‘Look over there’: the demise of the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council

Prithee, see there! Behold! Look! Lo! How say you?

Macbeth, Act 3, scene 4

On 15 January, I posted on the future or the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council IAC) (link here).

In that post which I repays re-reading in full, I stated inter alia:

Clearly, four different models for accessing Indigenous advice and views are in play here, including three that have been utilised by the current Government. This appears to point to a deep-seated structural confusion within the Government on the appropriate way to engage best with Indigenous interests on the breadth of its policy agenda….

…In relation to the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council, setting aside the more fundamental issues raised in my earlier post, it has been apparent to close observers for some time that all is not well….

…So what will the Government decide? There are essentially two options.

The first (and in my view less likely) would be to refresh the membership of the Advisory Council and seek to continue as if nothing has occurred…

….The second (and more likely) option is that the Government will allow the IAC to disappear. There is little substantive to show for the Council’s seven year existence, and there is no constituency advocating for its continuation. The Government may even be tempted to allow the Council to expire without any announcement…

Since I wrote that five weeks ago, there appears to have been no announcement from the Prime Minister nor Minister Wyatt of new appointments, and indeed, there appears to have been no statement whatsoever regarding the Government’s decision not to renew or refresh the membership of the IAC. A google search fails to identify any recent announcements. There was certainly no mention of the Indigenous Advisory Council by the Prime Minister in his most recent statement to Parliament on Closing the Gap (link here).

As of today (20 February 2020), the NIAA website still includes a page for the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council, although the most recent updates appear to date from March 2019.

The absence of any statement or explanation regarding the IAC’s future suggests that even the Government has concluded that there is little to show for the six years of the IAC’s existence since it first met in December 2013 (link here). It also suggests that the Government takes the community at large and the Indigenous community in particular for granted. While the rhetoric emanating at present is of partnership and co-design, the Government still appears addicted to strategies of ‘look over there’ and ‘lets move on’.

The policy implications of the demise of the IAC will be a greater reliance by the Government on the convoluted, diffuse and in many respects opaque existing advisory arrangements. In particular, these include the COAG partnership with the Coalition of peaks (link here), the three appointed advisory groups ‘co-designing an Indigenous voice’ (link here) and the Indigenous Reference Group to the Ministerial Council on Northern Australia (link here).

The fact that two of these three groups are technically engaged with providing advice to Commonwealth / State ministerial councils, suggests that the Commonwealth’s emerging medium term strategy is to shift responsibility for Indigenous policy outcomes and in particular key Closing the Gap targets wherever feasible to state and territory jurisdictions.

The complex overlapping appointed committees charged with co-designing an Indigenous Voice were apparently instructed not to focus on constitutional recognition (link here). Here too, there are clear suggestions that the Government wishes to see multiple ‘voices’ established at regional and local levels rather than a single and potentially influential national voice.

As the Prime Minister stated in his recent Closing the Gap speech (link here):

In 2018, the Joint Select Committee into Constitutional Recognition relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples delivered a bipartisan report. 

Our Government adopted the four bi-partisan recommendations in this report. 

In particular, JSCCR Recommendation 1. 

In order to design a voice that best meets the needs and aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the Committee recommends a process of co-design between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and government be initiated in communities across Australia to design a voice that can help deliver practical outcomes for that community. 

This is our Government’s policy.

It is clear from the Committee’s report that more work needs to be done on a voice proposal.

The Government has always supported giving Indigenous people more of a say at the local level.

We support the process of co-design of the voice because if we are going to change the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples on the ground, we need their buy-in to the matters and policies that affect them [emphasis added].

The complex process of co-design that has been set in train will inevitably lead to a two year hiatus in any coherent advice being provided to the Parliament or the Government (depending on which option is finally decided). Moreover, any outcome that does not ensure an effective national voice for First Nations citizens will have tremendous difficulty in effectively influencing policy.

My own admittedly pessimistic assessment is that the while ostensibly establishing a process to examine ‘constitutional recognition’, a separate ‘Indigenous Voice’, and various co-design processes for refreshing the Closing the Gap targets, the Government has thereby deftly distracted attention from more substantive matters. It has ensured that there is no substantive Indigenous advice provided, nor even significant public debate regarding the underlying effectiveness of the vast swathe of policy and program activities of the government.

Across virtually every facet of the Indigenous policy domain, the Government feels no obligation to explain what it is doing or not doing, and why it takes the decisions it does. The nation will be left to address the consequences at some point in the future, well beyond the next election.

Look over there! … Lets move on!