The New Political Landscape in Indigenous Affairs

Recent developments suggest the coming year will involve a heightened public discussion on Indigenous issues. While the major issue on the public agenda is the progressive ramp up of public debate on potential changes to the Constitution to recognise Indigenous Australians, a swathe of other issues are simmering on the back burner, and arguably are of equal or greater importance. We can confidently expect that some at least will eventually boil over and thus enter the electorate’s consciousness, but there is nothing particularly new about that state of affairs.

What is new, or at least is coming into much sharper focus, is the much greater representation of Indigenous people in our state and federal parliaments. The ALP’s recent decisions to pre-select Linda Burney – an experienced state based politician - for the NSW seat of Barton, and to seek to appoint Patrick Dodson to the Senate casual vacancy in Western Australia, complementing Senator Nova Peris, are merely the latest and most obvious iterations in that trend. On the conservative side, people such as Ken Wyatt and Senator Joanna Lindgren are playing significant but largely hidden roles in shaping attitudes to policy issues within the Government.

At state levels, the NT has an Indigenous Chief Minister in Adam Giles plus a number of Indigenous members of the Assembly, in South Australia Kyam Maher is of Indigenous heritage and is currently the state’s Minister for Indigenous Affairs, the ACT Government has recently promoted Chris Bourke into the Ministry and in WA Ben Wyatt is the Shadow Treasurer and stands a good chance of being the WA Treasurer after the next election.

Other politicians at both federal and state levels either identify as Indigenous or have Indigenous family connections, or may be of Indigenous descent but do not explicitly identify as Indigenous.

The key point to be made here is that we are reaching a point where there is a significant level of Indigenous representation within our parliamentary systems nationwide.

The obvious follow-on question however is that given this trend, why is the quality of debate on Indigenous affairs so shallow and simplistic?

One part of the answer may be that the policy process is much broader than parliaments and politics and Indigenous people are not as well embedded in the arenas most involved in early stage policy development. Parliament is not the only forum which influences public policy outcomes.

So, while there has been a widespread focus on increasing Indigenous employment within the bureaucracy and executive arm of Government for well over a decade, the results have been less than impressive. The public sector lags leading private sector corporations in many respects. Nevertheless, there are key Indigenous public sector leaders in virtually all jurisdictions who bring a level of insight and experience of huge value to public policy development.

Data on the involvement of Indigenous players in the outer ring of public policy stakeholders – the NGOs, the think tanks, business sector peak bodies, community organisations and the like is harder to come by, but my sense is that the record here is mixed. The closer to the coal face, the more likely are Indigenous people to be employed, but policies are generally most influenced by intermediaries and advocacy groups, and here Indigenous representation is quite weak.

Returning to the parliamentary domain, what is driving the progressive increase in Indigenous representation?

Clearly individual motivations will be varied. However, in my view, one important element is an increasing level of frustration amongst the Indigenous leadership that Indigenous interests have been taken for granted, and that Indigenous interests have not been well served by the political system. Noel Pearson in his recent Press Club speech articulated an argument precisely along these lines, suggesting that were he twenty years younger he would seriously consider a career in politics. Patrick Dodson gave a version of this argument in explaining his decision to accept Labor’s approach in his press conference and subsequent interviews today.

The implicit logic in these rationales is that ultimately it is in the party room and the cabinet/shadow cabinet where policies are made. That is, one can be more influential inside the political system than outside.

While there is certainly force to this line of argument, driving structural reform to and within our complex and in many respects deeply tradition-bound political system is not easy. While some political leaders can, by force of personality or innate political judgement and skill, drive major structural policy change virtually on their own (I am thinking John Howard or Paul Keating), most effective politicians derive influence for good or ill from the gradual accretion of authority through alliances based on shared interests or mere necessity. The one certainty is that forming these alliances will always involve significant degrees of compromise and deal-broking. In other words, being on the ‘inside’ is only the start of the journey toward influence and ultimately the exercise of power.

