From every angle, public policy is about interest group influence

Federal court judges in Texas have ruled against two Indian tribes’ efforts to continue running gambling on their lands. This news is reported in an extremely insightful article form The Texas Monthly (link here). It raises issues of federal /state relations, economic development opportunities, gambling policy on and off Indian lands, and the nature of Indian sovereignty in the US.

The case demonstrates clearly how intertwined are the law and public policy, and how public policy is in so many respects ‘path-dependant’ in that is based on what has gone before. In relation to Indian sovereignty, it is also a reminder that notwithstanding the rhetoric of governments (whether national or Indian), all sovereignty is limited, constrained and shared.

The following paragraph from the article is key:

The Tigua and Alabama-Coushatta are caught in a battle over tribal sovereignty that dates to the founding of the United States. While most Native American tribes are allowed to offer gambling on their land, several other tribes across the nation are blocked from doing so by legislation or agreements with state or federal governments. “The short and straightforward answer is that tribal sovereignty is whatever Congress says it is,” said Kathryn Rand, co-director of the Institute for the Study of Tribal Gaming Law and Policy at the University of North Dakota. “I think that that strikes a lot of people, not just tribal folks, as not only unfair but nonsensical in some ways—that you’d have federally recognized tribes, but some of them have this set of rights and others have this other set of rights, just depending on not only what the federal legislation says but the tribe’s political influence in Congress and with their congressional delegations.”

The article is worth reading in full, as it resonates – albeit indirectly -- in many respects with Indigenous policy issues in Australia.

In particular, the key insight I take from the Texas dispute is that public policy is invariably infused with crosscutting value tensions and that policy outcomes are primarily a function of interest group influence (both negative and positive).

In the Australian context, this suggests that for Indigenous interests to influence public policy outcomes, they will increasingly need to develop their capabilities to engage persuasively with the wider community to influence the impact of mainstream policies on Indigenous interests.