The New Deal for Aborigines was formally announced by the Australian government, providing for full civil rights for Indigenous Australians in exchange for cultural assimilation.

The New Deal for Aborigines was a landmark Australian federal government policy statement on Indigenous Australians. The policy was announced in December 1938 by interior minister John McEwen and detailed in a white paper released in February 1939. It provided for Indigenous people to be granted full civil rights in conjunction with a process of cultural assimilation.

Indigenous Australians are people with familial heritage from, or recognised membership of, the various ethnic groups living within the territory of contemporary Australia prior to British colonisation. They consist of two distinct groups, which include many ethnic groups: the Aboriginal Australians of the mainland and many islands, including Tasmania, and the Torres Strait Islanders of the seas between Queensland and Papua New Guinea, located in Melanesia. 812,728 people self-identified as being of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander origin in the 2021 Australian Census, representing 3.2% of the total population of Australia. Of these Indigenous Australians, 91.4% identified as Aboriginal, 4.2% identified as Torres Strait Islander, and 4.4% identified with both groups.

Cultural assimilation is the process in which a minority group or culture comes to resemble a society's majority group or fully adopts the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group. The melting pot model is based on this concept. A related term is cultural integration, which describes the process of becoming economically and socially integrated into another society while retaining elements of one's original culture. This approach is also known as cultural pluralism, and it forms the basis of a cultural mosaic model that upholds the preservation of cultural rights. Another closely related concept is acculturation, which occurs through cultural diffusion and involves changes in the cultural patterns of one or both groups, while still maintaining distinct characteristics.