Persistent inaction and pathetic explanations on remote housing data non-provision

Call it not patience…it is despair

Richard II, Act 1, Scene 2

Last week the Productivity Commission released the Housing chapter from the annual Review of Government Services (ROGS) (link here).

The provision of reliable and up-to –date data is particularly an issue in relation to Indigenous services as one of the only drivers of better government performance is transparency on how effectively and efficiently services are being delivered. The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet has emphasised on a number of occasions that data is crucial to assessing and driving performance (link here and here). While I am sceptical of the ‘data is gold’ approach as a substitute for effective policy, there is no doubt that transparency is a crucial element in allowing the community at large and the Indigenous community in particular, to assess the effectiveness of government investments and policy efforts, and thus a key element in our democratic framework.

The introductory chapter to the Review of Government Services provides some template information on the purposes of the exercise, and makes the point that one of the intentions is to allow greater comparability across jurisdictions. This aim is thwarted when key data is not provided by particular jurisdictions.

I wrote a post on the 2017 Review of Government Services Housing Chapters in February 2017 (link here) which canvassed the data presented and also foreshadowed various issues related to the delivery of remote housing including the review which was then underway. Key paragraphs from that post are reproduced in full here:

So how effective is the provision of social housing in remote regions?

The answer is that is seems there are substantial shortcomings in the effectiveness of social housing provision, but there are also inexplicable data absences which make comprehensive assessment more difficult.

So at page 18.5, in Box 18.3, the report indicates that some 5000 social housing units in the Northern Territory were removed from the Indigenous Housing data set following their transfer to mainstream social housing in 2008-10, but seven years later relevant data is still not being provided and is expected to be included in the Report in 2018. This is entirely unsatisfactory and difficult to understand in a context where government rhetoric is focussed on the priority of closing the gap. (emphasis added)

Notwithstanding the change of Government in the Northern Territory, the key tables on service delivery performance for the NT are still not available. Figures 18.2, 18.3, 18.4, 18.5, 18.6, 18.7, 18.9 and 18.10 all fail to provide comprehensive (or in most cases, any) data for State owned and managed Indigenous housing (SOMIH) in the NT.

Footnote 3 to the Housing Chapter states:

‘The NT commenced data reporting for its SOMIH program in 2016-17. Limited aggregate data are available and include the number of dwellings (5032), but not the number of households. These dwellings were not included in administrative data collections used in this Report for 2015-16 and previous years following their transfer from ICH management in the period 2008–2010.’

This strikes me as a pathetically inadequate explanation for the non-availability of crucial information which has been an issue for approaching seven years.

While there are indications that some data may now be being collected, there is still no comprehensive reporting for remote Indigenous housing in the NT, apart from figure 18.4 which shows overcrowding levels in social housing hovering around 5% across all jurisdictions except in the NT where SOMIH overcrowding is shown at 56%. This is an extraordinary figure, reported in the ROGS for the first time.

To put this in plain English, 56 percent of all remote social housing in the NT is overcrowded. There is no data on the average level of overcrowding. Virtually all of this housing is allocated to Indigenous tenants in remote communities.

Given the levels of disadvantage in the remote Indigenous housing sector, it is disappointing that the NT has not seen fit to collect the relevant data relating to remote housing since the changes made in 2010.

It is disappointing that the Federal Government has not seen fit to encourage the NT to get its act together, particularly given the renewed focus on data and evaluation in Commonwealth Indigenous policy.

And it is disappointing that the Productivity Commission merely reports these issues without comment, apparently taking no responsibility for the lackadaisical approaches of governments to providing data about basic services to the most disadvantaged citizens.

It might be time for the Productivity Commission to adopt a more robust and independent approach particularly to reports which deal with Indigenous disadvantage.

Qld Productivity Commission Draft Report on service delivery in remote and discrete Indigenous communities

I have just come across the Queensland Productivity Commission Draft Report on service delivery in remote and discrete Aboriginal and Torres Strait communities which was released for public comment in October 2017 (link here).

I wrote a post in January 2017 when the Terms of Reference for the review were released (link here), and I have to say that I think the Commission has done a pretty good job notwithstanding my earlier trepidation.

The Final Report has now been delivered to the Queensland Government, but may not be published for up to six months.

Accordingly, I don’t propose to invest a huge amount of time and effort analysing the draft report, but will point to some issues which are likely to emerge as it is digested and then implemented, either in part or in full.

