Theseus on the power of imagination:

The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act Five, Scene One.

Imagining a Better Welfare System: Next Steps for Income Management

On 20 January, the Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister, Alan Tudge, published an op ed in the Australian (‘Communal Despair Begins with Grog Abuse’) outlining the current state of play on the proposed new Welfare Debit Card, the latest version of income management for a small cohort of the most disadvantaged welfare recipients across the nation.

The welfare debit card, named ‘the Healthy Welfare Card’, was proposed by Andrew Forrest in his review of Indigenous training and employment, Creating Parity, in 2014, and involves 80 percent of a welfare recipient’s income being loaded onto a debit card  which cannot be used to purchase alcohol, gambling or to access cash.

The Government’s proposed welfare debit card is not Indigenous specific and will apply to all welfare recipients within the trial site locations. Nevertheless, the two locations chosen to date (Kununurra and Ceduna) both involve a majority of Indigenous welfare recipients. The reality is that income management of welfare payments emerged from and retains strong roots within the Indigenous policy domain based in large part on the inability of governments over the past decade to make inroads on reducing the high levels of personal and community disadvantage amongst Indigenous citizens in some locations.

Tudge appears to be pursuing two political objectives. First, to maintain the momentum in implementing the new income management scheme following the passage of legislation late last year with Labor Party support authorising three trials of the welfare debit card for up to ten thousand recipients; and second, to lay the foundations for broader (perhaps universal) implementation of the debit card in the Government’s next term.

In this latter context, the Australian’s Sarah Martin, writing the same day as Tudge’s op ed appeared (‘National cashless welfare card plan’), and presumably based on briefing from the Assistant Minister, began her column as follows: “A cashless welfare card aimed at stemming alcohol abuse would be rolled out across the country under a welfare reform the Turnbull Government is considering taking to the election”

Tudge’s comments elicited an article in The Australian on 25 January in response by the Social Justice Commissioner, Mick Gooda, critical of income management generally, and the new iteration of income management being advanced by the Government (‘The welfare card is not the solution to alcohol abuse’). In particular, Gooda asserts that the welfare card ‘will disproportionately affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and claw back our hard-won rights and freedoms’. He also questions the card’s efficacy in reducing alcohol harm, citing a lack of evidence for such claims. And Gooda begins his op ed by noting that ‘old wounds are being re-opened. Many of our people are being forced to revisit the past trauma of income management and stolen wages’.

This latter point is particularly salient in terms of considering how to proceed with the new iteration of income management. The implementation of a policy which engenders strong opposition at a deep emotional level amongst its recipients will always be highly problematic. Assistant Minister Tudge appears to be cognisant of these challenges as he has stated he is keen to find a third trial site in a major regional centre, where around 70 percent of welfare recipients are non-Indigenous.

How then should we assess the merits of the policy of income management, and in particular the Government’s particular approach to taking it forward? Not only is it complex policy in its own terms, but it has taken on highly symbolic ideological status, for and against, in both the right and left of the political spectrum. This accentuates its polarising impact within the ongoing policy debate on welfare policy, particularly in relation to Indigenous welfare issues. So for example, those on the left emphasise the alleged infringements of rights embedded within the policy, whereas conservatives emphasise the importance of mutual obligation and linking taxpayers contributions to welfare to societally sanctioned outcomes.

It is worth contextualising income management policy so as to outline the sequential development of variant models over the past decade, and to place it in the longer arc of the history of public policy development.

As mentioned above, the roots of income management are to be found in the indigenous policy domain. The current proposals are the fourth iteration of income management to be rolled out over the past decade, and importantly all three predecessor versions continue to operate. I note in passing that there are a number of sub-categories to each of the three income management schemes discussed below.

In Cape York, the welfare reform agenda funded over the last decade involved a system where a Family Responsibilities Commission composed largely of community members has the power to take decisions to effectively income manage welfare recipients who fail to ensure their children attend school, breach the law, or fail to meet their tenancy obligations and thus are contributing to social dysfunction. This system was established at the request of the local communities and the Cape York Institute, and is virtually entirely Indigenous in its coverage.

The second scheme is the so called New Income Management program utilising the NT Basics Card put in place in 2010 in a revision of the original income management program introduced as part of the NT intervention in 2007, which quarantines 50 percent of a welfare recipient’s income. This scheme applies to all welfare recipients across the NT (but not aged or disability pensions), but is almost wholly Indigenous in its coverage. The original program was protected from legal challenge by a statutory exclusion of the Racial Discrimination Act, however the New Income management program has been designed as an explicitly non-discriminatory scheme.  

The third scheme is Place Based income management which was rolled out by Labor in a number of locations across Australia, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous.

The three existing schemes have a limited geographical focus (although the NT scheme applies across the NT), and are either explicitly or implicitly conceptualised as trials within the bureaucracy and government.

Turning to the longer arc of history, income management can be seen to be the product of previous modes of ‘administering’ Indigenous people’s lives. As is comprehensively documented in Tim Rowse’s insight-laden history of the origins of Indigenous citizenship in Central Australia (‘White Flour, White Power’), the entire colonial project in remote Australia was largely based on the provision of rations to Aboriginal people both through state sponsored ration depots/settlements and state subsidised pastoral enterprises.

Rowse explores the administrative rules which linked the provision of in-kind rations to Aboriginal people’s readiness and capability to work, the pressures to move from in-kind rations to more fungible cash payments, and the differing perceptions of both Aboriginal and settlers regarding the basis for the respective roles of the parties to the transactions involved.

