Philippe Foubert Research & Writing
AUSTRALIAN WRITINGS

Racism as Australian Inheritance

By Philippe Foubert, PhD

No single cause sustains Australia’s racial inheritance, nor can any single lesson cure it. But an informed public—able to encounter evidence, evaluate claims and hear First Nations testimony on its own terms—is a necessary condition for democratic repair.

People often discuss Australia’s racism as though it were a private moral failure: a matter of individual prejudice, regrettable language or bad behaviour. That account is too small. Racism also has an institutional history. It was written into laws, immigration rules, protection regimes and educational practices; it shaped whose histories counted as national history and whose knowledge could be treated as peripheral.

That history does not mechanically determine what any Australian believes today. Nor should discussion of it turn people with limited formal education into a convenient target. Racism is not a synonym for ignorance, and a test score is not a measure of character. The more useful question is civic rather than accusatory: what allows inherited stories to survive when the documentary record is available but unevenly encountered, poorly taught or actively denied?

The answer begins with historical literacy—not simply the ability to decode text, but the capacity and opportunity to weigh sources, recognise omissions and revise one’s view. It also begins with intellectual humility: the willingness to accept that a familiar national story may be partial.

A nation’s stories are part of its political infrastructure

The White Australia policy is a reminder that racism in Australia has not been merely informal. One of the new Commonwealth Parliament’s first statutes, the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, helped establish a policy designed to restrict non-white migration; an official could administer its dictation test in a European language of the official’s choosing. The National Museum of Australia describes the policy as openly racist and directed towards the ideal of a “purely” white nation. Legislation abolished the dictation test in 1958, and the Holt government’s major reforms in 1966 moved migration policy away from race-based selection. National Museum of Australia’s history of the policy

These facts matter because they locate racial hierarchy in public policy rather than in a few regrettable attitudes. Yet precision matters here too. “White Australia” was not a single, self-contained law, nor did its end erase racism or settle every question of belonging. It was a connected body of policies and assumptions whose consequences continued through institutions and family narratives.

The same care is needed when describing the 1967 referendum. The referendum did not grant Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples the right to vote: the Commonwealth Parliament had legislated Commonwealth voting rights in 1962, and Queensland was the last state to provide Indigenous enfranchisement in 1965. The 1967 vote removed discriminatory provisions from the Constitution, including section 127, so First Nations people could be counted in population reckoning and the Commonwealth could make laws with respect to Aboriginal people. National Archives of Australia’s referendum guide

This is not pedantry. It demonstrates why historical knowledge must be more than a list of uplifting national milestones. A democracy that treats 1967 as the moment First Nations people “became citizens” repeats a comforting myth rather than learning what the referendum actually changed—and what it did not.

The Stolen Generations require exact language

Between 1910 and 1970, the Bringing Them Home inquiry estimated that between one in ten and one in three Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities. The inquiry documented profound, intergenerational harms, including separation from family, culture and language. Australian Human Rights Commission summary of the inquiry

The word genocide requires particular discipline. Under Article II of the Genocide Convention, genocide involves one of five specified acts—including forcibly transferring children from one protected group to another—committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, that group as such. The act alone is not the whole legal test; the required specific intent is central. United Nations explanation of the Convention’s definition

The 1997 Bringing Them Home report applied that framework and concluded that the purpose of removing Indigenous children from their people and culture could properly be described as genocidal; the report’s analysis identified the destruction of Indigenous group identity as a primary objective of forcible removals. Bringing Them Home, Chapter 13

That is a serious conclusion from a national human-rights inquiry, and readers should neither minimise nor casually inflate it. The inquiry did not constitute a criminal court delivering a final judgment of individual liability. For a public essay, the defensible formulation is therefore: the inquiry found that the removal policies could be characterised as genocidal under international law, on the basis of its analysis of purpose and intent. That wording gives the report its full moral and historical weight while respecting the difference between an inquiry’s finding and a judicial determination.