Having now read the draft report, and most of the subsequent submissions lodged following its release, I doubt that the Commission will have made major changes to the Report’s structure or key recommendations.

This draft report, and I expect the Final Report, are important contributions to remote policy analysis in their own right; the small number of largely high quality submissions add important insights in their own right into remote policymaking and Indigenous affairs generally.

So what are the positives in this process? The Commission has recognised that service delivery is systemic in nature and thus must be assessed and analysed systemically. It also recognises and acknowledges what everyone who takes an interest in these issues knows, namely that the system is not delivering; it is not fit for purpose. Further, the Commission has not shied away from advancing an ambitious agenda for change and improvement, one that amounts to a roadmap for major reform.

In essence, it argues for structural; reform which turns the current system on its head, and which places decision making in the hands of local and regional community institutions. While it suggests starting with indigenous specific programs, it recognises the importance of incorporating mainstream services eventually into any revised framework. The Commission also suggests two further reforms, both of which are extremely important and indeed would be crucial determinants of success were the reform proposal to ever be implemented.

The first is to provide for independent oversight of the implementation process, and more importantly the operations of the new service delivery arrangements.

The second which the Commission makes indirectly (and doesn’t explicitly recommend) is a focus on more timely and public performance information and the dissemination of evaluation results. The Commission notes in passing that evaluations are not routinely made public in Queensland. Both of these initiatives are designed to support and reinforce the more radical structural reforms outlined by the Commission. I can’t help but observe that they are potentially standalone reforms, and should be pursued under the current system whether or not the reform proposal proceeds.

These two initiatives are thus important elements of any long term reform process. While technically easy to implement, they run counter to government inbuilt reluctance to operate transparently. The Queensland Government has not been alone in holding fast to this predisposition in the past, so its substantive response to the report will be test of its commitment to operating differently going forward.

The Commission recognises that implementation will be crucial, and indicates that this is an area it will give further consideration to in its final report. Nevertheless, it is a huge leap from having a reform plan to implementing it. Whether the Queensland Government and its public service has the capacity and expertise to implement such an ambitious strategy is in my view uncertain. Perhaps more saliently, whether the Queensland Government will be prepared to implement what is in effect a radical overhaul of the state’s remote service delivery system is even more uncertain. One risk is that the Qld Government indicates a preparedness to do so, but instead goes through the motions.

The Commonwealth Government appears to have adopted this approach in relation to the Empowered Communities strategy advocated by Noel Pearson and Ian Trust, and backed by the business oriented charity Jawun (link here). The design document dated March 2015 languishes apparently largely unimplemented on the DPMC website (link here), and ironically, like the QPC’s draft report, it too identifies implementation as a key challenge. The bottom line is that there are two major hurdles in driving such an ambitious reform: one is to overcome the inevitable and mind-numbing complexity of the system overall; the second is to overcome the innate inertia and conservatism of governments who do not wish to rock the boat unless there is an overwhelming imperative to do so.

Were the Qld Government to wholeheartedly support the reform proposals outlined by the QPC, what are the potential downsides or shortfalls?  The sixteen draft recommendations are well constructed and thought through. They target important issues, and on the whole are worth supporting. My reservations are minimal compared to my support for the three overarching reform initiatives outlined above.

Nevertheless, it is worth outlining the potential problems:

·         As identified in my January 2017 post, there is a requirement for policy focus on the issues which the service delivery system is not reaching. While the bottom up approach recommended by the Commissions holds out real hope that this will allow these sorts of issues to be addressed, the Commission’s failure to focus on these issues in the Draft Report increases the likelihood that they won’t get the attention they need.

·         In draft recommendation 3, which deals with implementation, the Commission suggests an incremental approach to implementing the reforms, starting in two regions. While this may appear to facilitate change, the risk is that the process will bog down and fail to gain the necessary momentum to be carried through to completion.

·         Draft recommendation 7 dealing with economic development appears to implicitly assume that the removal of ‘impediments’ to private sector activity will lead to commercial activity which in turn will raise the tide of poor social outcomes. I am sceptical; in particular, I disagree with the suggestion that the Qld Government should divest its ownership of community stores. The rationale of government ownership of stores (something which is far from uniform across remote Australia) is that market failure in supply chains can mean that food security is placed at risk, and in worst case situations, the failure of privately owned stores can leave communities without access to food at all.

·         Draft recommendation 8 refers to publishing various information about services ‘every one to two years’. This needs to be every three months if it is to have any real impact.

