Indigenous suicide: a new trial of a Critical Response Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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