Transparency, Policy Effectiveness, and Democracy

One of the reasons I began this blog was my view that greater public transparency in relation to Indigenous policy would itself lead to more effective outcomes. I took the view that it was important to promulgate and analyse the information made available by Government (and the media), and hoped that this would itself contribute to improved policy outcomes.

Transparency allows stakeholders to better understand what government is doing, thus increasing trust and confidence; it provides a disincentive to both government and relevant stakeholders to cut corners, thus leading to higher quality outputs, and hopefully better outcomes; and it facilitates the sharing of information and ideas, thus allowing improved learning across and within sectors.

At a broader level, democracy is built upon a foundation of citizen participation and this in turn requires an informed citizenry. Poor transparency by the Executive arm of Government not only leads to less than optimal citizen participation and thus poor democratic outcomes, but also suggests an ingrained disdain by politicians for sustaining democracy, and thus reflects an ingrained disdain for citizens.

Politicians are paid good salaries, choose their career voluntarily, are provided with multiple supports including staff, access to departments of state and parliamentary resources, and ultimately retire with generous pensions and superannuation. There is an implicit quid pro quo in play: we expect our politicians to support our democracy, not half-heartedly, but whole-heartedly.

It is fair to say that in the year that I have been writing this blog, I have not been impressed with the quality of transparency in evidence in the Indigenous policy sector. Important information is often withheld, or made available in random snippets, or belatedly released, or released in indigestible forms. The Government appears to have no overarching policy framework document for its Indigenous affairs policies in the public domain. Many of the posts in this blog over the past year have noted shortcomings in the Government’s commitment to transparency in relation to particular issues – too many to list out here!

So my interest was piqued (to coin a phrase) when I came across this post by Robin Davies from the Development Studies Centre at the ANU. In essence, he persuasively points to serious shortcomings in the transparency framework operating in respect of Australia’s aid program. And he makes a series of excellent suggestions, which would apply equally well to the indigenous affairs sector as to the international development sector. His post is worth reading in full.

The optimists among this blog’s readers will conclude that this is good news: the Indigenous policy sector is not unique! The pessimists will conclude that is further evidence of the gradual, incremental and apparently inexorable slide away from good public policy in Canberra.

But both optimists and pessimists have cause to worry about the quality of our commitment as a nation to fundamental democratic principles. While our democratic institutions are apparently robust and resilient, they require ongoing sustenance and maintenance, and this requires that citizens continue to trust those institutions have integrity and operate in the public interest. A Government that is not prepared to publish its decisions, to explain how and why it made them, or to justify them in the public domain, is undermining those democratic values and institutions.

Transparency is a key contributor to the maintenance of democratic values, and thus to our nation’s way of life.

National Challenges, Parochial Politics: recent developments in remote Indigenous housing policy

There have been a number of recent developments in relation to the Federal Government’s Remote Housing Strategy (RHS) which raise important policy issues.

The Minister’s press release of 8 May 2016 (jointly with the then NT Chief Minister) confirmed that the new ‘Strategy’ is in effect of a rebranding of the last two years of the previous National Partnership on Remote Indigenous Housing (NPARIH). As he stated:

The Remote Housing Strategy is a new national agreement that will deliver $774 million over the next two years to improve the outcomes from Commonwealth investment in remote Indigenous housing and ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have access to better housing.

The funding has been redirected from the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing, which was a 10-year agreement from 2008 to 2018 that the new Strategy is replacing.

The Minister proposes a focus on outcomes:

The two jurisdictions have agreed a new approach is needed to address overcrowding and poor housing in remote communities, one based on delivering outcomes for residents in these communities rather than just getting the money out the door.

He also claims that the new ‘outcomes’ approach will lead to better housing sustainability and longer asset lifespans, but without explaining just how this will work. This claim is particularly problematic as the Minister has admitted to redirecting $95m from allocations for Property and Tenancy Management (PTM) under NPARIH to fund the Community Development Program which replaced the former Government’s Remote Jobs and Communities’ Program. PTM is a crucial element in maintaining asset lifespans. Interestingly, the Ministers’ media release goes on to document the ‘outcomes’ delivered under NPARIH by the Giles Government.

Unsurprisingly given that there has never been a formal document released describing the RHS, the new National Agreement does not appear to be loaded onto the COAG web site which has been the repository of all National Partnership Agreements to date, and it appears that the revisions to the National Partnership Agreement have not been formally endorsed by COAG. The unavailability of any RHS documentation and the new Agreement makes it difficult to clarify just how it differs from the previous National Partnership Agreement, and in particular, just what the increased ‘outcomes’ focus involves. There was a somewhat rambling discussion of what the Government is seeking in an Estimates Hearing in February 2016.