·         Draft recommendation 10 deals with land tenure. It is a huge reform challenge in its own right, and my sense is that the Commission has not adequately come to grips with the changes required.

·         Draft recommendation 11 deals with housing. While there is a case for greater community involvement in property and tenancy management, to talk of control really requires transfers of asset ownership, and this raises the spectre of the Government transferring liabilities rather than assets to Indigenous communities. This needs greater clarity and careful consideration.

·         Finally, draft recommendation 16 makes the inarguable caser for greater inter-governmental coordination with the Commonwealth, but doesn’t really identify a way to ensure that the Commonwealth plays ball. This is a major issue in remote indigenous policy.

Some comments about the submissions on the draft report. They are largely supportive, but pick up a range of themes and issues which go beyond what I can cover here. Two general themes stand out. One is the underfunding of remote local governments in Queensland (but in reality nationally); a second is what at least one submission (from the Yarrabah Council) refers to as a housing crisis. I may come back to these submissions in a later post. But they provide a wealth of data on the challenges faced by people and organisations operating in remote regions. And taken together, they reinforce the challenges involved in driving systemic structural reform.

I will aim to take a closer look at these issues once the Final Report is released, presumably with a response from the Queensland Government.

Finally, I can’t help but compare the approach taken by Queensland to examining what is a complex policy area with the Commonwealth’s more opaque and confused approach to policy development. It is a cause for concern that the Commonwealth is not prepared to put in place independent and transparent policy review processes in relation to important national Indigenous policy issues such as Queensland has adopted in relation to its service delivery issues.

Budget prophylaxis: the RACP pre-budget submission and Indigenous sexual health

The Royal Australian College of Physicians has released its pre-budget policy submission for the 2018-19 budget (link here). The RACP pre-budget submission includes sections on a range of key health issues including Indigenous health.

The May budget may appear to be over the horizon, but work will have already started within government on developing the budget. Agencies will have developed and costed proposals, Ministers will be sieving and choosing which proposals to take to the Expenditure Review Committee of Cabinet (ERC). The Department of Finance will shortly provide agencies and Ministers with various budget parameters and rules for considering the proposals. Cabinet may have set down the broad parameters within which proposals for new spending will be considered, including the levels of off-setting savings required for each proposal. And soon ERC will begin its more intensive rounds of meetings.

The bottom line is that there are no free lunches. Every program is vulnerable to be included on a Finance Department hit list of potential savings. Every budget proposal undergoes a process of multiple review and sieving, is critiqued by the Finance Department, and then more formally by ERC. To be successful, it needs to be rigorously developed, have identified offsetting savings, outshine competing claims from within the relevant agency, be supported by the relevant Minister, and then be supported by ERC which requires that it be aligned with the Government’s overarching budget and policy strategy.

The publication of pre-budget submissions by advocacy groups and peak bodies thus operate to raise the public profile of key issues, and can assist a minister in arguing for his or her new spending proposals by pointing to external support for particular initiatives. Unfortunately, too often these submissions come too late, or fail to be backed up with more intensive media follow-up by the authors. As a result, they can often be entirely ignored by government.

I thought I would use the release of this submission to draw attention to sexual health within the Indigenous community as a policy issue which demands greater attention and understanding both in the general community and within the Indigenous community. It is a topic I know very little about, but recognise as one which is of increasing significance and concern given the youthful demographic profile of the Indigenous population nationally.

The RACP pre-budget submission has this to say (footnotes excluded):

Sexual Health

There continue to be ongoing outbreaks of infectious syphilis across Australia affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, which has occurred in the context of increasing rates of other Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) and some Blood Borne Viruses (BBVs) in some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. STIs are endemic in some regions; an unprecedented syphilis epidemic in Queensland began in 2011 and extended to the Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia.

Since 2011 there have been six fatalities in Northern Australia from congenital syphilis, and a further three babies are living with serious birth defects in the Northern Territory. In addition, there has been one reported case of congenital syphilis so far in 2017 in South Australia. Despite the existence of a number of Federal and state-level sexual health strategies, the situation remains dire.

Appropriate funding needs to be allocated to the implementation of the Fifth National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Blood-Borne Viruses and Sexually Transmissible Infections Strategy and sexual health services; particularly to ensure sufficient capacity for the delivery of core STI/BBV services within models of care that provide comprehensive primary health care services (particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community controlled health services). People should have access to specialist care when needed, through integration with comprehensive primary health care services to ensure sustainable and culturally appropriate service provision.