At a more abstract level, Rowse argues that rationing policies were embedded in the policy of assimilation, and that the development of internal contradictions in the administration of rationing were based in large part on the reluctance of Aboriginal groups to leave their country to seek employment. Rowse sets out in detail how these internal contradictions in the administration of rationing ultimately led to and facilitated the eventual acceptance of remote Aboriginal community members as citizens, and contributed to the development of the Whitlam Government’s policy narrative of self-determination as a successor to paternalism and assimilation.

One of Rowse’s themes is to recognise the continuities inherent in policy shift from assimilation to self-determination. For present purposes, it is enough to note that these continuities continue into the present day and that access to welfare and the subsequent adoption of income management (albeit in a somewhat stop/start fashion) is a direct policy descendant of the ration depots of the nineteenth century. In particular, the internal contradictions remain, as does the likelihood that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples will engage with and interpret the policy on their own terms and in their own ways.

I focus on the long road to our present policy position to make the point that policy development is iterative and the options available are constrained not only by political imagination and political determination, but also by the largely invisible yet powerful projection of incremental inertia, which exercises an extraordinary influence on the imagined parameters of bureaucratic and political feasibility. In other words, where we are heading is often largely determined by where we are coming from.

There have been a number of policy evaluations of income management over the past five years. While I don’t have the capacity to closely review them here, it is fair to say that while the conclusions of the more recent evaluations are positive, the conclusions are far from unequivocal. Moreover, the most comprehensive and significant review was the evaluation of New Income Management in the NT finalised in 2014 by a team of researchers from the Social Policy Research Centre at UNSW, the Institute of Family Studies and the ANU. This comprehensive and independent evaluation found that the current New Income Management program in the NT has not met its objectives. Interestingly, the DSS website (see hyperlink above) referencing the various evaluations omits to summarise the results of the NT evaluation.

What does emerge from a cursory scan of the various evaluations undertaken to date is that they are highly sensitive to the design parameters and the formal objectives for each scheme, and that as one might expect, each scheme has its strengths and weaknesses, and amongst those being income managed, there is a diversity of views about the utility of the schemes. This suggests that there is a need for high levels of clarity regarding the policy objectives of income management schemes if we are to be able to use evaluations as determinative guides to policy development. Unfortunately, the complexity of the schemes in place, and the innate amorphousness of the policy and political drivers for the schemes make this a virtually unattainable aspiration.

My own assessment of the current policy settings for income management is an amalgam of the concerns and aspirations of both the left and the right. In an ideal world, I would support the provision of maximum autonomy for welfare recipients in the use of their funds. Such a view has the attraction of being philosophically straightforward, and like the free market theorists who advocate pure consumer sovereignty, it asserts that no one is better able to assess an individual’s interests than the individual herself. I also believe that we have to give serious weight to the multiple considerations canvassed in the evaluation of the NT scheme. In short, we cannot merely assert or assume that income management is or will be an unqualified success, and to the extent that it is pursued as an element of our welfare policy settings, we need to be prepared to reassess and redesign to ensure that it delivers net benefits.

It is clear however that income management has established a foothold in our current welfare policy framework which is based on something more than a broadly accepted evidence base and a series of technically narrow policy evaluations. This is reinforced when one notes the comment in the NT evaluation that the Department of Social Security requested that the evaluation not assess the cost effectiveness of the program, ostensibly because the requisite data was not available (page 3, summary report). One of the most salient factors in assessing Government programs is cost effectiveness; so clearly other forces are at work here.

Apart from the fact that the evaluations of income management as implemented so far in Australia are equivocal at best, and that the program exists for better or for worse, I consider that there exists a moral imperative for flexible policy responses in relation to the activities of governments in their engagement with Indigenous communities, and to a lesser extent, in their engagement with disadvantaged citizens generally.

In particular, if Governments are funnelling substantial resources into remote communities comprised of citizens with poor education, limited financial literacy, poor health, limited civic governance skills, and with strong culturally-based social capital, but weak social capital in areas involved in engagement with the broader society, then in my view government has a responsibility to understand the implications of those resource flows for the communities, and if necessary, act to meliorate any adverse consequences. It so happens that the source of much of those resource flows is the welfare system. Accordingly I see a rationale for Government intervention, especially in circumstances where the resources flowing (in this case largely through welfare payments) are contributing to social dysfunctional and family violence which impacts vulnerable community members such as he aged, women and children.

This rationale for Government action is not necessarily an argument for income management, as there may be other tools to achieve the objective I see as legitimate. However, income management is one of the potential tools available to government, and in my view should not be dismissed out of hand.

In particular, when faced with situations where welfare payments are subsidising dysfunctional behaviours, often involving violence against women and children, I can see little justification for maintaining a philosophically pure position based on the assumption that individuals know best. Moreover, while in many locations a preponderance of welfare recipients are not engaged in or subject to dysfunctional activities, I would prefer to see constraints on their access to fungible resources in order to minimise risks to women and children from the minority who do engage in dysfunctional behaviour. This point is strengthened if it is accepted that dysfunctional behaviour is likely to impact beyond the family and household and have community wide adverse impacts.

Once it is accepted that there may be a justification for income management of welfare in some circumstances, the next step is to determine the detailed specification of those circumstances. This leads on to the detailed design of an effective income management scheme including the key design parameters which should be in place. I would add though that the design work should be broadly based, and extend to the design of the support structures which are an essential adjunct to successful income management (see below).

