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The Final Report has now been delivered to the Queensland Government, but may not be published for up to six months.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