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PMC) website currently indicates that only the NT, Queensland and South Australia have signed up to the new Remote Housing Strategy (see link above). This leaves Western Australia yet to sign up (assuming the web site is up to date). The web page identifies national targets of 785 new builds, 285 refurbishments, and 58 ‘employment and education housing’ under the new agreement, but provides no reconciliation with the progress of the first eight years of NPARIH. In these circumstances, the claim that NPARIH failed to deliver outcomes lacks an evidentiary basis.

A second development of note is the election of the Gunner Labor Government in the NT. Labor went into that election promising to invest $1bn over ten years, and have since recommitted publicly to that promise.  See this previous post comparing the election promises of both the then Giles Government and the then Gunner Opposition.

The NT Labor Government’s commitment reflects a much greater NT Government contribution to remote housing provision than under NPARIH and RHS, but amounts to around 50 percent of the NPARIH ten year allocation for the NT. The NT Government is clearly assuming the Commonwealth will make a significant contribution to supplement their commitment. In the meantime, there is little information on the public record regarding the expected levels of remote housing investment over the next four years of the NT Labor Government’s term. While ten year commitments are commendable, there is also a need from a transparency and accountability perspective for Governments to develop and publish an annual investment funding profile. The NT Government will need to find on average $100m each year for remote housing.

A third development in the remote housing space is the recent announcement by the Federal Minister of an ‘Indigenous-led review into remote housing’.

The Minister’s media release and a linked web page are a masterful exposition in opacity. There are the usual nostrums: Labor’s NPARIH was too focussed on paying bureaucrats and consultants, ‘and did not deliver the improved outcomes for First Australians that it should’.  The ironic fact that these statements pre-empt the review being commissioned, and are made without resort to evidence of any kind, only weeks after the Government blamed a lack of robust evaluation for the persistence of Indigenous disadvantage, appears to be lost on the Minister and his media advisers.

The statement that overcrowding is ‘unacceptability high’ despite ‘significant investment from successive governments’ ignores the fact that the present Government has made no discernible new investments in remote housing since coming to office, and indeed has cut funding.

The Minister’s statement provides minimal information on the Expert Panel (apart from providing their names) and fails to identify the basis of their expertise. While it is clear that the Minister intends there to be significant consultation with Indigenous stakeholders, there is no information on the process nor the timeframe for the review.

The establishment of a ‘consultative committee’ of state and territory officials ‘bells the cat’ on what this review is really about: the development of a replacement program for the current NPARIH/RHS program as funding appropriated under NPARIH will expire in 2018. The policy risk facing remote Indigenous communities is that state and territory governments will be railroaded into accepting a much diminished replacement program both in financial quantum and timeframe. The rationale will be that national budget policy imperatives require ‘sacrifice’ and strong fiscal discipline, and that states and territories need to shoulder more of the fiscal load. Rather than engaging directly with state and territory governments, the Federal Government appears set to push this agenda under the guise of the proposed ‘review’ aimed at enhancing Indigenous participation in remote housing programs.

A fundamental risk for Indigenous interests in managing the political dynamics of the proposed review is that fact that there are no national or even state and territory peak bodies for Indigenous housing, and this leaves the sector exposed to the random interplay of a substantial number of other sectional interests, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, who have tangential interests but not a core focus on the housing sector. It leaves residents of remote communities vulnerable to side deals to which they have no visibility, and in which they have no voice.

Given the lack of an Indigenous peak housing body, there is much to be said for a much more transparent policy process directed to developing the next iteration NPARIH / RHS. This should, in my view, involve the development and publication by the Government (not an outsourced ‘’expert panel’) of its proposed policy model and policy changes (akin to a Green Paper) followed by a structured and open consultation process, followed by the final promulgation of the replacement policy framework.

The Government’s current proposed approach combines both an ex-post (looking back) and ex-ante (looking forward) review of remote housing policy. The use of the ‘review’ terminology appears to indicate that this will not be a full-fledged evaluation. Without a proper evaluation, the likelihood of accurately and comprehensively assessing the effectiveness of previous policy arrangements, and accurately identifying the level of residual demand for remote Indigenous social housing will be substantially diminished. Nevertheless, the bottom line is that we already know that the ten year NPARIH funding envelope was not adequate to meet all outstanding need, and with the high rates of population growth in remote Indigenous communities, and their extremely youthful demographic profile, the pressure on existing housing stock in remote communities will inexorably increase without new and additional investment.

This is the major Indigenous policy priority in remote Australia, and we don’t need another review to tell us that. Each of the state and territory social housing agencies, as well as the Prime Minister’s Department, already has the policy expertise and access to relevant data to make a reasonably accurate estimate of the size and location of residual housing need across remote Australia.

