The Joint Council on Closing the Gap review of the National Indigenous Reform Agreement

 

His promises were as he then was, mighty,

But his performance, as he is now, nothing.

Henry VIII, Act 4, scene 2.

 

The path-breaking December 2018 Closing the Gap Partnership Agreement (link here) between COAG and First Nation interests made a commitment to review the National Indigenous Reform Agreement (NIRA). The NIRA established and formalised the Closing the Gap process that operated from 2008 to 2018. The Partnership agreement also established a Joint Council co-chaired by the Minister for Indigenous Australians and the CEO of the Coalition of Peaks, Ms Pat Turner.

 

At its second meeting on 23 August 2019, the Joint Council met to consider the Closing the Gap process. The communique issued after the meeting (link here) noted:

The Joint Council considered a review of the National Indigenous Reform Agreement (NIRA), completed by the Partnership Working Group, and agreed to develop a new National Agreement on Closing the Gap, covering the next ten years, continuing the NIRA’s successful elements, strengthening others and addressing foundational areas that were previously excluded from consideration.

 

On 26 August 2019, I submitted a Freedom of Information request for the review. Following a long and convoluted 15 month process, that review was released in full on 23 November 2020, and is available on the FOI disclosure log of the NIAA (link here).

 

The review takes the form of a nine page agenda paper for the Joint Council prepared by a ‘Partnership Working group’, presumably comprised of representatives of NIAA, the states and territories, and the staff of the Coalition of Peaks. It is headed ‘Lessons learned from the National Indigenous Reform agreement’. The review paper is not so much an independent assessment of the NIRA as a consensus document that lays out its supposed strengths and weaknesses. It thus effectively provided each of the parties with the opportunity to introduce their perspective, and to begin to lay out their log of claims for the negotiation ahead. This is presumably the explanation for the countervailing and somewhat inconsistent views embedded throughout the document.

 

This post does not attempt to summarise the document. It is short and easily read. Instead, I have subjected it to a brief critical assessment and commentary, focussing particularly on the more contentious or self-serving claims made. Going forward, the review document will also provide a useful benchmark against which to assess the final outcomes of the negotiation as agreed in the July 2020 National Partnership on Closing the Gap (link here).

 

In a section titled Strengths and Weaknesses - Overview, the review states:

Target setting was highly aspirational. While this helped to highlight the issues and create a sense of urgency, the trajectories were not based on historical trends or evidence about what could be achieved in a given timeframe. This lack of distinction between final policy goals and an ambitious-yet-achievable rate of progress further contributed to a deficit narrative by creating the perceptions of continuous failure…

 

This text is both deeply problematic and fundamentally misconceived. Problematic, because it betrays an underlying agenda to abjure aspiration, and replace it with acceptance of limited progress or even implicit regress. The whole point of a strategy is to aspire, to lay out objectives that will move the nation and First Nations forward, and devise a feasible pathway to achieving those objectives. Misconceived, because it betrays an attempt by governments to appropriate and apply to themselves an argument or viewpoint that has been promulgated by Indigenous advocates to the effect that pointing to deficits implicitly define First Nations citizens as failures. The argument may have some validity when applied to analyses of the actions of Indigenous peoples, but in my view, it has absolutely no validity when used as an excuse for government failures or shortcomings.

 

Governments are effectively arguing that we should not focus on their failures and the structural implications of their policies, because to do so somehow reflects negatively on First Nations. Deconstructed, this text is signalling that governments are not committed to substantively closing the gap, but instead are focussed on the mere appearance of action.

 

In a further paragraph, the review notes that while NIRA did not provide funding:

…it was underpinned by a series of Indigenous specific and mainstream National Partnerships that committed Commonwealth funds often paired with state and Territory funds. These provided the critical foundation for Closing the Gap implementation, and as these began to expire from 2013 without renewal, bipartisanship and implementation fell away.

 

This text is misleading in two respects.