Key challenges facing policy designers are to ensure the scheme assists those most in need (who are largely those who are most disadvantaged) without adversely affecting those welfare recipients who don’t require income management; how to ensure the scheme does not breach the Racial Discrimination Act; how to deal with welfare recipients who are especially vulnerable and under duress; and how to minimise the administrative costs of the scheme and keep them within affordable limits while simultaneously ensuring that individual welfare recipients’ circumstances are monitored and adjustments made as necessary. These policy design issues are all substantial challenges for policymakers. Failure to overcome any one of these challenges engenders the development of the sorts of internal contradictions which ultimately undermined rationing regimes and will similarly undermine income management.

Assistant Minister Tudge deserves significant credit for progressing the next phase of policy development for income management in a consultative and methodical way, particularly in relation to its impacts on Indigenous people. The work of the Forrest Review and aspects of the design report for the Empowered Communities project, led by experienced Indigenous leaders such as Noel Pearson and Ian Trust provide a considered and robust foundation for the next steps. Nevertheless, in my view, there remains a need for further work by the Commonwealth Government to clarify its policy objectives for income management, and to establish a transparent and independent process for ensuring that issues which emerge in the implementation of income management schemes are addressed.

Moreover, there needs to be recognition that income management can never be an end in itself and must be seen as a tool to achieve better social outcomes. It will rarely be able to undertake the heavy lifting required in terms of welfare reform on its own, and will always require substantial ancillary support services. Indeed, there is an argument that income management should eventually be seen as the ancillary support for other more proactive social policy initiatives.

For example, the NT evaluation noted that one of the reasons why many income managed recipients in the NT have a positive attitude to income management is that it provides a low cost and accessible banking service. This suggests that there is a more fundamental need amongst disadvantaged citizens, particularly in remote Indigenous communities, for access to improved financial services, for financial literacy, and for culturally-informed banking services. In the US, the federal government has a number of schemes in place to incentivise and even require banks to provide accessible services to disadvantaged citizens, and there are strong grounds for believing that there is merit in the Australian Government moving in this direction too.

It follows that I am broadly supportive of the high level policy directions being pursued by the Government, and am particularly pleased to see a commitment to a non-discriminatory policy framework which is a major step forward from the 2007 NT Emergency Response framework. However there appears to be scope for a much more adventurous reconceptualisation of the purpose of income management, and for a much stronger focus on delivering the ancillary support services which will reinforce the potential positive impact of income management, and potentially lead to the a new phase where it is no longer required.

Notwithstanding my support, I do have six critical but I hope constructive comments regarding the approach being adopted by Assistant Minister Tudge:

·         While incrementalism is a fact of life in public policy, it seems particularly short sighted to continually develop new income management schemes while leaving their predecessor ‘trials’ in place. The result is a chaotic assemblage of similar yet different income management models, without a coherent policy rationale articulated by government. Government needs to simplify the number of different income management designs in operation.

·         It is time for the Government to move beyond ‘trials’ with limited geographic focus and develop a universal model, that is , one that potentially applies to all welfare recipients. The next term of government will see the completion of a decade since the contentious and poorly implemented initiation of the NT income management scheme.

·         While on its face Assistant Minister Tudge’s public statements foreshadow a move to develop and implement a universal income management scheme, it seems likely that part of his motivation in spruiking this possibility as a pre-election policy commitment is to build support and momentum within the Government for such an outcome. The implementation of a universal nation-wide scheme would involve considerable costs to the budget (in the hundreds of millions, potentially even in excess of a billion dollars), and would inevitably be strongly opposed by Finance and Treasury. The Cabinet endorsed budget rules require all new expenditure to be offset, yet Assistant Minister Tudge controls no other major programs from which to source offsets. Either the Prime Minister or the Minister for Social Security Christian Porter would need to come on board were a wide ranging expansion of income management to have any prospects of support within the Cabinet.

·         Alternatively, a more cynical interpretation of the Assistant Minister’s public statements would see the spruiking of what is a mere possibility without cabinet endorsement as just kicking the policy can down the road.

·         The focus on alcohol by Assistant Minister Tudge raises the question whether the Government is using the prospect of universal income management at some yet to be specified time in the future as a means of reducing broader political pressure to take robust action on the supply of alcohol to remote Indigenous communities and towns. The policy evidence is clear that a simple measure such as introducing a volumetric tax on alcohol would make significant inroads on alcohol abuse. Unfortunately, both the Government and the Opposition, at both state and federal levels, are in thrall to the substantial electoral funding from the alcohol industry, and sensible reforms such as this appear not to be on the table.

·         Finally, while the Government focusses an extraordinary amount of attention on what is in essence a thin sliver of our welfare system, broader public scrutiny and debate on the effectiveness and efficacy of our welfare system overall is curtailed.

Income management is a crucial social policy issue for Australia. It has particular resonance in the Indigenous policy domain, and continues to have a polarising impact notwithstanding the apparent bipartisan support for the policy. There appears to be a strong bipartisan consensus that any income management policy ought not to be racially discriminatory and this is driving a focus on broadening the base beyond discrete Indigenous communities who arguably stand to benefit most from the successful implementation of a well-designed and appropriately supported policy.

Nevertheless, income management raises a tangled web of issues, ranging from different views on its philosophical foundations, through to more concrete issues such as the design of effective scheme, determining the appropriate support mechanisms which are required to complement an effective scheme, and identifying how to minimise the ongoing duplication of competing models in place, and how to fund the apparently desired shift to more universal scheme in the face of what appear to be insurmountable budget constraints.

Charles Lindblom, an American political scientist was best known for his explanation of public policy development as ‘muddling through’. Income management of welfare can potentially contribute to the continued safety and protection of many disadvantaged citizens, particularly women and children, yet after a decade of ‘muddling through’, we should not be surprised to find that the current state of play is a public policy muddle.

