The working
lives of ministers for Indigenous affairs share much with ministers of other
portfolios. They all work within the same political system, and face many of
the same challenges and constraints.
But the
Indigenous policy domain is in many important respects sui generis and any attempt to describe or comprehend it is
confronted by the reality that it is characterised by a multiplicity of facets.
These facets include the wide span of functional policy areas involved –
health, education, welfare, land, and so forth; the fact that policy
implementation is shared by all three levels of government, plus in many cases
a fourth tier of NGOs, Indigenous organisations, and outsourced providers.
Perhaps most significantly, the indigenous policy domain necessarily involves a
host of inter-cultural issues; must of necessity (and whether recognised by
policymakers of not) deal with the consequences of dispossession; and often
incorporates more opaque symbolic or ideological expectations beyond the more
visible interests in play. These latter characteristics are not part of the
policy environment elsewhere across government.
Consequently,
more than in other areas of government, ministers addressing Indigenous policy
issues are confronted by issues akin to refracted images which change shape
depending on the facet or lens through which they are observed.
Perhaps the
most important point to note is that while the office of Minister is crucially
important, and deserves the utmost respect, the incumbents are invariably
human, and contain and often embrace enthusiastically the entire spectrum of
human characteristics. Accordingly, as individuals, they must earn our respect
and in practice, sometimes don’t deserve to do so.
Like most
politicians, ministers are generally well intentioned and entered politics to
pursue the public interest broadly defined. However, they are by definition
successful politicians which means they have learnt to work with and within the
political system, a system which is deeply flawed in its capacity to meet the
needs of Indigenous citizens. The odds of at least some of these systemic
biases rubbing off on a minister’s approach to his or her portfolio are in my
experience extremely high.
Achieving
ministerial office requires exceptional dedication and hard work, primarily in
what I consider the drudgery of politics. Aspirants for ministerial office must
be prepared to join a party (with all the advantages and disadvantages that
this entails), seek and win preselection, maintain this support over a number
of electoral cycles, win office as either a member of the House of
Representatives or the Senate (the prerequisites for doing so vary for each),
and keep winning over a number of electoral cycles. Ministerial aspirants must
be able to relate successfully to the community at large, the political party
they have joined, the constituencies which the party serves, their electorate,
and the media. They must learn to operate (some might say manipulate) the
internal machinery of their party both inside and outside the parliament as
well as the parliament itself and its committees. Only then will they be
expected to take a deeper interest in policy issues.
This is a
long winded way of pointing out that the skills required to become minister for
Indigenous affairs have virtually no relevance the Indigenous policy domain.
This is arguably as much an advantage as a disadvantage, but it does mean that
a minister’s capacity to understand the portfolio is very much dependant on his
or her capacity to learn on the job, both intellectually and in terms of
personal relationships.
In these
circumstances, there is inevitably a risk that the working habits and traits
which have necessarily become second nature and which are likely to be seen as
the reason for the ministerial aspirant’s success will continue to be applied
whether or not they are consistent with the demands and requirements of what is
an inter-cultural realm. Indeed, there is no guarantee that a minister will
continue to have any enduring interest in the Indigenous affairs policy domain
beyond his or her term of office (though interestingly more than a few previous
ministers have retained a strong ongoing engagement with Indigenous issues
beyond their term of office).
What then is
the lived experience of a minister for Indigenous affairs?
Perhaps the primary
observation should be about power. The perspective of those external to the
minister and his or her advisers is generally that a minister by definition has
power, and has the capacity to use it.
This
assumption is false from a number of perspectives. The capacity of ministers to
accrue and exercise power varies considerably, and for an individual minister
can vary over time. Perhaps more importantly, the complexity of Indigenous
interests, their organisations, the heterogeneous nature of indigenous
leadership, and the propensity of indigenous interests to expect government to
successfully address what are deep seated structural issues means that even the
best ministers appear to make little headway.
Clearly
ministers are powerful in the sense that they have access to cabinet, the
bureaucracy, and the business sector, and thus are potentially influential, but
this ‘power’ is easily overestimated, and often quite limited.
From the
minister’s own perspective, their exercise of power is often perceived as hugely
constrained, with every potential policy change attracting a multitude of
critics, and often few supporters, often requiring the expenditure of political
capital to just get onto the cabinet agenda, let alone be approved, requiring
substantial time and energy just to navigate the maze of central agency rules
and controls (with the concomitant reality that a minister will only have two
or three major policy reform opportunities within his or her tenure and thus
needs to choose carefully which ‘reforms’ to pursue). Moreover, once approved
in principle, the public debate begins and the minister must craft a narrative
which is aligned to the Government’s overarching agenda and endure the pain of
media scrutiny and often attack, and build a voting coalition within the senate
prepared to support any legislation involved.