The fourth development in recent times relevant to remote housing has been the release of a new report by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) titled ‘Reviewing changes to housing management on remote Indigenous communities’. This study builds on work begun in 2013, and was initiated in 2014. While focussed largely on the effectiveness of tenancy management practices in the states and territories under the NAPRIH program, this study is in all but name an evaluation of the roll out of the NPARIH program by a team of independent researchers based at three universities. The project Reports have gone through AHURI’s rigorous research management process.

Based on weeks of intensive on the ground field research and surveys in five regions and multiple locations, and encompassing over 160 pages of analysis in the report and a prior positioning paper, plus analysis of pre-existing reports and reviews into the program, the AHURI report provides the most comprehensive assessment of NPARIH one might envisage, and a much more detailed assessment than the proposed Review is likely to undertake. In fact, I would be extremely surprised if the proposed Review does not mine these AHURI Reports for the bulk of its analysis and assessment.

The AHURI Report finds that tenancy management standards have improved considerably over remote housing over the course of the NPARIH program. There were differences in the ways they were implemented by the states, and Western Australia’s ‘hybrid model’ involving the contracting of Indigenous organisations was the most successful. The Report argues for an increasing alignment with mainstream social housing policy, and greater use of the community housing sector. The Report’s authors note that “while a hybrid system appears to work best, it is also essential that housing authorities remain responsible for remote Indigenous housing and provide a regulatory framework to assure the maintenance of standards…”

Perhaps the key paragraphs, which essentially sums up the challenge facing not just the current Federal Government, but all current and future Governments, are set out below ( I have added paragraph spacing and emphasis to improve clarity):

The gains that have been achieved by NPARIH require sustained and continued investment by the Commonwealth, in partnership with the states and the Northern Territory. It is essential for Commonwealth funding to address continuing high levels of crowding, deliver adequate tenancy management and repairs and maintenance.

Remote Indigenous communities will always require housing subsidies. Tax subsidies provided annually per household to owner occupier households in Australia amount to $8,000 or more (2005–2006 figures) (Yates 2009) which our analysis estimates to be considerably more than the equivalent annual expenditure on housing services to remote communities under NPARIH.

Without adequate investment, the gains that have been achieved under NPARIH will be swiftly lost, and within a decade or two we risk once again facing a national crisis in Indigenous housing. Funding for remote Indigenous housing should also be quarantined from other programs to avoid pressures on the remote budget from other programs.

The involvement of both the Commonwealth and states is essential to a broad, long-term approach to increasing housing options in remote communities, including forms of home ownership. This requires working with communities to reconcile community aspirations for community land tenure and economic development. (page 4)

The Report’s Executive Summary is worth reading in full, and there is much detailed and valuable analysis in the body of the report.

The sentences in bold above are challenges to both the Federal Government, but also to Indigenous interests. They directly contradict the Minister’s narrative that NPARIH failed, and consequently undermine the rationale for his rebranding changes of the program.

More importantly, the Report confirms that a failure to consolidate the gains delivered by NPARIH over the past eight years, and to commit to an ongoing investment program of a similar magnitude, will be a slowly unfolding disaster with ongoing lifelong adverse impacts for (what I estimate to be) some 250,000 Indigenous remote citizens (many who are yet to be born) over the next two decades. The current Federal Government has so far provided no indication that it understand or cares about the consequences of failing to address this issue. Indigenous leaders and peak bodies such as the National Congress and NACCHO similarly need to ensure that these issues remain on the national policy agenda; the unfortunate reality is that Governments respond best to sustained and well-argued pressure.

A fifth development which may well offer one path forward to addressing the fiscal challenges inherent in the national remote housing crisis (for that is what it is) can be found in AHURI’s 2017 National Housing Research Program Research Agenda. AHURI are seeking research proposals directed to reconceptualising social housing as infrastructure. Given that there is a broader community acceptance of the need for ongoing policy support for both public and private investment in infrastructure, there is scope for remote housing to be framed in this way, and given the same support as roads, dams, railways, aerodromes, ports and mining infrastructure. I previously made the argument for reframing remote housing in this way in this earlier post. I plan a further post on infrastructure issues shortly.

In conclusion, in this era of increasing budget deficits, it seems likely that there is a very real risk that the current Government will attempt to defer renewing the ten year National Partnership which invested $5.5bn over ten years for housing in remote communities. The initiation of the recently announced Review is potentially a pre-emptive attempt to change the narrative away from sustaining the capital investment required towards one of encouraging much greater Indigenous involvement in a much smaller and shorter program. Such an outcome if it occurs would be an abdication of political responsibility for the most disadvantaged citizens in Australia. If the Government in fact believes that overcrowding in remote communities is “unacceptably high” as stated in the Minister’s media release, it would not have cut $95m from the program and would be adding new investment now to current allocations for remote housing. What else does ‘unacceptable’ mean? The Government’s record to date appears to be the reverse of this, namely overcrowding in remote communities is acceptably high.

