Deflection and inaction: the Australian Government’s formal response to the Productivity Commission Review on Expenditure on Children in the Northern Territory.

  

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action…

Hamlet Act 3, scene 2.

 

Last week, the Australian Government released its formal response (link here) to the Productivity Commission (PC) report on Expenditure on Children in the Northern Territory. The Australian Government commissioned the PC to conduct this research following on from the recommendations of the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory 2017 (Royal Commission). The PC commenced its study on 1 April 2019 and publicly released its final report on 8 April 2020.

 

I wrote a post analysing the import of the PC report in April 2020 (link here). It is worth re-reading that post in conjunction with the Government’s formal response. The analysis below complements that more detailed response, which in turn relied heavily on the PC report.

 

The recent Australian Government response notes at paragraph 3:

Consistent with the Royal Commission’s findings, the PC’s final report outlines that the Australian and Northern Territory Governments make funding decisions in relative isolation, leading to fragmentation, inefficiencies in service delivery, and significant overlap in expenditure effort.

 

In my April 2020 post, I characterised the PC report in the following terms:

The PC study report is a stunning document. It focusses on one strand of government service delivery (children’s services) in one jurisdiction (the NT), and lays out in forensic and stark detail the extraordinary complexity of the funding and service delivery arrangements, the extent of the overlapping funding, the ongoing existence of gaps in funding, the absence of coordination both between jurisdictions and within jurisdictions (see pages 112- 116), the underutilisation of agencies’ regional networks who of course have most direct contact with citizens, and the lack of internal coherence in funding decisions by both levels of government...

… What is crystal clear — even from a cursory reading of the report — is that the system for funding and delivering children’s services in the NT is not fit for purpose. What is particularly arresting is the PC’s documentation in various places (eg page 306) of the long history of previous reports and inquiries whose analyses and recommendations have not been taken on board by governments.

 

I went on to argue that the implications of the PC report’s forensic examination of just one sliver of the policy domain impacting families (predominantly Indigenous families) in the NT was that similar issues would apply much more broadly.

 

To what extent then does the Australian government response suggest that there has been or is a serious attempt to address the shortcomings identified by the PC?

 

The short answer is that the Governments response is deflection rather than action. It reflects the deep-seated inability of governments to come to terms with the deep structural issues confronting disadvantaged Australians in remote regions. Instead of a new strategy, backed by political will and determination, what has been served up is ‘more of the same’ clothed in layers of bureaucratic sophistry and verbiage.

 

In the words of the Government’s response (paragraph 7):

The Australian Government supports in-principle the PC’s final report, including the areas of reform outlined. However, while holding significant merit, the PC’s suggested reforms also introduce additional operational and strategic complexity. As a result, detailed consideration of each recommendation, including risks, timing, policy alignment, capacity building and resourcing requirements by each agency will be essential for steady, realistic and informed planning and implementation.

 

Sir Humphrey Appleby could not have said it better!

 

The response proceeds to consider in detail each of the PCs four suggested areas of reform, namely: coordinated funding underpinned by regional plans; longer term funding for service providers; better data at the regional and community level, and stronger supporting institutions. While the response points to a range of processes, some more developed and serious than others, there is no overarching commitment to see these reforms comprehensively implemented.

 

I don’t propose to undertake a forensic critique of each element of the response; however I will comment on two issues of current relevance mentioned: the new framework for closing the gap, and the role of evaluation.

 

At paragraph 31, in relation to the PC identification of better data as an area for reform, the Government response states:

The Australian Government recognises that accountability and access to the data being interpreted is another critical consideration to drive transparency. An example of the Australian Government’s commitment to this can be seen through the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. One of the four key priority reforms the National Agreement is centred around is ‘building better data and sharing access to the right data to support Indigenous communities to make informed decisions with us.’

 

This is all good and well, although it reflects the implicit strategy of the Government to deflect calls for greater transparency into processes of greater data provision and sharing at local levels, two quite separate issues. More fundamentally however, the National Partnership provides for a series of processes designed to deliver shared decision making with Indigenous interests on service delivery, and for structural reforms to mainstream government agencies to enhance engagement with Indigenous interests. Yet there is no indication here that DSS has engaged with Indigenous interests in devising the Government’s response to the PC report as a whole. This bodes ill for the quality of the implementation of the national agreement.

 

At paragraph 33, the Government’s response states:

The NIAA’s IAS Evaluation Framework is also a notable example of how the Australian Government is taking a continuous improvement approach to evaluation, and is designed to ensure evaluations are high quality, ethical, inclusive and focused on improving outcomes for Indigenous Australians.

 

Yet the crucial issue is not the quality of myriad evaluations of small scale programs of limited strategic significance, but the use of evaluation to assess the overarching effectiveness of Government programs impacting (in the present case) disadvantaged children in the Northern Territory, most of whom are Indigenous.

 

Another example of (almost) seamless deflection…

 

In this context, it is worth noting that the response makes no mention of the PC report dated October 2020 on an Indigenous Evaluation Strategy, which incidentally recommended an independent evaluation capability across the Australian Government for policies and programs that impact Indigenous citizens. The Government has not formally responded to this report, and makes no mention of this fact in its response.