The challenge for Assistant Minister Tudge, and indeed the Government and Opposition together, is to learn from the models of income management implemented over the past decade, learn from the evaluations undertaken, and move beyond the policy foundations established to date to a more flexible, coherent, non-discriminatory and national policy model for income management. Such a model would be located within a matrix of complementary government services and initiatives which operate flexibly to ensure that welfare recipients are encouraged and incentivised to build the skills and capacities they need to move beyond welfare.

Ultimately, we should aim to prioritise and establish much more robust and innovative nationally implemented policy frameworks for reduced alcohol and substance abuse, for reduced family violence, for increased financial literacy and improved banking services which allow our national welfare policy frameworks to move beyond income management.

This is a task of policy and strategic imagination, breaking free of the notion that our pathways forward are constrained by where we have come from. It truly is a policy objective worthy of our aspirations.

Shakespeare on Life and Death

Methinks in thee some blessed spirit doth speak
His powerful sound within an organ weak:
And what impossibility would slay
In common sense, sense saves another way.
Thy life is dear; for all that life can rate
Worth name of life in thee hath estimate,
Youth, beauty, wisdom, courage, all
That happiness and prime can happy call:
Thou this to hazard needs must intimate
Skill infinite or monstrous desperate.
Sweet practiser, thy physic I will try,
That ministers thine own death if I die.

All’s Well That Ends Well Act Two, Scene One

Indigenous suicide: a new trial of a Critical Response Project

It is pleasing to see the Government allocate funding for a trial of a new Critical Response Project to to ‘ensure the services available for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families affected by suicides or attempted suicides are better coordinated and delivered in culturally appropriate ways’.

The project will be administered by the School of Indigenous Studies at the University of Western Australia, where a major evaluation project, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Suicide Evaluation Project funded by PMC, and involving a range of partner institutions, is currently underway.

An examination of the evaluation project’s website confirms that the project has brought together an impressive array of highly qualified staff, and it seems unlikely that there exists anywhere else in the country a comparable critical mass of expertise on Indigenous suicide.

Moreover, as both the Minister and the evaluation project web site attest, Indigenous suicide is a national tragedy which has been taking a devastating toll on Indigenous communities for at least two decades, including from time to time in highly concentrated (both temporally and geographically) clusters of suicides.

I can thus understand why the Government has asked the School of Indigenous studies at UWA, presumably utilising the evaluation project’s expertise, to administer the new Critical Response Project. Indeed, if there is a place anywhere for pragmatic initiatives focused on making a tangible difference, then the issue of Indigenous suicide would be one of the first to qualify.

Nevertheless, and without detracting from the clear merits of the decision taken by the Government to allocate further support to responding to the impact of suicide and attempted suicide on indigenous families, I can discern a number of issues which give cause for caution.

First, there are a number of risks to the perceived independence of the current evaluation project unless clear governance boundaries are established between it and the Critical Response Project.

Second, the new Critical Response Project seems to exist in a liminal space between action project and evaluation project. There is clearly a need to evaluate all new initiatives, and there is nothing wrong with a trial, but the Indigenous policy landscape is littered with ‘trials’ of one kind or another. It’s what governments do when they don’t wish to commit to a focused and sustained action, but wish to be seen to be doing something, even anything.

Third, and perhaps of most concern, there is a slight whiff here of temporary funding being used to temper and blunt into the future the calls for more broad scale structural interventions which have been emanating from the evaluation project and its experts for the past few years (refer to the media list on the evaluation project’s website). Whether intended by the Government or not, and whether recognised by the University or not, once the coordinators to be funded under the Critical Response Project are in place and operating, there will be a strong incentive not to do or say anything which will place the renewal of funding at risk.

As an aside, it is worth noting that the Government has moved across the board to reduce the certainty of funding under the Indigenous Advancement Strategy to shorter periods, a matter likely to be commented upon by the current Senate Inquiry into the Indigenous Advancement Strategy.

Finally, given the longstanding reality of over-representation of Indigenous citizens in our national suicide statistics, it seems timely for Governments at all levels to commit to much greater proactive action as well as reactive initiatives. Economic development and jobs will be part of the solution (providing those policies work), but given the deep seated and inter-generational impact of the history of Indigenous dispossession and exploitation on Indigenous families and individuals, stronger and sustained national support and recognition of the importance of culture, post-traumatic healing, language support, and access to mental health programs will also be crucial in proactively addressing suicide and its concomitants – substance abuse, mental illness, and family violence.

To go to the bottom line, while evaluations and trials are important, indeed essential, it is time that we as a nation developed and implemented a coherent, sustained and broad based action plan aimed at reducing suicide amongst Indigenous citizens and addressing the individual and family morbidities which drive Indigenous suicide.

Governments at all levels and of all persuasions have patently failed in this task to date.

A Welsh Captain assesses the portents of change

The bay-trees in our country are all wither'd
And meteors fright the fixed stars of heaven;
The pale-faced moon looks bloody on the earth
And lean-look'd prophets whisper fearful change;
Rich men look sad and ruffians dance and leap,
The one in fear to lose what they enjoy,
The other to enjoy by rage and war:
These signs forerun the death or fall of kings.

King Richard the Second, Act Two, Scene Four

The institutional placement of the Indigenous Affairs portfolio

The stars are aligned for further change to the Indigenous affairs portfolio. The transition from Prime Minister Abbott to Turnbull breaks the nexus with the previous decisions on the administrative arrangements orders within the Government.

A reshuffle is widely expected in February to deal with the likely resignation of Deputy Prime Minister Truss. It will thus necessarily involve some adjustment to National Party representation in Cabinet, and this may also impact on Senator Nigel Scullion, who has chosen to sit with the Nationals in Canberra.