While budget pressures are real, the argument for addressing the ongoing and deep seated deficit in remote housing provision boils down to the fact that the opportunity costs of not sustaining current funding levels (at a minimum) will be unacceptably high, both in terms of Indigenous lives adversely affected, the associated social costs of continuing Indigenous disadvantage, and in the future costs of asset replacement which we, the current generation of taxpayers, will be imposing on future taxpayers.

[Declaration: I am a former head of the NT Housing Department; a former NT representative on the Board of AHURI, and a former policy adviser to the Labor Minister for Indigenous Affairs Jenny Macklin who oversighted the roll out of NPARIH in its first five years].

Rough Magic: the Role of Evaluation in Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage

Last week we saw the publication of the Productivity Commission’s Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage (OID) 2016 Report. Predictably, it reported mixed results. I don’t propose to summarise the contents, but focus instead on the narrative around its release.

The Minister’s media release emphasised the positives, but stated that

“a great deal more needed to be done to address Indigenous disadvantage, including building the evidence of what worked”….

…. Minister Scullion also acknowledged that in the areas of incarceration, domestic violence, mental health and substance misuse, increased effort was required to improve outcomes – and better evidence was needed to drive this progress….

…. “Until recently, there has not been sufficient investment in evidence to drive Indigenous-specific mental health and suicide prevention responses.”….

….Minister Scullion said it was also important that individual programmes within the Indigenous Affairs portfolio were properly evaluated to determine their effectiveness….

… “The Coalition Government is working hard to build a better evidence base than there has been previously for Indigenous Affairs. We are increasing the use of quantitative data and using a variety of mechanisms to evaluate the success of individual Indigenous Affairs programmes”.

Coincidentally, the Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department, Martin Parkinson in a recent speech noted:

The current Closing the Gap framework is coming up to 10 years old and many of the targets about to expire. We should not be fearful of where we go from here but rather seize the enormous opportunity this presents. This is our chance— Government and Indigenous people—to take the lessons of the past decade and work together to reset the agenda, to focus our efforts to truly close the gap in the outcomes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

 A high proportion of what we fund has, at best, a weak evidence base of how it affects Indigenous peoples. We must gather evidence which shows we are improving the lives of Indigenous Australians. And if that evidence tells us otherwise, we must change our approach. 

We need to put our minds to many questions—what did we get right and what did we get wrong? And why? We need to commit to the economic development for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples based on accumulated knowledge. We know that the keys to self-reliance, independence and improved social outcomes are: higher levels of employment; Indigenous business ownership; and the opportunity to use and develop culture, knowledge and land assets to generate wealth.

Joining the chorus, the Deputy Chair of the Productivity Commission, Karen Chester, made a robust case for more evaluation of Government programs on ABC Radio National’s AM program (audio here) and in The Australian.

Digressing briefly, The Australian’s story was headlined “Lack of account in $5.9bn spend ‘beggars belief’”. The misleading headline managed to simultaneously imply that the report found that there is a widespread lack of accountability for public funding, and that the problem lies with funding recipients rather than the governments who are responsible for the effective management and oversight of funding programs. This inaccurate message was reinforced by the apparently misleading text under the photo of Ms Chester (in the online story) which quotes her as saying she is “staggered by the programs’ lack of success” whereas she is quoted in the article as saying “she was staggered at the lack of attention paid to assessin­g what works, ….Evaluation is missing in action­ and it beggars belief that it’s missing in action…”

So what to make of the narrative that the problem we face with Indigenous policy is fundamentally about insufficient evaluation?

There are at least three potential interpretations. 

The first is that the explanations offered by the Government and bureaucracy should be taken at face value, and that once we manage to successfully evaluate the key programs, and adjust our policy and program settings in response, we will be back on track.

A second is that those at the centre of devising, developing, implementing policy in relation to Indigenous affairs are working from a set of deeply entrenched and extremely technocratic assumptions both as to how the public policy system works and how Indigenous communities respond to policy initiatives. In this rational and technocratic framework, policies, laws and programs are devised to structure and if necessary change behaviour so as to accord with a set of values and expectations largely determined by mainstream interests (eg cutting benefits to parents whose children don’t attend school, or income management of welfare payments to ensure expenditure is not directed to gambling or alcohol consumption) through the imposition of incentives both positive and negative. These types of technocratic approaches can often miss the mark as, apart from the inevitable implementation challenges and shortcomings, they are often perceived by Indigenous citizens as irrelevant to Indigenous concerns, poorly targeted, culturally insensitive, externally imposed, inappropriately coercive, or even discriminatory.

In this technocratic world of unidimensional causation described by a process of inputs, outputs and outcomes, evaluation and remediation is the final link in the circular process which closes the circle. We should not be surprised then that evaluation will work from within the technocratic frame and assumptions adopted by mainstream policymakers, and will be unlikely to identify underlying and fundamental issues driving policy failure which lie outside the technocratic mindset.

