Indigenous Health and Human Rights

'Closing the Gap in Indigenous Disadvantage' and the Northern Territory Emergency Response or 'Intervention' are policies that highlight the significant intellectual distance between Australia's rhetorical public support for human rights and its routine willingness to set these aside in relation to Indigenous health. Yet, there does remain political possibility and space for the incorporation of human rights precepts into domestic policy arrangements. This article sets these out, uses them to evaluate contemporary policies, and to propose alternative philosophical premises to support the development of a more substantive human rights framework for the conduct of Indigenous health policy. It does these things by juxtaposing human rights with the politics of indigeneity to contextualise Indigenous claims in liberal democratic thought, and to bring conceptual clarity to an intellectually inconsistent policy environment.