In the bureaucracy, Martin Parkinson will shortly take over from Michael Thawley as head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PMC), the third Secretary of the Prime Ministers Department since Prime Minister Abbott decided to place the Indigenous Affairs function within his Department.

The decision to place the administration of Indigenous Affairs within PMC, taken at the very beginning of the Abbott Government’s tenure, was presumably made to give force to Prime Minister Abbott’s promise to be the ‘Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs’. While this is not the place to attempt a full assessment of that aspiration, it is fair to say that Prime Minister Abbott found delivering on this promise harder than he originally thought.

A couple of stage managed visits to remote parts of the country, some stirring rhetoric on ‘sweating blood’ for constitutional recognition, an arguably premature overhaul of Labor’s barely implemented Remote Jobs and Communities Program, and the most severe budget cuts to Indigenous programs since 2007 are hardly the break-through achievements we might have expected from Prime Ministerial engagement in this area.

Within the executive arm of the Government, former Prime Minister Abbott put in place a confusing array of functional responsibilities for Indigenous related issues. As well as proclaiming his own personal engagement with the area, he appointed a Minister for Indigenous Affairs (Nigel Scullion), a Parliamentary Secretary (Alan Tudge) to deal with Indigenous welfare related issues (and perhaps to provide a Liberal counterweight to the Nationals’ Minister), and an Indigenous Advisory Council chaired by a close confidante of the Prime Minister, Warren Mundine, and which included a number of corporate heavyweights along with its Indigenous members. This quadripartite structure continues to this day, despite its cumbersome nature and potential for internal conflict.

While it is clear that Prime Minister Turnbull is not particularly focussed on Indigenous Affairs, there is every indication that he will wish to see it managed effectively at both political and administrative levels, and he will be attuned to its potential to create negative problems for the Government if mishandled.

I am even more confident that Martin Parkinson will not be keen to see the indigenous affairs function continue to be located within his Department. It was not a good fit when first placed there, and it is not a good fit now. PMC’s strengths and comparative advantage do not lie in policy or program implementation, but in strategic management of whole of government issues. By placing a particular policy and program function within PMC, a Prime Minister runs the risk that PMC’s core responsibilities are compromised (at least in relation to that functional area) and takes direct ownership of the responsibilities and risks inherent in any complex functional area.

Indigenous affairs has its fair share of political and policy risks, and it seems highly unlikely that Martin Parkinson would not be looking for the first opportunity to move to a more coherent and conventional arrangement.

That first opportunity will come with the forthcoming ministerial reshuffle. It would not necessarily require a change of minister, but would probably benefit from simpler executive arm arrangements which merged the responsibilities of the Minister and Parliamentary Secretary.

What then are the options for new administrative arrangements for Indigenous Affairs in the Commonwealth?

In broad terms, apart from the status quo, I see four broad options:

        i.            A transfer of the existing function from PMC to another line agency (such as DSS, Health, or Employment).

      ii.            An  autonomous agency within a portfolio;

    iii.            A Department in its own right;

     iv.            A ‘mainstreamed’ arrangement where all policy and program functions are located with the relevant mainstream department, with a small oversight unit located in a central agency (probably PMC).

There are two separate but linked questions I would like to briefly explore. First, working from first principles, what would be the most appropriate structural arrangement? And second, what option is the more likely outcome of any change?

Bearing in mind Aaron Wildavsky’s insight that public policymaking is an art and craft and not a science, and that there is thus no objective yardstick to measure these options against, I would venture the following observations.

The status quo is severely flawed, both in terms of its impact on PMC’s core business, but also in terms of the inevitable constraints which being part of PMC would impose on the Indigenous parts of PMC. In particular, driving effective policy and program implementation in remote contexts is made more challenging under the current arrangements.

The PMC culture tends to give priority to generalist or managerial skills over functional knowledge. Since the change of government, there appears to have been a conscious attempt to replace officers with background in Indigenous policy with others less inclined to identify detailed concerns or constraints. Think too for example about the logistical difficulties of ensuring that all PMC’s IT systems are secure for national security purposes across the remote network.

However the major reason the current administrative structure is flawed is that managing the current complex political structure and players within the executive arm demands a top down, centralist approach to policy development and implementation. Yet Indigenous Affairs, more than any other portfolio, requires a deft combination of top down and bottom up policy engagement. In particular, effective outcomes require that space be allocated for community views and concerns to be incorporated into the policy making process. The current arrangements, reinforced by both bureaucratic culture and managerial necessity, are entirely unsuited to delivering what is required.

Option (i) would involve a return to the arrangements in place under the previous Labor Government where the Indigenous Affairs function was largely located in the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA). The Health function was located within the Health Department (and remains so at present) and the native title responsibility was with the Attorney General’s Department (and remains so at present). These arrangements worked reasonably well, notwithstanding my personal view that native title policy should not be left entirely to the lawyers. Nevertheless, to return to the previous Labor Government’s administrative structures would be an admission of error, and is thus highly unlikely.

Option (ii) and option (iii) are similar structurally, the major difference being that an autonomous agency operates under more intense oversight from its portfolio ‘parent’, whereas a department of state actually does have considerable autonomy. Thus the former AusAID was an autonomous agency within the Foreign Affairs portfolio, thus providing DFAT with the opportunity to guide or influence strategic positioning by AusAID. As it transpired, even this was not enough control, and the Abbott Government under Julie Bishop’s tenure as Foreign Minister decided to bring AusAID wholly within DFAT.

