Push for recognition a threat to national unity: Windschuttle

Constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians could lead to national break-up, ­says Keith Windschuttle.

Historian Keith Windschuttle, left, with Ross Fitzgerald

Constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians could lead to the break-up of the nation, ­historian Keith Windschuttle has warned, unless voters are clear that notions of sovereignty ­accompanying it pose a clear ­danger to political unity.

In a new book, one of the architects of the “history wars” which dominated public discourse from the 2000s argues that political leaders and public intellectuals, both indigenous and non-indigenous, have failed to acknowledge the implications of proposed constitutional change.

Windschuttle accuses “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples themselves, especially those active in politics, law, education, media and the arts, who now firmly control the agendas for debate and policy on indigenous matters”, of using the success of native title claims over the past two decades to plot a campaign for full sovereignty.

“To these activists, the recognition of Aborigines in the Constitution would simply be one more step towards their real objectives: political autonomy, traditional law and values, and sovereignty over their own state or nation,” he writes in The Break-up of Australia: The Real Agenda behind Aboriginal Recognition.

Windschuttle’s 2002 thesis The Fabrication of Aboriginal History attracted the ire of progressive historians for disputing claims that European colonisation had been particularly brutal and in many cases took the form of war.

He now argues that the broadly held view of constitutional recognition — that it would be “a courteous symbolic gesture with no real consequence” — ignores the potential for it to become “a bargaining position for a local black state to exert far more influence”.