A third more cynical interpretation is that the Government knows that its policies, laws and programs related to Indigenous citizens are not working, but doesn’t understand why, or is not prepared to resource programs effectively, or is not prepared to drive the states and territories to perform effectively, or is focussed on politics to the exclusion of policy, or plays favorites, or won’t take advice, or tries to be all things to all people, or actually isn’t prepared to give the Indigenous policy sector the priority it needs to cut through the inertia which surrounds every policy domain to a greater or lesser extent, and so on. In this interpretation, the calls for more evaluation are in effect a cynical distraction aimed at buying time and political cover, along with a hope that by the time the next Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage Report is issued, the electorate and stakeholders will have forgotten what was said two years previously, and in any case, life will have moved on.

These potential interpretations raise a number of general issues. If evaluation is so important now, why has it been neglected for the past three years, or indeed the past ten years? What work is proposed to understand why the focus on evaluation (particularly in Indigenous programs) has been allowed to fade and lapse? And what about the various audits, coronial inquests, reviews, and the like which have been undertaken over the past decade? Did we learn nothing from them? Was the Hope Coronial Inquiry into 22 Kimberley suicides a waste of time? Did we fail to learn anything from the Mullighan Royal Commission into the abuse of children in the APY Lands? How is it that the Office of Evaluation and Audit established under the ATSIC legislation, with an independent statutory remit, has been dismantled, and absorbed into the ANAO?  And where has the ANAO been while this systemic ‘lack of attention’ to evaluation has emerged? And how might the electorate and Indigenous citizens be assured that the same deterioration in focus won’t occur in the future?

Whichever of the three interpretations one accepts, we can expect more attention to be directed to evaluation issues by Government. Under the first two interpretations, there will likely be an increase in the number of evaluations, reviews, and effectiveness audits commissioned and undertaken. Under the third, policy failure will continue, periodic disasters or crises will emerge, and questions about policy effectiveness will continue to be raised, if not by governments, then certainly by others.

Contrary to most accepted wisdom, I am not entirely persuaded that more evaluation would be an unalloyed positive. Like Prospero in The Tempest, “this rough magic/ I here abjure”. Too often, in my perhaps jaded experience, evaluative work (especially when undertaken within the executive arm of government) is an exercise in going through the motions, designed to provide confirmation for policies and decisions which are based on political imperatives or ideology rather than evidence.

In my experience, effective evaluations inevitably revolve as much around value judgments as objective analysis, but few policymakers are prepared to justify their decisions on values over ostensible evidence. Yet statistical analysis can be, and often is, shaped to support (or at least not contradict) a predetermined policy or political narrative. Moreover, apart from the substantial cost of effective and independent evaluations, there is a real opportunity cost both in terms of what those resources might have been directed towards, and in terms of policymakers inwards focus into what the evaluation or review will say rather than towards making programs and policy initiatives more effective.

Implicit in this critique is a view that in most areas of policy, we actually know what will deliver positive outcomes, and the challenge is to deliver the basics, not the optimal. We know that provision of police services will improve community safety. We know that provision of adequate housing and reducing overcrowding will improve health and education outcomes. This is not an argument in favour of zero evaluation, but rather is an argument in favour of targeted and risk based evaluation activity with an eye on the expected net benefits of the proposed evaluation. It is an argument in favour of short and sharp evaluations designed to identify, say, the three most significant changes that might be made to a policy, not the list of fifty (or more) recommendations which comprise all conceivable changes. It is an argument for a focus on policy effectiveness, and against mechanistic evaluation processes which claim to be comprehensive, but are in reality drivers of yet more complexity and process. It is an argument for doing good, not achieving perfection.

One of the reasons governments call for more evaluation activity is the fact that evaluations rarely lead to the fundamental questioning of the government initiative under review. Indeed, in my more cynical moments, it seems to me that an anthropologist from Mars studying our evaluation culture might easily describe it as akin to a ceremonial ritual activity, designed to reassure all who participate that the world as we know it will continue, that the future though uncertain will not be disastrous, and that if we participate in the ritual, we will all receive our just rewards, if not in this life, then in the next. In other words, don’t rock the boat now; things will improve in the future if only we participate in the ritual ceremony of evaluation.

Clearly I am conflicted about the merits of evaluation. Nevertheless, given the general acceptance of the ritual of evaluation in our public policy life, there is a case for establishing some benchmarks. In particular, it seems incontrovertible that the quality of evaluations will increase to the extent that there is greater transparency around its commissioning, greater independence in the process of reaching conclusions, and increased accountability in monitoring the implementation of the responses to evaluations by governments.