 

Finally, the most serious problem with the Government response to the PC report is not what is included, but what is omitted.

 

There is just no serious, comprehensive and thought through plan for substantive policy reforms, notwithstanding the fundamental shortcomings identified in the PC report.

 

In my April 2020 post, I outlined two potential approaches to substantive policy reform which would need to extend beyond children’s services to a range of related service delivery and policy domains:

The first approach would be  for Indigenous interests to implement a targeted strategy that picks out five or six of the key reforms identified by the PC (of course there may be others), and to make them core principles and advocate continuously for their implementation and ongoing retention at both national and jurisdictional levels….

…The second (and much more ambitious) approach would involve a fundamental reconceptualisation of the service delivery funding system to take decisions on grants and contracting out of the hands of politicians and place them in the hands of substantively independent service delivery purchasers (SDPs).

Governments would appropriate block amounts of funding over multiple years to say 20 regional SDPs across the nation for key social services, and provide broad (and public) guidance in terms of overall priorities. In turn, the SDPs would make funding decisions on service delivery within their regions, and report on progress to both the public at large and governments.

 

Neither substantive policy reform approach is seriously contemplated in the Government response issued last week. Nor is there anything else that might address the fundamental shortcomings in the architecture of service delivery identified by the PC report.

 

The Government’s response to the PC report is both a lost opportunity, and unfortunately and most seriously, given the lack of commitment to substantive reform, it seems likely that it is a portent of what we are likely to see when the first implementation plans under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap are released in July this year. Bureaucratic deflection and incessant process clothing underlying inaction are habits which are extraordinarily difficult for governments to break.  

Maintaining our gaze: the ongoing Indigenous child protection crisis

 

Men's eyes were made to look, and let them gaze…

Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, scene 1

 

This week the AIHW released the report Child Protection Australia 2019-20 (link here).  Attached are a series of selective quotes from the report reporting extraordinary rates of over-representation of Indigenous children within the system. I have omitted the relevant graphs which accompany these quotes.

 

The number of children in out-of-home care rose by 7% between 30 June 2017 and 30 June 2020 (from 43,100 to 46,000). During this time the rate of children in out-of-home was relatively steady at 8 per 1,000 children.

Indigenous children continue to be over-represented among children receiving child protection services, including for substantiated child abuse and neglect, children on care and protection orders and children in out-of-home care.

…14,300 Indigenous children were the subject of a substantiation in 2019–20. The most common type of substantiated abuse for Indigenous children was emotional abuse (47%) followed by neglect (32%)…

1 in 18 Indigenous children (around 18,900) were in out-of-home care at 30 June 2020, almost two-thirds (63%) of whom were living with relatives, kin or other Indigenous caregivers. [page vi].

 

Of the children in long-term out-of-home care, 2 in 5 (42%) were Indigenous [page vi].

 

In 2019–20, 55,300 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children received child protection services, a rate of 166 per 1,000 Indigenous children. This was almost 8 times the rate for non-Indigenous children (21 per 1,000 non-Indigenous children) [page 14].

 

The number of Indigenous children receiving child protection services rose between 2016–17 and 2019–20, from 49,200 to 55,300. This was reflected in the rate, which rose from 151 to 166 per 1,000 Indigenous children in the same period. For non-Indigenous children the rates declined slightly from 22 to 21 per 1,000 children, with minor fluctuations during the period [page 16].

 

Children from geographically remote areas had the highest rates of substantiations—children from Very remote areas (24 per 1,000 children) were more than 3 times as likely as those from Major cities (7 per 1,000) to be the subject of a substantiation... Of the children who were the subject of a substantiation from Remote and Very Remote areas, 88% were Indigenous. In Major cities 20% of children subject to substantiations were Indigenous [page 26].

 

In 2019–20, 14,300 Indigenous children were the subject of a substantiation. This is a rate of 43 per 1,000— almost 7 times the rate of non-Indigenous children (6 per 1,000)... This is consistent with findings for previous years... The reasons for the over-representation of Indigenous children in child protection substantiations are complex. Underlying causes include:

• the legacy of past policies of forced removal; • intergenerational effects of previous separations from family and culture; • a higher likelihood of living in the lowest socioeconomic areas; • perceptions arising from cultural differences in child-rearing practices.

Indigenous children are also over-represented in other areas related to child safety, including:

• hospital admissions for injuries and assault; • experiences of homelessness; • involvement in the youth justice system [page 27].

 

At 30 June 2020, about 18,900 Indigenous children were in out-of-home care—a rate of 56 per 1,000 Indigenous children, which was 11 times the rate for non-Indigenous children ... This difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children was evident across all age groups...

Rates for Indigenous children in out-of-home care varied by age groups. Indigenous children aged 10–14 had the highest rate of out-of-home care (63 per 1,000 Indigenous children), while those aged under 1 had the lowest rate (28 per 1,000) [page 54].

 

For Indigenous children in out-of-home care, rates rose between 2017 and 2020, from 51 per 1,000 children to 56 per 1,000 Indigenous children [page 58].