We welcome the plans to activate a short-term response across the state and territories on the continuing syphilis outbreaks, coordinated by the Federal Department of Health. However, whilst this Action Plan and short-term funding is urgently needed; the short-term activities need to be coordinated with and contribute to longer-term strategies and investments.

The RACP recommends [inter alia] that the Australian government:

• Allocate sufficient funding for the implementation of the Fifth National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Blood-Borne Viruses (BBV) and Sexually Transmissible Infections (STI) Strategy.

• Fund the syphilis outbreak short-term action plan and coordinate this response with long term strategies.

 • Allocate long-term funding for primary health care and community- led sexual health programs to embed STI/BBV services as core primary health care (PHC) activity, and to ensure timely and culturally supported access to specialist care when needed, to achieve low rates of STIs and good sexual health care for all Australians.

• Invest in and support a long-term multi-disciplinary sexual health workforce and integrate with PHC to build longstanding trust with communities.

• Allocate funding for STI and HIV point of care testing (POCT) devices, the development of guidelines for POCT devices and Medicare funding for the use of POCT devices.

These recommendations appear sensible and quite modest, but also contain quite sobering information, which is made more concerning by the reality that the sexually active cohort of the Indigenous population is information poor. Yet with appropriate behaviour modification and/or treatment, most of these issues are or would be avoidable.

If I have a criticism of the RACP submission, it is that it provides no information on what the RACP would consider to be adequate funding for the various actions and initiatives it is proposing. There is a sense in which the RACP has abdicated the issue of funding adequacy to the government, and decided to focus solely on identifying issues which require prioritisation. I understand this as a pragmatic strategy, but remain sceptical that funding adequacy can be a victim of political rhetoric and spin.

Nevertheless, the RACP has done the public a service in identifying the health priorities it has. Their submission includes a range of other Indigenous related issues, as well as a larger number of mainstream health issues (many of which are highly relevant to Indigenous citizens’ health too). I recommend readers have a quick look at the RACP submission.

My suggestion is that it would be useful if post-budget, the RACP released a short assessment of the Government’s budget decisions in the health area along with a checklist of the RACP proposals and the relevant amounts allocated by the Government. I will try to have a closer look at this policy issue in future posts.

Finally I wish to acknowledge the NACCHO website for pointing me to the RACP pre-budget submission (link here).

Remote school attendance: a gap worth closing

Minister Scullion visited Gunbalanya a week or so ago to launch the school year with the local remote school attendance strategy staff. The Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS) has been one of the Minister’s signature or headline initiatives.

I have been drawn to look again at the program as a result of the Minister’s rationale for justifying likely cuts to remote housing programs, namely that it is a state responsibility and the Commonwealth has no role. While I don’t agree with that rationale in relation to remote housing, it is an argument with the Minister has ignored entirely in relation to school attendance.

Traditionally the delivery of education services has been a state responsibility. In 2014 however, the Minister broke new ground when he initiated RSAS with funding of $46.5m, and extended it in 2015 with added funding of $80m. It now involves dedicated staff in some 77 communities across WA, Qld, SA and the NT. I previously posted on the RSAS in April 2016 (link here).

I don’t propose to undertake a detailed assessment of the program here. For those interested, key documents include the two evaluations of the program (link here and here) and the chapters in the two most recent Closing the Gap reports, each of which deal briefly with the RSAS.

What is clear is that progress nationally on school attendance has been falling (albeit only marginally) in recent years whereas the Government introduced a five year Closing the Gap target in 2013 which aimed to reach parity by 2018. Overall school attendance for Indigenous students nationally is sitting just above 80 percent.

The hardest nut to crack however is in remote regions where RSAS selectively operates. Here there is little current information on progress, consistent with the Government’s parsimonious approach to real and timely transparency. As an aside, rhetoric about making data available to communities for better local decision making, mentioned in the Discussion Paper on the Closing the Gap refresh (link here) and in Martin Parkinson’s Wentworth Lecture (link here), and moves for more evaluation as the driver of better performance (link here) ring hollow while important performance information on progress on issues as important as school attendance is withheld or not compiled.

Given the paucity of current information on the Department’s website, I thought I would undertake a mini-research project of my own, which I don’t claim to amount to a comprehensive assessment of the RSAS program, but are enlightening in opening a window into the reality of school attendance in particular locations and as a means of assessing the Government’s rhetoric against some objective data.

In the Minister’s media release, he states:

“The Gumbalanya RSAS team does a wonderful job encouraging kids to go to school and stay in school every day and I have no doubt that the team is making a real difference to the lives and futures of the children.

