Much of the book provides a generally excellent overview of the public debates that have emerged since 2000. It presents an engaging narrative of the end of the self-determination era and the inauguration of a new, as yet unnamed, era in Indigenous affairs.

On the side of the debate she dubs the ‘anti-separatists’ are Peter Sutton, Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton, and Helen Hughes. They broadly argue that a narrow concern with preserving Indigenous cultural difference has masked worsening social conditions in remote communities; that marginalisation has been entrenched by welfare, which provides ‘modest but sufficient means to disengage from market society’; and that land rights filled a gap left by the end of Aboriginal employment in the pastoral industry and on missions, and encouraged traditional ties to land at the expense of gainful employment. On the other side of the debate are those who defend Indigenous cultural difference – in particular, the right to live in remote communities, including small groups on outstations – and question whether ‘closing the gap’ is possible or desirable for those who live remotely from cities and towns. She attributes this claim to the Australian National University’s Centre for Aboriginal Economic and Policy Research (CAEPR) in general, although the charge would more accurately be ascribed to CAEPR’s founding director, Jon Altman, whom she extensively cites (including misquotations, as Altman’s review of her book on the New Matilda website outlines).

Austin-Broos has strong objections to both sides of the debate. The anti-separatists ‘pathologise’ Aboriginal difference, whether this difference is judged to be a degenerate Aboriginal culture or the result of the corruption of classical cultural values by marginalisation and substance abuse. On the other hand, the pro-homelands camp ignores social suffering and misreads disadvantage as reified cultural difference. That the arguments of each camp are somewhat simplified is understandable, given Austin-Broos’s task of highlighting contrasting positions. But the depiction of CAEPR as focused solely on saving the homelands and eschewing issues such as labour market policy and mainstream education (because they consider them ‘assimilationist’) is belied by the literally hundreds of CAEPR publications on these topics. Given that a key aspect of Austin-Broos’s complaint about anthropology is that it has neglected the economy, this portrayal of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic and Policy Research is puzzling.

At the heart of these debates is the tension between equality and difference: between the quest for statistical equivalence, and the recognition and encouragement of distinctly Aboriginal forms of knowledge and social behaviour. For many Indigenous Australians, their cultural difference is not in conflict with their ability to obtain education and employment. For others, including the highly visible minority who live in remote areas, the potential friction between cultural difference and statistical equality is more prominent.

As well as providing a useful outline of these debates, A Different Inequality attempts to fill the purported anthropological silence with Austin-Broos’s own diagnosis of Indigenous disadvantage. She argues that cultural difference and inequality are enmeshed, and that we need to take account of both simultaneously. It is here that the book becomes problematic. First of all, what Austin-Broos proposes is nothing new. The solutions she prescribes follow on from her ‘both not one’ solution to difference and equality: support Community Development Employment Projects as a stepping stone to jobs in the real economy; and improve mainstream education. Many would argue these goals have been the target of decades of policy effort (while acknowledging that programs have not been sufficiently effective or extensive). Many hundreds of millions of dollars have been devoted to just the things Austin-Broos recommends – education and employment in remote communities – with disappointing outcomes. Simply stating that those things are the answer offers nothing new.

In fact, the prescription for education and employment is identical to that of the ‘anti-separatist’ camp that she criticises for ‘pathologising’ Indigenous people. This leads to the second problem with her argument, which can be explained by yet another debate lurking behind the text, this one internal to anthropology.

As Austin-Broos notes, the silence of anthropologists on Indigenous policy was well and truly broken with Peter Sutton’s book The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australians and the End of the Liberal Consensus (2009), perhaps the most significant public contribution by an anthropologist to the Indigenous affairs debate since Stanner’s 1968 classic After the Dreaming, based on his Boyer lectures. Sutton’s book crystallised a growing critique of self-determination policies – what he terms the ‘liberal consensus’ – and argued that current Indigenous social problems, and violence in particular, may be related to pre-colonial cultural forms as well as to colonisation and oppression, compounded by welfare dependency and the collapse of mission education and pastoral employment. As a consequence, what is needed to improve Aboriginal disadvantage is nothing less than (in Austin-Broos’s words) a ‘restructuring of personal psychologies in the early years of life’.

Austin-Broos is critical of Sutton, and curiously never concedes that he is an anthropologist, instead calling him a ‘linguist and land rights consultant’. She disapproves of his ‘psychologising’, arguing instead that Aboriginal children need to obtain ‘literate education’ through ‘widespread, forceful and persistent support for mainstream primary education in remote communities’ supported by ‘robust public opinion and confident local leaders’. The outcome of what she and Sutton advocate is identical: literate and numerate children who are able confidently to move between Western and Indigenous worlds. While she opposes Sutton’s sense of how this shift can be achieved, her alternative mechanism of change is unclear. She is silent, for instance, on exactly how this robust public opinion that demands quality Western education is going to develop in remote communities.

Austin-Broos’s ideas are nearly indistinguishable from those of the ‘anti-separatist’ camp that she critiques, except that they are expressed in a different way so as to avoid the label of ‘pathologising’ for which she takes the anti-separatists to task. Rather than the term ‘welfare dependency’, for example, she prefers ‘the adverse effects of long-term underemployment’. This is a language game that has more to do with preserving the moral integrity of the speaker than with outlining a genuinely different policy outlook.

While Austin-Broos’s attempt to distinguish herself from the anti-separatists and resolve the equality-difference debate is unconvincing, her description of recent debates is (with the exception of her account of CAEPR) accurate, lively, and informative, and offers much to the general reader grappling with the complexity of Indigenous affairs. Overall, the book underlines the enduring tensions between equality and difference that animate every policy era in Indigenous affairs. If the reader is looking for a resolution, she will be disappointed.