Establishing a separate Department of Indigenous Affairs would require substantial investment in back office infrastructure (finance, HR, IT etc) and there are real doubts whether this would be a cost effective approach. Moreover, establishing a Department of state for Indigenous Affairs still carries a degree of symbolic baggage for Indigenous interests. On balance, the political and administrative risks inherent in establishing a standalone Department are considerable, and in my view are unlikely to be pursued. On the other hand, an autonomous agency within say the PMC portfolio would allow for greater autonomy than at present, cut the tight lines of accountability and responsibility with PMC, while allowing an oversight role to continue, and if necessary access to the parent Department’s corporate services systems. At a future date, the agency might be shifted to an alternative portfolio should this be thought desirable. I think this is the most likely change to Indigenous affairs administrative arrangements.

Option (iv) seems to me to be the optimal arrangement from first principles. The very real risks of having a separate Indigenous Affairs program and policy structure is that it allows mainstream agencies, at both federal and state/territory level to step back and leave it to the feds. There is a long history in the administration of Indigenous Affairs of the mainstream doing just that, and this history continues to the present in a range of areas – think school attendance, remote social housing, remote infrastructure provision (which continues to be an issue of concern notwithstanding the arrangements negotiated with the states by Minister Scullion in 2014).

The counter argument of course is that without a specific locus of policy responsibility for Indigenous policy and programs, mainstream agencies and state and territory Governments will do nothing (and there is considerable historical precedent for this fear too). The solution is to have strong multilateral oversight arrangements, and for central agencies (and especially PMC) to make it their business to ensure that line agencies both federally and in the states and territories) are doing their job in relation to indigenous citizens.

Interestingly, Frank Brennan in his 2015 book No Small Change reminds us that the Council of Aboriginal Affairs established under the Holt Government and chaired by Dr H C Coombs took the strong view that this mainstreamed approach to Indigenous administration should be pursued and Coombs had argued unsuccessfully against the establishment of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs by the Whitlam Government. In my view one of the functions which the Council for Aboriginal Affairs fulfilled in the nine years of its existence from 1967 to 1976 was the central agency responsibility to hold the whole of government to account. As in so many areas, on this issue Coombs was a visionary whose ideas and contribution remain highly relevant to our times.

My own sense is that policy pragmatism will win out over theoretical purity, and that the Turnbull Government will establish an autonomous agency for Indigenous Affairs, probably within the PMC portfolio, either at the next reshuffle, or perhaps following the next election. This would be an extremely positive change, although the significant cuts and changes to staffing over the past two years would mean that any new structure would face ongoing challenges.

However, while positive, any such transition would leave unanswered the deeper reform questions: if we as a nation are to close the gap, it will be imperative that the whole of government (both federally and in the states and territories) is engaged. The portfolio arrangements in Indigenous Affairs which will best ensure this are yet to be fully explored within Australia. The stars may be aligned for positive change, but current astrological portents suggest more radical structural change in the administration of Indigenous affairs is not currently likely.

A Walking Shadow: rationale and declarations of prior interests

Indigenous public policy making is not for the faint hearted. It is complicated, convoluted, complex and often confusing.  As Alonso notes in the Tempest: ‘This is as strange a maze as e’er men trod’.

My intention in establishing this blog was twofold. First, to provide an accessible portal into this maze, and perhaps even a guide to some of its mysteries, and thus fill what I see as a gap in the coverage of policy issues within the Indigenous public policy domain. Second, to provide a useful and hopefully persuasive outlet for my own thoughts and ideas in a post-employment phase of my life.

The inclusion of the quotes from Shakespeare is largely a bit of fun and merely a reflection of a hobby of mine which revolves around gaining a better understanding of Shakespeare’s life and works, fuelled by an intuitive sense that Shakespeare is at core dealing with politics as much as human emotions. Finding an apposite quote to complement my thoughts on one or another policy issue is for me an alternative lens through which to learn about and understand Shakespeare’s work. For the reader, it hopefully demonstrates that the Indigenous policy realm is characterised by many of the human and social motivations and forces which infuse our broader society, past and present.

As for my views promulgated in this blog, they are an amalgam of my inherent intellectual capacities shaped by my life experiences. The most salient of these experiences include growing up in a country NSW town where Indigenous people were literally marginalised to a camp next to the town tip, working for remote communities in the Kimberley after university, working for the Central Land Council in the early eighties as an administration manager, working at the ANU for a year in the mid-eighties, working for three Labor Ministers of Indigenous Affairs (Holding, Hand and Macklin), and working in the bureaucracy at both federal and NT levels, in and out of Indigenous affairs.

Key non-Indigenous related jobs included a period in the Industry Department managing Australia’s innovation and research and development programs, and with AusAID managing our aid program to PNG and later the Pacific.

Throughout my working life, I tried to maintain an intellectual interest in Indigenous affairs issues over and above my professional commitments, and from time to time wrote and published articles and research reports on issues of interest.

While the interface between politics and policy has been an abiding interest, as have institutional structures, my interests have always been on the policy side of that coin. I have never been a member of a political party.

The Pew Research Centre Political Typology test indicates that I am a “Solid Liberal”, described as follows:

Generally affluent and highly educated, most Solid Liberals strongly support the social safety net and take very liberal positions on virtually all issues…. Overall, Solid Liberals are very optimistic about the nation’s future and are the most likely to say that America’s success is linked to its ability to change, rather than its reliance on long-standing principles…

Notwithstanding the above, I am keen to ensure that alternative policy perspectives are aired and considered in this blog. While I cannot escape my own ideological perspectives and predispositions, I am determined that the blog not be partisan in any crude sense, and to the maximum extent possible addresses issues on their merits. It is intended to be more a reflection of my skills as a former public servant than as a former political adviser.