“By the end of 2017, the Gunbalanya RSAS team supported a 13 per cent increase in school attendance over the past 12 months demonstrating the success of our Government’s commitment to working in partnership with Indigenous communities.

The My School website (link here) allows citizens to access key data on virtually every school in the nation, including attendance data. So I decided to have a quick look at Gunbalanya and then a few other random schools in the RSAS program. I emphasise that these are random selections, and may not reflect the average for all 77 RSAS schools, however in the absence of a continuously updated data base on the Department’s website ( a useful transparency and accountability initiative for a program the Minister claims is addressing one of his headline priorities) there is little alternative.

The 2015 Interim Progress Report on RSAS had found that on average, there had been a 13 percent improvement in term three attendance levels over the first year of the program.

The following table lists attendance data for four schools: Gunbalanya (NT), Papunya (NT), Indulkana (SA) and Roebourne District High School (WA). The attendance rate is the average percentage of students attending each day over the course of the semester or term. The attendance level refers to the percentage of students who attend 90% or more of the time.

	Attendance Rate Sem.1	Attendance Rate Term 3	Attendance Level Sem. 1	Attendance Level* Term 3
Gunbalanya
2014	57
2015	56	45	14	8
2016	53	50	8	10
2017	49	43	4	5
Papunya
2014	63
2015	65	59	7	4
2016	69	46	11	4
2017	54	52	1	2
Indulkana
2014	82
2015	77	69	27	27
2016	73	68	19	17
2017	72	64	27	16
Roebourne
2014	51
2015	61	48	15	9
2016	62	51	10	12
2017	55	51	14	11

So what do these random data tell us? First, notwithstanding the Commonwealth program intervention, there appears to be since 2014 a generalised downward trend in school attendance in these schools, with Roebourne perhaps the exception. Second, the data suggest that at best, only around two thirds of students are attending on average, and in three of the four schools the term three figures are around a half of all students. These figures are well below the national attendance rates of 80 percent mentioned above. Third, of most concern to my mind are the extremely low figures for attendance levels as they indicate virtually all students (around 85 percent) experience gaps in attendance which have the potential to disrupt their learning and once students fall behind the risk of early exit entirely from the education system increases dramatically.

None of these data give me any cause to change the conclusions I drew in my 2016 post (link here). I encourage readers to re-read it. I will repeat the key paragraphs:

The Commonwealth’s current policy on remote school attendance appears to be fundamentally flawed. It bears all the hallmarks of a policy initiative designed to be seen to be doing something, yet runs the risk that it will actually allow the states and territories off the hook … RSAS operates in a limited number of remote locations, and thus will only ever have a partial impact. A more effective alternative would have been to allocate the funds to the relevant education departments utilising an incentive structure which rewards not merely improved attendance (an output), but ideally improved NAPLAN scores (an outcome), leaving the methods to be employed to the education experts….

…There would be merit in developing and publishing a strategic plan (or mini white paper) on the overall Commonwealth’s strategy for achieving improved educational outcomes in remote Australia. Such a plan would ensure that a comprehensive and coherent program logic would be devised, and would canvass how best to harness the resources and expertise of the states and territories, and thus lay out a comprehensive rationale for the Commonwealth’s involvement.

If the states and NT were not prepared to cooperate, the Commonwealth should then canvass options for the Commonwealth to take over the whole school education system in remote Australia from start to finish rather than inject random interference as at present.

In the absence of such a strategic rationale for the Commonwealth’s involvement in remote education, interested citizens can be forgiven for seeing RSAS as merely another instance of politics subverting good policy. It will most likely end up on the scrap heap of failed policies in Indigenous affairs, with Indigenous citizens wearing the reputational damage of yet another policy fiasco, taxpayers being $125m worse off, and yet another generation of remote citizens reaching adulthood without the literacy and numeracy skills which will allow them to fully participate in our nation’s future.

Finally I want to return to the Minister’s recent press release on Gunbalanya. He claims that the local team have ‘supported a 13 per cent increase in school attendance over the past 12 months’. Yet the My School data suggest that attendance rates fell in Semester One by 4 percentage points and in Term Three by 7 percentage points.

On his ministerial webpage (link here) the Minister states:

My priorities as Minister are to ensure that Indigenous children attend school every day and receive a quality education; ….

I am left wondering about the vast gap between rhetoric and reality. That would be a gap worth closing.