 

First, the pairing of state funding was invariably comparatively minor. The Commonwealth provided the vast bulk of funding under NIRA addressing Indigenous disadvantage. One might argue that the states should have provided more, but the reality is that Closing the Gap was effectively a Commonwealth Government initiative. The states do not have the fiscal capacity of the Commonwealth, and are subject to electoral and political dynamics that virtually ensure under-investment in addressing Indigenous disadvantage. Commonwealth policy leadership is essential if the nation is to successfully close the gap.

 

Second, the non-renewal of the National Partnerships as they expired was a conscious and explicit decision of the incoming Abbott Government elected in September 2013. Bipartisanship and implementation did not gradually and incrementally ‘fall away’. These were deliberate decisions made by the current Liberal/National Coalition Government to stop the pre-existing and arguably inadequate funding directed to addressing Indigenous disadvantage, and thus closing the gap. The most egregious example of this was the decision not to renew the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing that I have analysed at length in previous posts. See the dot points on page 4 of the review document for more specific examples.

 

Finally, the review notes:

Two additional factors compounded the impacts of this withdrawal of resources: the absence of a formal structure for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander involvement in the governance of the framework, and the dissolution in 2013-14 of the two key oversight bodies for the Closing the Gap framework (the COAG Reform Council and the Working Group on Indigenous Reform). Both factors facilitated a period of policy drift. The Close the Gap campaign’s 10-year review concluded that:

By 2014-15, the Closing the Gap Strategy as a coherent, national response to Indigenous disadvantage was effectively over. […] In practice, [it] persists in name only…

 

This text was clearly inserted at the insistence of the Coalition of Peaks. In a stark assessment, it supports and reinforces the points I made above regarding the underlying commitment of governments.

 

Implications

 

So what are we to make of this rather sorry document. At one level, it might be argued that it has been overtaken by the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, and is arguably of minimal or merely historical significance. That is certainly its formal status.

 

However, to my mind, it points directly towards the risks inherent in the current Closing the Gap institutional framework. It reinforces the deeply embedded predispositions of the current Government (and potentially future governments) merely to go through the motions while kicking substantive reform down the road.

 

It points to the path-breaking importance of implementing the Priority Reforms set out and agreed to by all governments in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap.

 

It also points to the very real risk of under-investment by Governments in addressing the Closing the Gap targets identified in the new National Agreement. It is significant in my view that since the announcement of the Agreement and notwithstanding the largest ever stimulus budget in the nation’s history, the Commonwealth has not come forward with any major budget initiatives apart from funding of $46.5m for Community Controlled service agencies (link here). Similarly, the states have made no substantive funding announcements, apart from funding for community controlled services. Western Australia recently announced funding of $4.8m for the community controlled sector (link here).

 

While funding community controlled services is important, addressing substantive disadvantage requires much more substantial funding commitments. These are nowhere to be seen. There is a real risk that Governments have decided to invest in the community controlled sector to facilitate a strategy of non-investment in substantive reform. The lessons of the implementation of the NIRA, identified in the review report the Government sought to keep hidden, have clearly not yet been learnt.

 

Furthermore, there is at present no single data repository recording the investments of governments under the agreement. This is a priority if the agreement is to have a substantive impact.

 

Finally, the fact that the Government was not prepared to release this document immediately it was requested points to an underlying fear that its contents would reveal too much about the governments underlying agenda during the negotiation of the National Agreement. That in itself lends credibility to the analysis above. It should be cause for real concern in the engine room of the Coalition of Peaks.

 

Transparency is an important means of ensuring governments are kept to their word. In coming weeks, I hope to post a short outline of the arguments used to justify the review’s non-release for over a year.

 

I have previously expressed concern about the level of substantive commitment by governments generally, and the Commonwealth in particular, to the substantive reforms required to close the gap (link here and link here). Close analysis of the NIRA review does nothing to change my mind on this score.