone has a claim on what is currently considered ours.
A people-first version of the same moment would have looked different. The apology would have been attached to:
- a federal reparations statute establishing compensation schemes for survivors and descendants,
- a nationally funded network of Indigenous healing centres,
- legal guarantees of access to records and family tracing, and
- a timetable for reforming child-protection, housing and policing practices that continue to tear families apart.
The gap between these two possibilities is the gap between recognition as speech and recognition as power-sharing. The first can be absorbed by the existing order with little strain. The second threatens to redistribute authority and resources, and so does not occur.
Uluru, the Voice, and the normalisation of contempt
In 2017, hundreds of First Nations delegates at Uluru issued an invitation to the rest of the country. The Uluru Statement from the Heart called for three things:
- a First Nations Voice to Parliament enshrined in the Constitution,
- a Makarrata Commission to supervise agreement-making (treaty), and
- truth-telling about our history.
The request is, by international standards, extremely modest. It does not alter sovereignty. It does not create a second chamber. It creates an advisory body, dependent on parliament for its powers, but protected in the Constitution from being simply abolished at whim.
The 2023 referendum to implement this proposal failed, with approximately 60% of voters nationwide voting 'No'. A later analysis by the Jumbunna Institute and National Justice Project, drawing on hundreds of reports to the Call It Out register, found that racism towards Indigenous people surged during and after the campaign. The referendum “normalised” open hostility, especially online and in the media, and many First Nations people described profound psychological harm.
What is remarkable here is not only the defeat itself but the ferocity of the reaction to a minimal request for participation. It tells us something about the real content of phrases like “reconciliation” and “a fair go” as they are used in official rhetoric. In their doctrinal meaning, these terms imply nothing about ceding control. They license ceremonies, flags, acknowledgements, but they do not license an Indigenous body that might, even symbolically, claim a standing within the constitutional order.
In the alternate history - the one that was available but not taken - the political class treats Uluru as an instruction, not a suggestion. Governments invest, over the years, in civic education about the Statement and its limits and possibilities. Media are held to basic standards of accuracy and reliability. The referendum passes.
In that world, every piece of legislation affecting First Nations people must pass through an Indigenous advisory body, which holds public hearings and publishes its advice. The Commonwealth and the states are under pressure to negotiate treaties. School curricula incorporate the Uluru Statement as a foundational text. The cost of ignoring Indigenous views, even when legally permissible, becomes politically higher.
The point is not that a Voice would have solved the structural problems of colonisation. It would not. It is that the refusal even of this narrow concession is a clear statement about priorities. When the interests of existing power structures and the dignity of dispossessed peoples come into conflict, it is the latter that is discarded.
Inequality and the erosion of the “fair go”
The mythology of the “fair go” is especially instructive when examining how wealth is distributed.
Recent data assembled by community organisations and government agencies show that wealth in Australia is highly concentrated. By 2021–22, the top 10% of households by wealth held around 46% of all wealth. The next 30% held another 38% and the bottom 60% were left with the remaining 17%. A separate analysis found that by 2020 the bottom 40% held only 5.5% of the country’s wealth, down from 7.8% in 2004, while the top 1% held nearly 24%.
During the same period, the number of high-net-worth individuals and billionaires has increased sharply, with the combined wealth of the top 200 richest Australians nearly tripling over the past two decades, primarily driven by capital gains in property and other assets.
These are not the numbers one would expect in a society that organises its economy around sharing. They are precisely what one would expect in a system that treats housing as a speculative instrument, tax concessions on capital as a sacred right, and social spending as a regrettable cost to be contained.
A people-first approach to the same economic reality would look almost unrecognisable from current policy debates. It would begin with the observation that a decent life, including secure housing, adequate food, healthcare, education, and time, is not a luxury to be earned through success in the market, but rather the baseline for any legitimate order. From this premise, certain conclusions follow: large-scale public housing, rent controls or strong regulation in tight markets, taxation that actively reduces wealth concentration, and income supports set above any plausible poverty line.
Instead, we find that when the interests of the bottom 40% collide with those of asset-holders, it is the former who are asked to adjust. The doctrine of the “fair go” remains useful, but primarily as a way of describing what is supposedly under threat from migrants, welfare recipients or other convenient targets, rather than from the upward redistribution of the last several decades.
Measuring What Matters, so long as it doesn’t matter too much
In 2023, the Commonwealth introduced Measuring What Matters, advertised as the first national wellbeing framework. It identifies fifty indicators across five themes, including healthy, secure, sustainable, cohesive, and prosperous, and is explicitly presented as an attempt to move “beyond GDP” in assessing national progress.
On the surface, this is a departure from the usual fixation on growth and deficits. The 2025 update, however, paints a less reassuring picture. Access to healthcare is deteriorating, with an increasing number of people delaying visits due to the cost. Perceptions of safety have declined sharply since the early 2000s. Emissions reductions have stalled, and inequality remains high by OECD standards.
More importantly, the framework primarily functions as a dashboard, rather than a set of binding constraints. Governments note that wellbeing is essential. They produce reports and media releases, but when priorities are set in the budget, traditional measures and interests still dominate. Projects that clearly undermine some wellbeing indicators, like increasing pollution, deepening inequality, or degrading public services, proceed so long as they do not offend powerful constituencies.
Here, the contrast between common-sense and doctrinal meanings is evident. In ordinary language, to say that we are “measuring what matters” would imply that the things measured actually determine decisions. In policy practice, the phrase means that additional statistics are collected and displayed, while the core logic of accumulation remains untouched.
A people-first use of the same framework would be straightforward. Any major policy would have to demonstrate how it improves the situation of those at the bottom across the five domains, or at least does not worsen it. Projects that fail this test would not go ahead, regardless of their contribution to short-term GDP. That is what it means to measure what matters and act accordingly.
Two trajectories
Set alongside one another, these episodes trace two possible trajectories for 21st-century Australia.
In the first - the one we are following - Indigenous communities are the object of periodic emergency interventions but denied durable constitutional power, apologies are offered. Still, reparations are avoided, wealth flows upwards, wellbeing is counted but not decisive, and racist narratives resurface whenever modest redistributive proposals appear.
In the second, which was always available in principle but seldom chosen, the logic runs in the opposite direction. Indigenous peoples determine the policies that govern their lives and lands. Recognition entails transfer of power and resources. Economic policy is judged above all by its effects on the least secure. Wellbeing frameworks are not ornaments but rules. The “fair go” regains something closer to its literal meaning, because the society is organised to ensure that nobody falls below an unacceptable floor.
There is nothing automatic about either path. They are the accumulated result of decisions made by governments, parties, bureaucracies, corporate interests, and the pressures, or lack thereof, exerted from below.
If one lesson emerges from examining these turning points, it is that people-first outcomes do not arise solely from enlightened leadership. When they occur at all, it is usually because organised groups, such as unions, community organisations, First Nations movements, and social campaigns, have imposed a political cost on continuing to treat human lives as incidental to profit and control.
Australia is not unique in this respect. It is a reasonably clear case study of how a society can coexist with two narratives: one about generosity and mateship, the other about the routine sacrifice of human well-being to the demands of capital and state power. To close the gap between those stories would require, not another slogan, but a willingness to insist that the phrase “people first” be taken literally.
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