An issue of longstanding concern to me is that many non-Indigenous Australians have disengaged from Indigenous issues, some because the micro politics of Indigenous affairs is complex and confusing; others because of a well-intentioned view that Indigenous policy issues ought to be left solely to Indigenous citizens to determine.

The stark reality however is that Indigenous policy issues infuse a vast expanse of the public policymaking estate, and governments, parliaments and the bureaucracy, both federally and in the states and territories, make decisions (either by action or by omission) which impact Indigenous Australians all the time.

Without transparency and the focus of attention from the wider community, Indigenous Australians interests often fall victim to what Bill Stanner termed ‘the Great Australian Silence’ in his 1968 Boyer Lectures. All Australians have a role to contribute and influence how the nation deals with the place of Indigenous citizens within the broader polity. Hopefully this blog will make a modest contribution to facilitating that outcome.

Antonio takes out an unwise loan

Thou know’st that all my fortunes are at sea
Neither have I money nor commodity
To raise a present sum: therefore go forth;
Try what my credit can in Venice do:
That shall be rack’d, even to the uttermost,
To furnish thee to Belmont, to fair Portia.
Go, presently inquire, and so will I,
Where money is, and I no question make
To have it of my trust or for my sake.

Antonio, The Merchant of Venice, Act One , Scene i

The Tip of the Iceberg: Consumer Protection and Financial Literacy in remote communities

It is extremely pleasing to see the ACCC taking action to enforce consumer protection laws in relation to residents of remote communities. There is a long history of ethically challenged individuals taking advantage of the residents of remote communities, and action such as this by the ACCC will assist in sending a message that regulatory oversight occurs and action will be taken.

Of course, lying submerged under the tip of this iceberg is the much larger structural problem that the levels of financial literacy in remote communities are often poor. This is not unexpected given the poor educational outcomes in remote Australia over the past two decades.

The ongoing impact of poor educational outcomes is life-long, and continues to reverberate for decades for individuals, within families and within communities. Poor financial literacy is just one of the adverse outcomes of the nation’s failure to deliver basic services to remote communities.

It is surprising too that there is not more attention paid to addressing poor financial literacy. There have been sporadic spurts of policy attention, but it is a long grind, and the natural constituency guarding against program closures and funding cuts, reallocations, and the like is limited.

Moreover, a large part of the problem is that there are structural constraints on adopting smart personal financial strategies. To take just one example, access to cash in remote communities is limited to ATMs which often charge high fees, and/or the local store which may or may not adopt progressive policies vis a vid their customers. The issues involved in the operation of remote community stores deserve separate attention. I will endeavour to say something about this at a later date.

The Banks have made some efforts on addressing financial literacy over the last decade or so, but Governments cannot expect the private sector to fully address what is by any definition market failure, thus justifying government remedial action.

Given the focus on jobs and economic development in the Government’s current policy toolbox, there would appear to be a strong case for a much greater focus on building financial literacy within remote communities. It is also the sort of issue to which the Parliament and its committees could make a serious contribution to policy.

Macbeth on lighting the road ahead

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

 Macbeth Act 5, Scene 5

Frank Brennan's book 'No Small Change'

The road to recognition for Indigenous Australians extends back at least fifty years, and looking forward appears to disappear into a chimerical haze beyond the horizon. Frank Brennan’s book provides an essential guide not just to that road, but to the journey Indigenous interests have travelled to date, and goes on to lay out his assessment of the challenging terrain ahead, and outlines his suggestions for best making progress.

I initially thought that this was two books disguised as one. The first, a history of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs established by the Holt Government after the successful 1967 constitutional referendum, and the second, an outline of the case for moderate change in the next phase of constitutional development in Australia. However Brennan successfully integrates the two narratives, along the way providing an indispensable repository of the cut and thrust of developments in both narrative spheres. Each part of the book is valuable in its own right, and together they make a persuasive case for Brennan’s argument.

In essence, Brennan argues that the Council for Aboriginal Affairs, comprised of Nugget Coombs, Barry Dexter and Bill Stanner, were able through bureaucratic persistence, successful infighting, and innovative policy work, to leverage the successful 1967 referendum to successfully initiate the implementation of a national land rights agenda, both in terms of national public debate, but importantly in terms of legislated outcomes, and that the momentum built by the Council provided the impetus for the legislation of land rights in the Northern Territory in 1976 and ultimately led to the High Court decision in Mabo and the enactment of the Native Title Act.

In effect, Brennan argues that the 1967 Referendum, which merely broadened the pre-existing race power in section 51(26) of the Constitution to remove the exception of Aboriginal people and thus allow the Commonwealth to concurrently legislate for Aboriginal people, was ‘no small change’, because it opened the gate to the overturning of terra nullius and the thus facilitated the present situation where Indigenous interests are now recognised as the owners of almost 30 percent of the continent’s landmass.

I found the historical account of the Council’s battles at the interface between the bureaucracy and politics fascinating, and the book lays the narrative out in extremely accessible terms. This is a very real achievement, and will provide all those interested in the history of Indigenous affairs policy with an accessible and essential starting point.

As for the broader argument that it was the 1967 referendum which allowed the Council to make the inroads it did, I agree that the evidence does not contradict this conclusion. However, there were times when it seemed that Brennan’s argument was a little tendentious, aimed at making the case for his perspective on current constitutional challenges as much as providing a retrospective perspective on the events of 40 years ago. Intuitively, it seems to me that the Menzies era approach to Indigenous land rights would not have withstood the tectonic shifts which took place in Australia with the election of the Whitlam Government in 1972, whether or not the 1967 Referendum had been passed, although clearly counterfactual hypothesis is an entirely fraught approach to historical analysis. Nevertheless, I am happy to agree with Brennan that the success of the 1967 referendum certainly facilitated the Commonwealth making the running on Indigenous Affairs once the time was right. Whitlam’s campaign slogan, Its Time, really did resonate in Indigenous Affairs.

