Australia's Operation Sovereign Borders: Racial Ideologies, Metaphors and Language of Legitimation

Abstract

The foundations of contemporary Australia have historically been tied to colonial habits and practices that extol superiority of whiteness while treating non-desired racial groups as ‘objects’ or non-beings. Immigration, border protection policies and notions of belonging and national sovereignty have always been designed to place certain restrictions on non-desired racial and ethnic groups, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Operation Sovereign Borders (OSB) policy is the latest measure that joins the long list of previous policies aimed at preventing the ‘influx of alien’ races into Australia. This paper seeks to advance our understanding of the various mutations of the hegemony of whiteness in Australia by drawing attention to how border politics and attendant discourses of national sovereignty have increasingly become politics of race – albeit by stealth. The paper introduces ‘vernacular discourse’ as an alternative explanatory paradigm for speaking to the internal contradictions of border protection policies. The argument is that OSB policy is a statement of national sovereignty that emphasises the need for protecting national borders that are imagined in spatial terms – as constituting a completed and closed horizontality. Such a view of Australia misses crucial points: (a) about present conditions of unprecedented voluntary and forced movements of human populations; and, (b) about Indigenous Australians’ longstanding contestation of the mainstream narrative of sovereignty. The conclusion is that OSB policy contradicts the common values of humanity in that it represents an abyssal line separating the ‘zone of being’ (whiteness) from the ‘zone of non-being’ (the racialised non-desired other).