The paucity of sustained advocacy on crucial policy issues within the Indigenous policy domain creates a second constraint inhibiting the accrual of influence and power within parliamentary parties and ultimately governments by Indigenous leaders. The bread and butter of policymaking is the promulgation of concerns, issues, ideas and arguments by stakeholders. Yet the indigenous domain has a poorly developed advocacy infrastructure.

While some sectors have respected and established peak bodies – health being the best example with the leadership of NACHO, and land rights being another with the role of the major land councils, some key policy sectors of crucial significance to disadvantaged Indigenous citizens do not have well established sectoral peak bodies. Remote social housing springs to mind, so does remote employment. This leaves Indigenous parliamentarians and their ideological supporters with a dearth of ammunition to utilise in driving policy debates internally, ironically in policy areas involving the most disadvantaged citizens.

There is clearly a significant potential role for the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples in filling this advocacy gap, but they face serious funding constraints, are relatively new and so far have tended to give priority to higher level national issues such as human rights and constitutional change rather than the bread and butter issues facing local communities which require detailed policy work to effect structural change. In the meantime, Indigenous politicians will be rather more reliant on their own networks and contacts to discover the issues to pursue than is ideally the case.

Finally, the third constraint for Indigenous politicians is the attitude of the political machines within all political parties who share a relentlessly single-minded focus on the ‘main game’ of winning elections. In these circles, all other issues are subordinated to the overarching strategy, and this trend of insisting on rigorous message and narrative discipline in articulating a coherent message is increasingly dominant in an age of instantaneous communications and social media immersion.

As a related aside, it seems to me that one obvious motivation for Labor’s embrace of two prominent Indigenous leaders is its desire to stem the flow of progressive votes to the Greens nationally, and their decisions are not necessarily or solely a ‘road to Damascus conversion’ to lift Indigenous issues higher on the ALP’s list of policy priorities.

These constraints or challenges are not insurmountable for talented individuals, but they do mean that driving pro-Indigenous policy and political reform from ‘the inside’ is not straightforward. There is no escalator inside the Parliament and the parties which automatically takes politicians to positions of influence on policy.

On the other side of the ledger however, one the advantages of being ‘inside’ is that much of the major structural change in Australian politics is opportunistic and crisis driven, and often there is not time in a crisis for external stakeholders to marshal the political arguments and community support necessary to influence policy from outside.

Looking forward, we face an election this year, and a potential double dissolution. What will the post-election landscape look like?

This is entirely speculative territory. However the likely arrival of Linda Burney and Patrick Dodson in the Australian Parliament will open up new opportunities for the debate on a wide range of indigenous policy issues to demand more attention. This is unequivocally positive in my view.

It will unleash a new dynamic on these issues which will force a response from the current Government and potentially the Greens.

In response, it seems inevitable should the Government be returned at the forthcoming election that the Prime Minister will give serious consideration to refreshing his Indigenous affairs portfolio.

Ken Wyatt would make an attractive and highly knowledgeable Minister, particularly on matters relating to Indigenous health. Indigenous health is perhaps an area which could receive more attention from the current Government in its next term, as it tends not to have the inherent ideological tensions present in other parts of the portfolio such as land rights.

The current Minister may well decide to pack his bags and give Adam Giles (who seems likely to lose this year’s NT election) an opportunity to take a seat in the Senate, and the administration arrangements for the portfolio are likely to change. See my previous post on this latter point.

The Greens will face difficult choices, with Labor reclaiming the ideological territory it has incrementally retreated from over the past decade. How the Greens might react to this new dynamic is not immediately apparent to me.

As we head into the election, and then on towards the 50^th anniversary of the 1967 Referendum in May 2017, the debates on the place of Indigenous Australians in our nation are only going to warm up, much like the climate.

The challenge for policymakers is to ensure that we make space to address the structural policy issues adversely impacting Indigenous Australians which drive disadvantage and welfare dependence, exacerbate racism, disrespect Indigenous cultures and languages, and reduce economic and social opportunity. Constitutional change will help, but it is not a panacea.