One further point worth noting regarding the recent Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage reports are that they are technically not owned by the Productivity Commission, but by a Steering Committee made up of bureaucrats from across the states and territories as well as major federal agencies. The same is the case for the Indigenous Expenditure Report produced by the Commission. While the undoubted technical capacity of the Productivity Commission is brought to bear in producing these reports, it does mean that the bureaucracy effectively controls and determines the way in which the reports are framed and completed. Secondly it has the consequence that the Indigenous portfolio is likely to receive less access to the Productivity Commission’s independent research capacity. This is because the Commission when allocating its finite research resources, will usually take the view that it is already allocating substantial resources to the Indigenous sector. The recent Commission research paper on Primary School Achievement is the exception which proves the rule. Thus paradoxically, while the Productivity Commission plays a crucial independent role in devising and formulating innovative policy solutions to many of the most challenging public policy issues the nation faces, it does not often do this in relation to Indigenous affairs. This is an issue which requires reconsideration if we are to commit to a stronger evaluation culture in the Indigenous policy sector.

On its face, if the Government is serious in its view about the need for greater focus on evaluation of Government programs impacting Indigenous people, it should commit to action designed to establish a new and more robust evaluation framework for the Indigenous policy sector.

Breaking my rule about limiting recommendations to three, here is my list of ten recommended actions for a more robust evaluation framework in Indigenous affairs:

1.       Initiate an urgent review to take stock of all evaluations relevant to Indigenous affairs over the past five years, identify outstanding recommendations, and publish the results;

2.       Develop and publish a regular (say biannual) Evaluation Plan for  the Indigenous Affairs portfolio;

3.       Commit to publishing the terms of reference and expected timeframe for completion of all reviews and evaluations as they are initiated.

4.       Commit to establishing an Evaluation Oversight Committee which includes external members including evaluation experts and representatives of key Indigenous peak bodies, with functions which ensure it sees and comments on all evaluation Terms of Reference, receives copies of and comments on all draft reports provided to Government, and provides formal comment on the Government’s response to all evaluations.

5.       Commit to publish all evaluations within two weeks of their receipt and to publishing a formal response to the recommendations of all reviews within six weeks of receipt.

6.       Request the ANAO to undertake a regular (say every three years) meta-evaluation of the state of evaluation in the Indigenous policy sector.

7.       Commit to publishing the formal advice from the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council to the Government.

8.       Review the regular reports oversighted by the Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision and determine if the Productivity Commission ought to be granted a more autonomous role in developing the reports and in reviewing the Indigenous policy sector.

9.       Encourage the states and territories to adopt similar approaches to evaluation given that most of the programs which impact on Indigenous lives are delivered by state and local governments.

10.   Convene a national evaluation conference each year (similar to the annual native title conference) where Indigenous groups can present their perspectives on the successes and failures in government programs, and identify issues which require further evaluative attention.

I am not holding my breath on seeing these recommendations implemented. But it does seem to me that the preparedness of Government to develop a much more transparent and robust framework for the evaluation of Indigenous programs will provide a much clearer indication of which of the three interpretations discussed above best describes the reality of Indigenous public policy in Australia today. 

The Post-Colonial Door - link

As promised in my earlier post, here is the link to Canadian Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould's 2016 ANU Reconciliation Lecture titled Reconciliation: Walking Through the Post-Colonial Door. The video is also available on the ANU National Centre for Indigenous Studies website: link here.

Victoria’s new Water Plan: a roadmap toward reconciliation

I came across this document by chance. Water for Victoria is the State’s strategic plan for water management. The plan was released on 20 October by the Premier and Minister for Water. Media release is here. There does not appear to have been much media coverage.

What both impressed me and surprised me is that the Plan explicitly includes Victorian Aboriginal traditional owners as a key stakeholder. Chapter Six (pages 98-109) deals specifically with Indigenous access to water. The Implementation Plan in the Appendix explicitly identifies Victorian traditional owner groups as a key stakeholder across a range of areas.

While I don’t propose to make a detailed assessment of the merits of the Plan, it strikes me as both comprehensive and refreshingly transparent. It is apparent that there has been a good policy process underpinning its development.

The Plan foreshadows the establishment of an Aboriginal Water Reference Group, with a role to advise on strengthened Aboriginal involvement in the water sector, and commits the Government to incorporating Aboriginal values and knowledge in water resource planning.

It seems clear that since the passage of the Traditional Owner Settlement Act in 2010, (an innovative approach to short circuiting lengthy native title claims across Victoria), Aboriginal Victorians have been taken much more seriously across the breadth of government. This current plan is tangible demonstration that this is the case.