Governments,
and therefore ministers put themselves forward as offering national solutions
to national problems. We are entitled to take them at face value and hold them
to account. We would be naïve however to accept unquestioningly the claims of
governments and ministers that they possess the wherewithal to provide
solutions. The world is complex, ministers can only address a finite number of
issues within their term, and many issues are not susceptible to direct
intervention or remediation.
Moreover, it
is useful to remember that the decisions taken by ministers and governments two
years ago, or five years ago, or ten years ago, are almost always still largely
in place and being administered and implemented by the bureaucracy. As a rule
of thumb, I would assess that less than ten percent of the institutional
structure (what I term the policy infrastructure) in place at any one time will
be the subject of current political and policy debate and decision making.
Accordingly, ministers are only dealing with less than ten percent of the
public policy infrastructure at any one time.
Those who
blithely criticise ministers for their lack of achievement, or incapacity to
address a particular issue are generally choosing to ignore the constraints
outlined above.
I have
outlined these realities not to absolve ministers nor defend them for lack of
performance, but merely to inject a sense of reality into just how difficult
these jobs are, particularly in areas (such as Indigenous affairs) where there
is not universal and ongoing community and electoral interest. This perhaps too
theoretical analysis provides a precursor to the discussion below on the
strategies available to ministers for indigenous affairs in pursuing their
remit.
Scanning the
history of the past three decades, I see three broad approaches by ministers to
fulfilling their role.
One approach
is to leave policy formulation and implementation to the bureaucracy and use
the office of minister purely as a platform to pursue the minister’s political
agenda howsoever he or she defines it. This is a particularly feasible strategy
because the level of media and community interest in the detail of Indigenous
policy is minimal and quite diffuse. The risk of being called to account for
not doing anything is actually extremely low.
The second
approach is to create a policy façade or fig leaf, generally based on identifying
a set of tractable second or third order policy issues which appear susceptible
to resolution, and use the pursuit of these ‘policy objectives ‘ as a means of creating
the appearance of progress while simultaneously avoiding the intractable hard
long term choices and decisions. Indeed, by focussing on second order issues,
attention is diverted from first order issues. Such an approach requires the
development of a high level narrative which purports to lay out the rationale
for the policy agenda being pursued. The risk here is that arbitrary and
irrational changes in the pursuit of the appearance of policy change create
uncertainty and confusion amongst Indigenous interests and the community
generally. Change is inevitable, but it is not always positive. Again, the lack
of sustained media analysis and the regular appearance of apparently positive
announcements make this an eminently viable strategy for a risk averse
minister, particularly one keen to be promoted to a more senior portfolio.
The third
approach is to forego guaranteed short term wins and focus on longer term
structural and institutional changes which will not only have ongoing impact,
but which change the incentives and signals which operate across different
areas of the indigenous policy domain. Importantly, like the second approach,
driving structural change requires an over-arching narrative or ideology. The
difference is not in the existence of the narrative, but in the substance of
the changes being proposed.
Clearly,
these three approaches are not sharp alternatives in that ministers can adopt
elements of each, particularly at different times during their tenure. However,
it is my assessment and contention that most ministers fall into one or the
other of these three categories. Moreover, it is my experience that no one
political party has a monopoly on any of these approaches, and I can think of
both Labor and Coalition ministers for Indigenous affairs who have adopted or
been prone to adopting each of the approaches.
It is worth
making the point too that while the first and second approaches are in my view
wasted opportunities, the mere fact that a minister pursues the third approach
is no guarantee of success. In particular, the strategic objectives being
pursued must be appropriate in the sense that they will lead to positive and
sustained policy outcomes. And the strategy must be implemented successfully,
which is contingent upon a range of factors, not all within the minister’s
control. Perhaps the two most important of these factors are the effective use
of the intellectual capital which resides within the bureaucracy, and competent
engagement with key Indigenous stakeholders and interests. And even where a
minister is successful, there is no guarantee that a future minister will not
undo his or her structural reforms.
