In a paper prepared for the Democratic Audit of Australia Will Sanders concludes that, on grounds of electoral administration, participation and representation, ATSIC does deserves some support, as a reasonably democratic attempt to develop an elected national Indigenous representative structure. ATSIC elections do seem to be fairly 'full, free and fair'.

This paper examines the history of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR) in Australia from 1991 to 2001 and argues that reconciliation between Australia's Indigenous and settler peoples was never likely to be achieved in that time frame. Reconciliation, it argues, will be a matter of many decades or even hundreds of years, rather than...

The ultimate strength of Indigenous peoples' political claims lies in their being seen as quite different from those other interest groups. Following the example of Canada, Will Sanders looks at the idea of Indigenous peoples' organisations and their processes of representation as constituting an Indigenous order of Australian government. It is argued that this is...

It observes that progress towards greater autonomy has been slow and difficult and relates this to unresolved issues pertaining to three underlying analytic questions: from whom, for whom and for or over what is autonomy being sought? This paper by W.G. Sanders and W.S. Arthur argues that there have been, and still are, difficult unresolved...

This report examines the participation and representation in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) elections over the ten-year period since its inception in 1990. The authors attempt to identify patterns of participation that seem to be emerging and what these might suggest about ATSIC's operation. By examining numbers of nominees compared to positions available...