‘The Australian Way of Life’: Neoliberal Hegemony, Colonisation and Territory

Abstract

In this chapter, I highlight how the interconnected relationship between capitalism and colonisation is reinforced in Australia. Australian policy and political discourses construct land as a resource to be captured and exploited for profit. As I suggest, this is an example of the ongoing reproduction of colonisation in Australia, where the settler-colonial state has dispossessed First Nations peoples from their land, and imposed a system of values, laws and regulations and knowledge, and normalised an extractive relationship with the land. This system is constructed as a ‘common sense’. As I show, politicians and policy discourses frame economic growth, of which mining is a major contributor in Australia, as essential to ‘living standards’ and the Australian ‘way of life’. Thus, dispossession and extraction is legitimised through these constructs of the ‘good life’. This argument is tacitly used to maintain settler-colonial relations with the land, which is framed as logical, rational and necessary. Throughout this chapter, I analyse examples such as Adani’s Carmichael coal mine, the destruction of the Juukan Gorge caves by Rio Tinto, and the Victorian Governments’ felling of sacred Djab Wurrung Trees, to show how settler-colonial ways of managing and exploiting the land have subjugated First Nations peoples’ histories, cultures and knowledge, while prioritising exploitative and extractive approaches to the land in the name of ‘living standards’.