Why Australia’s National Anti-Racism Framework Isn’t Fit for Purpose

This article was originally published in The Mandarin on 17 March 2026.

Australia’s National Anti-Racism Framework was initiated in October 2022 by the Australian government with a $7.5 million commitment. The funding supports four years of work by the Australian Human Rights Commission to develop the country’s first national framework, along with related projects aimed at eliminating racism.

Released in November 2024, the framework proposes 63 recommendations and has received broad support from civil society organisations. Senator Lidia Thorpe has described it as a ‘clear, evidence-based roadmap to tackle racism and white supremacist extremism.’ But is the framework fit for purpose?

Considered as a whole, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people remain the most marginalised group in Australia. Larissa Behrendt wrote in 2001 that their treatment makes them not a ‘special category’ but a test of Australian democracy. One stark indicator is incarceration. Indigenous people accounted for 14.4% of all people in custody in 1991. By 2025, that figure had risen to 37%, even though First Nations people represent only 3.8% of the population.

It is also widely acknowledged that ‘one size fits all’ approaches are inappropriate in Indigenous affairs. As Marcia Langton has emphasised, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are peoples, not a race. At the same time, some indicators show progress. Median household income for First Nations households grew by a real 18% between 2016 and 2021. When the 48th federal parliament opened in 2025, Indigenous representation reached a record 17 members, around 4% of parliamentarians. Indigenous voices have also become more visible in mainstream media and public life over the past decade.

The AHRC conducted extensive consultations with First Nations communities, culminating in the report An Anti-Racism Framework: Voices of First Nations Peoples. Its first recommendation calls for legislative reform, including the removal of racial powers from Section 51 of the Commonwealth Constitution, which explicitly racialises Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Eddie Cubillo writes in his 2026 book Defending the Defenceless that this provision is ‘an affront to the rule of law and right of all to be treated equally under the law.’

Yet the recommendation to remove racial powers from the Constitution was omitted from the framework’s final list of 63 recommendations. Instead, the report states without further explanation:

This [removal of racial powers from the Constitution] should be done as part of broader efforts to decolonise the legal system and its colonial foundations, embed First Nations peoples’ right to self-determination, and remove barriers to fair and equitable outcomes for First Nations people.

After passing over what may be the deepest root of systemic racism in Australia, the report states:

Our systems are built to maintain white privilege. Those who are white can successfully navigate, access, and lead systems and institutions without having to shed their language, culture, religion, and other parts of themselves.

This claim is presented without a clear explanation of how Australian institutions maintain white privilege or what policy levers might address it. Key terms are also left undefined. Who exactly are ‘those who are white’? And who in Australia has remained culturally intact?

It is unclear whether the report uses ‘white’ as a racial category or as shorthand for cultural dominance. The distinction matters. The popularity of Pauline Hanson and One Nation reflects a widely expressed sense of cultural loss among some Australians. While Anglo-Australians may be closest to Australia’s historical cultural dominance, the category itself is far from uniform. There are six Anglo-Celtic languages, nearly 40 dialects in the UK, numerous distinct accents, and more than 250 indigenous languages in Europe.

Instead of dismantling racial categories, the AHRC framework repeatedly reinforces the conceptually unstable category of ‘white’. For example, the report states that racism operates ‘to maintain the dominance of groups racialised as white’, again without defining who these groups are beyond their opposition to those described as ‘negatively racialised’.

This language is vague and potentially misleading. It assumes that people classified as white are not subject to assimilation, oppression, or negative racialisation. It also frames those described as ‘negatively racialised’ in deficit terms. Portraying ‘white people’ as immune to these experiences risks feeding grievance politics and reinforcing the narratives used by white supremacists.

Clear definitions are especially important because the term ‘white’ is often used not as a literal description of skin colour or ancestry but as a label for an ideology. Hamid Dabashi writes that ‘it is only white supremacists who benefit from the confusion of the term “white” as a colour of skin designation with “white” as an ideology of racial supremacy.’ The AHRC report does little to resolve this ambiguity.

Ghassan Hage’s 1998 book White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society argues that minority communities in Australia are not powerless. Hage calls for ‘rethinking a new cultural politics capable of addressing the sense of cultural loss feeding neo-fascism’, arguing that dominant white culture cannot do this because it exists in a ‘fantasy that it is in control’.

Hage also leaves the ‘white’ category loosely defined, but his broader point is persuasive. Cultural dominance shifts over time. Contemporary Australia bears little resemblance to the ‘white man’s land’ imagined in earlier eras. Yet rather than challenging the lingering fantasy of white control, the AHRC framework risks reinforcing it.

Racial categories themselves are unstable and historically contingent. They do not map neatly onto biology, culture, identity, or social advantage. In the United States census, South Asians were classified as ‘white’ between 1970 and 1980. A 1978 federal guideline defined ‘white’ as anyone ‘having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East.’ A 2022-2023 New York Times survey found that a large majority of respondents felt existing racial categories did not reflect how they identify.

By continuing to rely on such categories, the AHRC framework moves in the wrong direction. Anti-racism strategies built around race can produce a more racially diverse elite without addressing structural disadvantage.

The framework notes that the concept of race emerged in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. In reality, race only began to develop as a supposedly scientific classification in the 17th century, when invented hierarchies of human difference were used to justify slavery and colonisation. Within these hierarchies, the category of the ‘black race’ was consistently placed at the bottom.

Since the 1970s, Australian governments have gradually moved away from racial classification in policy language. Instead of recognising this shift, the AHRC framework questions what it calls ‘racial literacy in government’. The report argues:

A limited understanding of the operation of race and racism in Australia means systemic and structural racism continues to go unaddressed in most government-led anti-racism action. Recent research published by the Commission on existing government anti-racism programs and policies found that there was an overall reluctance from governments to name racism or use the term.

This criticism overlooks the historical reason racial categories were removed from the national census in 1981. They were replaced with classifications based on countries and cultural groups. Since then, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has continued refining data collection in response to expert advice calling for more nuanced demographic information. First Nations health expert Jill Gallagher has argued that failing to collect such detailed data is ‘racist’.

Nuanced data allows policymakers to move beyond broad racial labels. It makes it possible to identify the specific forms of disadvantage that affect different communities.

In February 2026, the AHRC released a report on racism at universities. It repeats many of the same problems found in the framework. The report refers to ‘systemic’ and ‘structural’ discrimination without identifying specific mechanisms or policy responses. It also relies on the poorly defined category of ‘negatively racialised’.

While the universities’ report is correct that racialisation can produce power differences between groups, those differences rarely align neatly with racial labels. Race is not a stable category. All racialisation is harmful because it encourages stereotyping, dehumanisation, division, and conflict.

Racism persists even though the scientific basis for racial categories has long been discredited. Removing the umbrella label of race allows discrimination to be identified more precisely. Bias may be based on class, caste, religion, ethnicity, language, skin shade, indigeneity, or other factors. Recognising these distinctions allows targeted responses.

Abandoning racial categories would improve our understanding of identity and inequality in Australia. As Larissa Behrendt argued in 2001, a rights-based anti-discrimination framework for all Australians offers a more durable path forward.

Adopting the AHRC’s National Anti-Racism Framework, with its simplified analysis of race and deficit framing, risks doing real harm.

Fortunately, the government has not yet taken that step. On March 4, it opened an inquiry into discrimination against First Nations people, who, as Behrendt wrote, remain the ‘litmus test’ for the whole community.