Exclusion within, exclusion without: race and neoliberalism in an unequal Australia

Race, as some would have it, is a term that has been emaciated of any analytical utility or real-world significance in contemporary Western society. Relegated to the realm of individual pathology and sociopolitical antiquation, race has largely been marginalised and invisibilised in discussions of inequality and deprivation - a phenomenon referred to by David Theo Goldberg as ‘antiracialism’. Against this phenomenon, I aim to shed light on the structural and discursive transformations occasioned in the implementation of neoliberalism in Australia, with particular reference to how constructs of racial identity are mobilised in producing and legitimising racial inequality within these transformations. In doing so, the first chapter affixes a provisional conceptual identity onto neoliberalism that describes neoliberal power as both hegemonic and discursive, and as being constantly exerted by the transnational capitalist class in furthering the agenda of capital accumulation. The second and third chapters proceed to unravel how welfare and immigration policy (respectively) in Australia have both been transformed according to the neoliberal agenda. After charting these transformations, I problematise each in terms of how constructs of racial identity are mobilised within these transformations in order to marginalise and exclude certain people groups.