 

There is a risk of over-simplification selectively quoting from a report such as this. I recommend readers take some time to have a look at the report itself. Nevertheless, it is astounding to comprehend that 42 percent of the 46,000 children in out of home care across the nation are Indigenous. In 2019, Neil Westbury and I assessed the state of out of home care in NSW in our Policy Insights paper Overcoming Indigenous Exclusion (link here), and we noted then that there were 31,000 children in out of home care and 11,900 or 38 percent were Indigenous. While the AIHW notes that data adjustments mean that prior comparisons are not appropriate (see page vi), it is clear that the national situation is much worse than national policymakers realised just two years ago. Moreover, these data points are not point in time issues, but are indicators of ongoing reductions in children’s life opportunities, with ongoing human costs to the families concerned and social and financial costs to the broader community.

Moreover, what is not addressed in a report focussed on measuring children’s engagement with the child protection system are the multiple upstream issues for parents and families that have led to children being placed into care. Issues such as drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, incarceration, and so on. These too have huge personal, family and wider social impacts which are both ongoing and negatively synergistic.

On the positive side of the ledger, the new National Agreement on Closing the Gap (link here) provides for new child protection target (link here) aimed at reducing the rate of over-representation by 45 percent over the decade to 2031.

Yet as the report notes, the rate of Indigenous over-representation has increased in the last four years. Further, this is not a new problem; in our Policy Insights paper referred to above, we considered the experience of NSW, and in particular, the reviews conducted by the NSW Ombudsman in 2011, 2014, and the excellent review by David Tune. Megan Davis conducted a subsequent review focussed on Indigenous child protection issues in 2019 (link here). What is common to all of these NSW reports is that the previous responses by the NSW Governments have been inadequate and that the calls for structural reforms have been dismissed (either implicitly or explicitly). The NSW experience has been largely replicated in the other jurisdictions.

While child protection is a state and territory responsibility, the broad uniformity of the challenges particularly for Indigenous children and families across the nation, and the inability of state and territory governments so far to successfully address those challenges, suggests that there are deeper structural issues at play. These are issues that span both Commonwealth and state / territory responsibilities, and demand a combined approach led by the Commonwealth.

To date, however, there is very little evidence that the Commonwealth recognises that it has a responsibility to lead in this policy space, nor that without its leadership, the prospects of success are limited. There has been no response from the Minister for Indigenous Australians to the release of the AIHW report.

We await the publication in July of the first implementation plans arising from the new National Agreement, and the associated Commonwealth investment. My prediction however is that in relation to this particular target, the Commonwealth will stay with its longstanding script, and seek to place the entirety of the responsibility on the states and territories. For their part the states and territories will either put their heads in the sand and ignore the issue, or implicitly deny that a problem exists. They have form on this… On 16 September 2020, the nation’s Community Services Ministers met and were briefed by Minister Wyatt on the new Closing the Gap targets for children in out of home care. The communique of the meeting (link here) has a self-congratulatory tone overall, and mentions that child protection reforms were paused across the nation in March 2020 because of the pandemic, and had not then been resumed. Extraordinarily, the Communique stated (inter alia):

Minister Wyatt acknowledged the importance of governments working together to keep children safe and healthy by identifying and replicating best practice, in partnership with Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations. Ministers noted that a number of states and territories had developed very strong practice in this area which was seeing clear gains in reducing the intake of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children into out of home care and increases in family restoration (emphasis added).

Given the data outlined in the AIHW report, the impression left by the statement in bold is clearly just wrong, and it is extraordinary that neither Ministers Ruston nor Wyatt, who were both present at the meeting, sought to correct the record.

When rhetoric trumps reality, policy development becomes an exercise in doing the minimum required to avoid sustained criticism. When the life opportunities of children are involved, this is plainly not good enough.

What is required is a comprehensive and well-resourced plan to address the structural underpinnings of child safety in the broadest sense. This would require the development of a structural reform agenda plus targeted program initiatives; robust but simple coordination arrangements across jurisdictions; long term financial commitments; engagement with the relevant community controlled agencies; and the creation of a sophisticated and policy specific research and evaluation capability aimed at identifying the key leverage points to turn current trends around and monitoring progress in live time. See my previous March 2020 post on an earlier AIHW report (link here) for other similar policy reform suggestions.

Such an agenda appears ambitious, because it is ambitious. It also happens to accord with the principles laid out in the new National Partnership.  Anything less is unlikely to have the necessary policy heft and firepower to make a difference. It is time the nation got serious about addressing Indigenous disadvantage. This will require Commonwealth leadership and commitment.

A core proof of the existence of structural exclusion is the inability of those who are not excluded to recognise and actually ‘see’ an issue. As a nation, we are conscious that there is an issue with Indigenous child protection; we know it is there somewhere, we allow statisticians to write reports, and prepare graphs, yet we are incapable of keeping it in focus, of identifying with the real and tangible impacts on children and their families. In short, we are incapable of maintaining our gaze. To maintain our gaze is too difficult because it would reveal a truth about Australian society, and ourselves, that we cannot bear to acknowledge.