This distinction is not an escape hatch for denial. It is the opposite: it asks readers to meet the evidence at its strongest, most precise point. Reckoning becomes more durable when it is not built on a phrase that can be easily dismissed as careless.

Literacy matters—but it is not destiny

The previous debate around this subject has too often used “functional illiteracy” as a blunt explanation for racism. That is neither fair nor supported by the available evidence. Australia’s last ABS release of the OECD adult-skills assessment, based on 2011–12 data, found that the assessment placed 44% of Australians aged 15–74 at literacy Level 2 or below. The ABS does not label that group “functionally illiterate”, and the figure cannot tell us that those people cannot read historical sources, lack political agency or hold racist views. ABS: Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, 2011–12

The data are also old. The ABS says that release is its last PIAAC release and points to a future Foundation Skills Study; writers should not present it as a current measurement of Australia’s civic capacity. ABS release notes

What we can responsibly say is narrower and still important. A review of 32 Australian survey-based studies of racism found associations between lower educational attainment and support for discriminatory migration policy or Islamophobia, while also identifying significant gaps in national racism data. Association is not causation; income, age, geography, media environments, social networks and many other forces also interact with education. But education that develops critical inquiry, source evaluation and historical understanding is plainly relevant to a society’s resistance to misinformation. Racism Data in Australia: A Review of Quantitative Studies and Directions for Future Research

The crucial shift is from blame to capability. Adult literacy programs, accessible public history, libraries, local archives, community-controlled education and high-quality journalism are not supplements to anti-racism; they are ways to widen the public’s capacity to participate in it. They make it harder for a slogan, a selective anecdote or a fabricated “fact” to stand in for a history.

Contemporary evidence makes the issue urgent

Historical racism is not important only because it is past. Reconciliation Australia’s 2024 Australian Reconciliation Barometer reported that 54% of First Nations respondents had experienced racism, compared with 39% in 2014. It also reported that 56% of First Nations respondents, compared with 41% of the general community, believed Australia is a racist country. Reconciliation Australia’s 2024 racism snapshot

Readers should read those figures carefully. They describe survey respondents’ reported experiences and perceptions; they are powerful evidence of a serious problem, but not a single all-purpose index of every form of racism in Australia. The 2024 survey was conducted between 18 July and 7 August, included 2,559 respondents—547 of them First Nations people—and weighted its samples against ABS Census data; the First Nations subsample has a stated margin of error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage points. ARB methodology statement

Precision does not make the results less confronting. It makes them harder to evade. A public culture that can recognise racism only when it is spectacular will overlook the ordinary exclusions, insults and institutional effects that First Nations people describe.

Truth-telling must become a public practice

Australia’s national curriculum can help, but it cannot do the whole job. Education ministers endorsed Version 9.0 of the Australian Curriculum in 2022, not 2024, and its history materials strengthen attention to “truth-telling”. States and territories, however, decide when to implement it on their own timelines. Australian Curriculum version history ACARA’s description of changes to Version 9.0

Schools matter enormously, but adults do not return to school as a single cohort. Nor is a curriculum document the same thing as sustained, skilful teaching. The wider work must be intergenerational: support teachers; fund First Nations-led historical and cultural institutions; help the public find and understand reliable material; and create civic forums where people can examine uncomfortable evidence without reducing people to caricatures.

The objective is not to impose a script on Australians. It is to replace inherited certainty with informed responsibility. We should be able to say, simultaneously, that Australia’s past includes democratic achievement and that its institutions dispossessed, excluded and harmed First Nations peoples. We should be able to distinguish legal findings from political rhetoric without using technicality as a refuge from moral accountability.

Racism persists through power, policy, habit and silence. Public discussion reinforces it when it lacks the skills—and the will—to test inherited narratives against evidence. The remedy is therefore larger than literacy, but literacy in its fullest civic sense is part of it: the ability to read closely, listen seriously, verify claims and change one’s mind.

That is not a cure delivered by a document. It is a democratic practice, to be renewed.

Sources

This essay was researched and fact-checked against primary and authoritative sources, listed above. If you notice an error or have a correction, please get in touch.

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