How to
assess the performance of ministers for Indigenous affairs is an inherently
fraught and subjective task. A Prime Minister’s criteria for success will be
different to those of an Indigenous person in Kempsey or Cunnamulla. Prime
Ministers will look to political criteria, such as the perceptions of the wider
community in relation to the portfolio, the way the portfolio’s key
stakeholders have been managed, whether the portfolio is subject to sustained
public criticism, and the minister’s overall contribution to the Government’s
agenda. Indigenous interests will look to impacts on funding, commitment to
longstanding Indigenous policy aspirations and thus will be much more sensitive
to the ideological alignment of the minister to Indigenous concerns.
To my mind,
a conclusive view requires a retrospective perspective of at least ten years,
and even then assessment will be subjective and open to interpretation. My
instinct however in attempting to assess the performance of ministers is to ask
the question, ‘what long term structural reforms of benefit to Indigenous
interests did the minister pursue and put in place’?
On this
basis, and looking back over the past thirty years, the major structural shifts
in Indigenous policy have rarely been driven by ministers, but can be seen to
have been the product of deeper forces, and to have often involved prime
ministers and the development of a degree of (eventual) bipartisanship.
Take the
entry of the Commonwealth Government into the Indigenous funding and policy
arena, initiated after the agreement of the Liberal Government headed by Prime
Minister Harold Holt (pushed internally by backbencher William Wentworth and
after the Arthur Calwell led Labor party had previously adopted it in its
platform) and then proactively advanced by the Whitlam Government.
Or consider land
rights, introduced in the NT at the instigation of Prime Minister Whitlam,
enacted by the Fraser Government with Prime Minister Fraser’s strong personal
support; the failure of Minister Clyde Holding’s National Land Rights proposals,
followed by the judicial recognition of native title, and the Keating
Government’s subsequent Native Title Act driven personally by Prime Minister
Keating.
Or consider
Minister Gerry Hand’s apparently successful attempt to establish a broad based
representative structure in ATSIC with both a regional representative structure
and an executive arm replacing the former Department of Aboriginal Affairs and
thus linked closely to the executive arm of government. This was dismantled by
Prime Minister Howard with the active support of the Labor Opposition Leader
Mark Latham within ten years.
Or consider
Minister Mal Brough’s Northern Territory intervention (in reality initiated by
the Prime Minister Howard in the lead up to the 2007 election at Brough’s
suggestion) involving the use of the ADF, compulsory acquisition of five year
leases over communities, strict alcohol and other controls, and the
introduction of income management, all backed by the potential lifting of the
Racial Discrimination Act. The incoming Labor Minister Jenny Macklin inherited
these revolutionary policy shifts and responded by significantly increasing
investment in housing and infrastructure in remote NT communities, by progressively
discontinuing the more offensive aspects of the policy (the lifting of RDA
protections, the use of the defence forces) while contentiously continuing the welfare
reforms. The initial policy shift was driven by the Prime Minister as much as
Minister Brough, and Labor’s Macklin, constrained by the Senate, was left to attempt
to find the middle ground of bipartisan consensus.
These
arguably random selections suggest to me that ministers for Indigenous affairs,
when assessed against the criterion of the extent to which thy drove major
structural policy reform, are more often than not merely placeholders within
the political system, and are neither as powerful nor as influential as the wider
community, the media, and Indigenous interests often assume.
This is not
to say that individual ministers don’t have the capacity to do great good, particularly
to Indigenous citizens (and ultimately to the nation). But a focus on ministers
alone is an inadequate approach to understanding and assessing the state of
play in Australian Indigenous public policy.
It does
suggest, at least to my mind, that the solutions to the challenges of facing
the nation in Indigenous affairs are to be found amongst a broader set of
interests and policy drivers than the office of minister for indigenous affairs
within the Commonwealth Government.
The makeup
of the Parliament, the state of the economy generally, the bureaucracy, mainstream government
portfolios, state and local governments, and perhaps most importantly, the capacity
and capability of Indigenous interests themselves will be the locus of many of
the opportunities and challenges the nation faces in indigenous affairs over
the coming decades.
Paradoxically,
these are the very areas which are under-analysed and reported by the media and
more serious political analysts in an Indigenous policy context. This gap is
itself a source of potential inefficiency as each of the potential drivers of
policy innovation in Indigenous affairs will perform better if they are subject
to transparent and informed scrutiny.
Finally, a
hypothesis: while I have argued that we tend to over-estimate the influence of
ministers for Indigenous affairs in determining outcomes in Indigenous affairs,
might it not be the case nevertheless that the comparatively weak influence of ministers
for Indigenous affairs on the state of Indigenous policy outcomes as evidenced
in the historical record is the product of poor oversight of the Indigenous
policy domain by civil society generally? Do we as a nation get the ministers
for Indigenous affairs we deserve?