One lesson is that institutional reforms provide stepping stones to greater political influence for Indigenous interests, and create a social and political environment where diversity thrives, and Aboriginal communities can feel that they belong not just to ‘country’, but to the wider society. To reprise Canadian Minster Jody Wilson-Raybould’s argument (see previous post), reconciliation requires changes to the distribution of political power across society, relevant interests and stakeholders. On the evidence of this Plan, the Victorian Government appears to be laying out a roadmap with real potential for greater inclusion of Aboriginal interests, at least in the water sector.

A second complementary insight however is that roadmaps do not take you to a destination.  They need to be acted upon; not once, but on a sustained basis. In the case of Victorian water policy, there will be opportunities for Indigenous interests to engage with the policy process, interact with other interest groups (all of whom are likely to be professionally supported) and be actively involved in the day by day interplay of policy development. To do so effectively, Indigenous interests will need to be organised, have access to professional support and briefings, apply a strategic vision, and work in unison amongst themselves. This may well be the larger challenge for Indigenous interests. And in the longer term, a failure to take up opportunities by Indigenous interests will not be in the interests of the Victorian Government either.

If the Government appoints random individuals to the proposed reference group, without the backup support that organised interest groups provide to their representatives, then the opportunity presented by Water for Victoria will be wasted.

For their part, Victorian Aboriginal groups should consider their own mechanisms for representation in water policy, and ensure that whoever is appointed has access to professional advice and briefing. I don’t know enough about water policy nor Victorian Indigenous politics to know if this will be an issue or not, but it is an issue which resonates more broadly and so is a point worth making.

For example, the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council appears to suffer from this exact issue. Its Indigenous members while all extremely well networked, as a group appear to bring limited institutional affiliations to the Council and as a consequence the Council appears to have played a more limited role in policy development than might have been expected.

In summary, the strategic plan for water policy in Victoria is at once a source of optimism, given the opportunities inherent for greater inclusion of Indigenous interests, particularly in relation to the management of ‘country’; but also presents risks and challenges for both Government, and in particular Indigenous interests, to ensure they make the most of those opportunities.

The 2016 Reconciliation Lecture: lessons for Australia from the Canadian experience.

The annual Reconciliation Lecture, hosted by the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at ANU and Reconciliation Australia was given last night by the Canadian Justice Minister and Kwakwaka’wakw leader from Vancouver Island, Jody Wilson-Raybould PC, QC, MP. There is unlikely to be much media focus given the almost simultaneous results of the US election. Here is the National Indigenous Times story.

The event was of interest for a number of reasons.

A short preliminary speech by the CEO of Reconciliation Australia (RA), Justin Mohamed, summarised the findings of a report, The State of Reconciliation in Australia, recognising the 25^th anniversary of the establishment of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, a forerunner of RA. The report was published by RA in February 2016 (media release here), and seeks to assess the state of reconciliation today by considering progress against five interrelated criteria or dimensions: race relations; equality and equity, institutional integrity, historical acceptance, and national unity.

Not surprisingly, the report’s assessment is that the nation faces considerable challenges in its path towards reconciliation. The state of race relations is problematic, interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians are low, trust is low, and racial discrimination and prejudice is a lived reality for many indigenous people. Equal access to life opportunities does not exist. Key institutions in Government, business and the community do support the reconciliation process. There is widespread community understanding that past policies led to ongoing Indigenous disadvantage, but the desirability of formally addressing those wrongs is more contentious. Accordingly, unifying the nation is broadly accepted as an aspiration, but leaves much to do in practice.

The report identifies an agenda for change, aimed at sparking ‘a renewed national conversation about how, over the next 25 years, we can move toward becoming a reconciled, just and equitable Australia’. The proposed agenda is set out under seven headings: overcoming racism; renewing the focus on closing the gap by all governments; recognising and respecting Indigenous cultures and collective rights; capitalising on social change generated by RA’s Reconciliation Action Plan program; improving the governance of government; establishing a process to recognise Indigenous Australians; and acknowledging our nation’s past treatment of Indigenous peoples through truth, justice and healing.

In essence, this report makes the argument that Governments have a moral duty to implement just policies. I certainly agree; however the pragmatic reality is that Governments rarely do what it right without the encouragement of organised and sustained political pressure. It is worth re-assessing this report in the light of the core argument in the Canadian Minister’s Lecture summarised below.

The Minister’s Lecture was an incisive overview account of the history and state of play of Indian policy in Canada, and her speech was titled ‘Moving Through the Post-Colonial Door’. I won’t try to summarise the speech and will provide a link once it is published (I understand a text version is likely to be made available in a couple of weeks).