The second half of No Small Change is devoted to the history of current attempts to design an acceptable formula for changing the Constitution to recognise Indigenous citizens.

Brennan provides an extremely useful survey of the various milestones along this more recent segment of the road to recognition. He argues that the Expert Panel appointed by the Gillard Government and chaired by Patrick Dodson and Mark Liebler overstepped in recommending that the constitution be amended to enshrine a prohibition on racial discrimination, and also considered that the Expert Panel’s recommendations that any head of legislative power for the Commonwealth be shaped to require positive measures (‘to secure the advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’) would be counterproductive and unwise.

Along the way, Brennan cogently explains the pivotal role that the Racial Discrimination Act has played in the history of Indigenous Affairs. It is clear however that Brennan’s major concern is to argue against the inclusion of a provision in the Constitution prohibiting racial discrimination. He lays out an impressive number of arguments, from the purely pragmatic (the Australian people just won’t accept it) to the more legalistic (that it would require the Courts to consider political matters which are more appropriately the responsibility of Parliament).

Brennan’s position is that moderate change (that is, not including a prohibition on racial discrimination in any referendum) will have much greater chance of success, bearing in mind the super majority required for a successful referendum and the extremely poor record of successful constitutional change. In this sense, even moderate change will be ‘no small change’.

Moreover, Brennan implicitly argues that, like in 1967, even moderate constitutional change will open policy and political doors in the future which can be leveraged for the benefit of Indigenous interests, and thus even a moderate change will be ‘no small change’. As he notes, ‘what will matter is not so much the legal reach of the constitutional reform but the breadth and depth of the public sentiment in support’ (page 286).

There is a huge bias towards incrementalism deeply embedded within our political system. There is little doubt that this is how the Australian political system works most of the time. Most policy development and most political change are incremental. There is an intuitive attractiveness in incremental change, particularly if it is clearly in a positive direction.

However, there is a case to be made against moderate change. All change will have unintended consequences, and there is no guarantee that these will on balance be positive. Constitutional adjustments which make no change to existing institutional arrangements (as opposed to symbolic representation) open up risks without clear benefits. Moreover, for Indigenous interests to accept purely symbolic change to the Constitution will likely leave them in a weaker political position vis a vis the wider community as there will be a general consensus that Indigenous people have already  ‘been recognised’ and any future demands will be discounted by some and possibly by many as unnecessary or unjustified. No matter how deep public support for Indigenous aspirations is at the time of a referendum, there is no guarantee that widespread support will remain in place through time.

Thus there is a strategic calculus to be considered by the Indigenous leadership. What exactly do they wish to achieve in terms of structural or institutional reform over the next ten years? The indications are that leaders such as Noel Pearson, Marcia Langton and Professor Megan Davis are well aware that they will have just one shot at substantive change this generation, and that the shot ought not be wasted.

Of course, it may be that a constitutional prohibition on racial discrimination is not the ‘one shot’ Indigenous leaders wish to pursue. Moreover, if all that is on offer in terms of Constitutional recognition is symbolic change, then Indigenous leaders might decide to set it aside in favour of an alternative agenda, either within or outside the Constitution. One of the costs of the extensive constitutional change process followed to date, going back to 2007 without any apparent consensus having emerged, is that it has distracted political attention on issues that demand focussed attention from the political leadership of the nation.

For example, it is more than disturbing to consider that some $95m has been cut from the Commonwealth’s remote housing programs in the last two years, with the concomitant very real ongoing human costs of overcrowding and poor living conditions imposed on diffuse and politically voiceless remote communities, and this is done without any media attention, and minimal political debate. Meanwhile the political elites debate the terms of a referendum question and the major political parties keep kicking the can down the road.

No Small Change is full of perceptive insights, and is based on a deep understanding of the judicial contribution to policymaking in Indigenous affairs without being overly legalistic and technical. Notwithstanding my reservations in relation to the strategic consequences of Brennan’s overall argument in favour of ‘moderate’ proposal for change to the Constitution, I have no hesitation in commending his book to anyone interested in the history of Indigenous policy, the role of the Racial Discrimination Act in shaping Indigenous policy, and the current state of the debate on constitutional recognition.

Frank Brennan concludes No Small Change with a quote of Prime Minister Bob Hawke quoting Nugget Coombs. It is worth repeating here:

It is a politician’s job to recognise when the will is there and to do something but they also have a responsibility to create that will. It is never divisive to correct injustice. The fact of injustice is divisive and will continue to be until we correct it and learn to live with it. People who benefit from injustice will oppose this, but you don’t stop working for justice simply because people around you don’t like it.

Shakespeare on the Budget Process

First Witch	Round about the cauldron go;
	In the poison'd entrails throw.
	Toad, that under cold stone
	Days and nights has thirty-one
	Swelter'd venom sleeping got,
	Boil thou first i' the charmed pot.
ALL	Double, double toil and trouble;
	Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.
Second Witch	Fillet of a fenny snake,
	In the cauldron boil and bake;
	Eye of newt and toe of frog,
	Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
	Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
	Lizard's leg and owlet's wing,
	For a charm of powerful trouble,
	Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
ALL	Double, double toil and trouble;
	Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Macbeth Act Four, Scene One