Australian nationalism's conservative form has been called a paranoid nationalism. It's conception of national sovereignty is premised on the populism of the white Anglo-Celtic Aussie battler that refuses to acknowledge and confront the violence of the colonial past and its hatred of the Other. The politics of sovereignty is articulated through a white Australian nationalism.

White Australia is currently experiencing an acute obsession with border control and with paranoid fantasies about the ability of internal and external 'Others' to seize control of the country; an obsession immersed in fear that resurfaced in the wake of multiculturalism, reconciliation, republican debates and the rise of Asian immigration in the 1980s and 1990s.

Increasing fear of an outside world meant that the welcome mat was pulled up and the doors firmly closed. The asylum seekers would never knock on the door of the newly renovated national home as they wouldn’t even make it through the front gate.

The other aspect to the populist hostility to the non-white other is the ongoing internal project of enacting or reasserting colonial sovereignty over Indigenous bodies and lands. The various protectionist discourses effectively meant entrapment for Indigenous communities in a form of apartheid that is experienced as a feeling ‘of being hunted in a confined space’ and a ‘loss of voice’.

As Irene Watson says in her Aboriginality and the Violence of Colonialism in a recent issue of Borderlands:

the demonization of Aboriginal culture allows an opening for the state to appear as a crusader and rescuer of Aboriginal women and children ..... The state becomes the knower of what is Aboriginal culture while Aboriginal peoples and communities are positioned as mere actors, acting out a deemed and ‘known’ cultural practice. The state as knower of ‘objectionable practices’ has power to construct what Aboriginal culture is and to analyse, vilify, and ultimately undermine the right of peoples to self-determination.