Ms Wilson-Raybould began by providing a succinct yet comprehensive overview of salient events in Canada’s history of Indian policy. As many have observed, including the Minister, there are many parallels between Australia and Canada in the treatment of Indigenous peoples and our shared colonial legacies. The Minister argued that the Indian Act had long been used to assimilate Canadian Indians, and went on to outline the Trudeau Government’s agenda which includes a comprehensive review of the justice system, a process to ‘deconstruct’ the Indian Act and replace it with self-determining communities, a review of litigation approaches by governments aimed at adjusting the default of automatic opposition to every Indigenous claim or application, the implementation of the recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission modelled on South Africa’s post-apartheid commission to address the outstanding legacy of abuse of women and children in residential schools (the subject of a scathing 4000 page report in 2015), and the exploration of alternative justice strategies such a justice reinvestment.

While it is easy to see the parallels with Australia in the issues and challenges that are being confronted, it is clear that the Trudeau Government is determined to move Indian policy issues to a new level. It is not so clear that the current Australian Government, nor indeed the Australian community generally, are prepared to do likewise. To the extent that Canada makes tangible and substantive progress, it will inevitably increase pressure on Australian Governments to do more.

There were three key points which emerged from the Lecture which resonated with me.

First, Minister Wilson-Raybould argued very persuasively that reconciliation is fundamentally about changing power relations. It is not just about changing selective laws and policies, but requires a fundamental and systemic change to the distribution of political power within society. This is not how we in Australia tend to conceptualise reconciliation; and is not how the RA report discussed above is framed and argued.

We tend to see reconciliation as something which governments will voluntarily promulgate and engender, because it is morally right to do so. We tend to frame reconciliation as improving communication, improving respect, improving trust. The focus is on persuading mainstream society and mainstream governments to do better, to consult more, to acknowledge culture, and so on. In this sense, the Canadian Minister’s speech laid out a much more radical (and challenging) vision for Australia, for our governments, and for RA. Implicit in her argument is that Indigenous peoples need to work to acquire political power (not assume it will be voluntarily given to them) and thereby engender the respect, and substantive recognition that those with power automatically receive.

Second, Minister Wilson-Raybould argued that by reforming the Indian Act, and putting substance back into the treaties which underpin most Indian communities/populations, a pathway based on a ‘new federalism’ would emerge which would provide a decentralised and institutional basis for greater powers to be exercised. She cited the Canadian Supreme Court’s decision in Williams as providing a strengthened basis for self-governing Indian communities. Here is a link to an analysis of the implications of the case. Thus Canada has by virtue of past treaties, the strengthened legal requirements on Governments to respect Indian territoriality, and the Government’s fiduciary duty towards Indian peoples, an institutional basis for Indian communities to take on greater governance responsibilities and concomitantly exercise greater power within the Canadian federation.

Of course, Australia has no history of treaties, the courts and our Constitution have not seen fit to determine that Governments have a fiduciary duty to protect the rights and interests of Indigenous Australians, and native title is conceptualised as a mere property right, and not a right to exercise territorial sovereignty. In these circumstances, Australia’s Indigenous peoples, and particularly their leaders, will need to forge an alternative route to acquiring and retaining greater political power than that outlined by Minister Wilson-Raybould for Canada.

My third reaction to the Lecture was a sense that the Trudeau Government, and Minister Wilson-Raybould may not have given adequate consideration to countering the inevitable push-back from interests who lose influence and power as a result of their proposed reforms. After all, the allocation of power and influence within society is in large measure a zero-sum game. What one group gains, another loses; and this rarely happens without the losers actively defending the status quo. I readily acknowledge that my knowledge of Canada’s policy landscape is too shallow to be certain about this; and it may be that the Trudeau Government has a strategy to lock in its reforms that it is not advertising. Alternatively, it may be that the interplay of Executive action and the Courts in Canada means that gains for Indigenous interests will be more robust than appears on the surface. Nevertheless, the aspirations of the Canadian Government to implement far reaching reform in Indigenous policy will likely be tested, either in the short or medium terms.

The lesson for Indigenous interests and their leadership, both in Canada, but also in Australia, is that they need to establish the organised, coordinated and politically effective advocacy structures and organisations that all other major interest groups within society utilise both to assert and expand their political influence, and to protect their interests from countervailing incursions.

Finally, in researching this post, I came across the Minister’s Mandate letter from the Prime Minster which the Canadian Government makes public. Here is the link; it will be seen that it reflects many of the issues mentioned in Minister Wilson-Raybould’s Lecture.

Australian Prime Ministers have previously issued charter letters to their Ministers. I am not sure if the current Government does so. It would however be an excellent initiative for the Prime Minister to do so, and to publish it, particularly in the Indigenous Affairs portfolio where it is quite difficult to ascertain what the Government’s overarching policy agenda entails. One of the lessons of the US election must be that electorates are losing faith not just in politicians, but in Government itself. An obvious way for Government’s to engender greater trust is to seriously commit to greater transparency (as the Canadian Government has already done), and the release of ministerial charter letters would be an obvious place to start. If Canada can do it, so too can Australia!