It won’t be long before we hear politicians arguing about the “Democracy of Nth Korea” the way this term has come to be bandied about. After the referendum and with the LNP declaring Australia a Christian State calling Israel a Democracy seems more a smoke screen to stall us from questioning ours.

Jacinta Price demanded without acknowledging her mother to be funded an extra $ 12 M to set up a “re-education camp” (boarding school) for indigenous kids. It’s so like Abbott’s policy after he deducted $500M from their promised budget. He too cried for the need to re-educate “them” by getting them to school on time. Nothing akin to those Chinese camps the LNP claimed were against “human rights”. Price insists those at risk be defined by the government. The LNP do sound Democratic don’t they? In a very Israeli way.

The logic of a racial contract that overtly and unapologetically relegates colonised Indigenous peoples to “a position defined by violence, exploitation, poverty, and denial of … full humanity” is precisely that which we see being exercised in that act of collective punishment in which Alaa and her children were killed. Thousands more in Gaza, children and adults, have been killed in the last few weeks, even as the West ritually reiterates its support for the democratic state of Israel. But what price democracy in a state premised on the unequal humanity of Indigene and settler?

Source: The racial contract of settler colonialism  – Pearls and Irritations