Wednesday, 20 May 2020

Indigenous economic and social development in northern Australia in a post-pandemic world




In 2007, Neil Westbury and I wrote a chapter in our book Beyond Humbug arguing that Indigenous economic and social development in the north would be a net contributor to Australia’s defence and national security.

I was therefore interested to read a short and persuasive report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (link here) focussed on the deficiencies in Australia’s fuel security and its potentially adverse national security implications[1].

In particular, it struck me that core elements in the report’s argument could be transposed to the Indigenous policy domain as further evidence that the Government has dropped the ball on effective policy in support of Indigenous economic and social development in northern Australia. I have previously posted critically on this issue (link here and here).

Set out below are admittedly selective extracts from the ASPI report that in my view apply with equal or greater force to the Indigenous policy domain:

The government’s Our north, our future: White Paper on developing northern Australia identified the need for greater public–private partnership in the development of Australia’s north. It established two major northern funding programs: the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (NAIF; $5 billion) and the Northern Territory Investment Fund ($200 million), but neither has delivered much. It’s clear that nation building in the north needs considerably more thought and commitment than it has received until recently (page 7)….

…Northern development has been a wicked problem for governments since federation. In periods of strategic uncertainty, it has taken on significant value. However, the north’s remoteness from Australia’s population centres has meant that economic investment is a costly endeavour with little benefit at the polling booth. To the casual observer, such analysis might appear glib, but a long-term investment in northern development is a fleeting policy focus. Over the past 50 years, consecutive governments have relied upon market forces and demanded a return on investment to drive nation building in Australia.

Australia’s declining strategic certainty and its Covid-19 lessons on national resilience indicate a need for a change. Or, more accurately, perhaps policymakers will need to do more to ensure that our national interests and strategy aren’t subordinated to commercial profits or economic models that we now see have major gaps and flaws. …

…The Our north, our future: White Paper on developing northern Australia identified the need for greater public–private partnership in the development of Australia’s north. The White Paper established two major northern funding programs: the NAIF and the NT Infrastructure Development Fund. Unfortunately, the NAIF is under parliamentary review for lack of capital allocation and the NT Infrastructure Development Fund has been closed down due to a lack of capital allocation. The debt-based model of both failed to contribute to a sovereign investment model.

… Covid-19 has already shown that market forces don’t always promote adequate national resilience in multiple areas, from broadband bandwidth to the capacity to produce essential medical supplies. … The Covid-19 pandemic has made it increasingly clear that Australia’s current model for nation-building infrastructure investment is far too narrowly focused. The notion that such investments should be funded mainly by those who directly benefit from them rather than also considering who benefits from the increased capacity and resilience more broadly is reducing the country’s resilience. (page 24)…

… The debt-based NAIF and user-pays nation-building efforts are unlikely to result in anything more than passing peaks of economic activity. Unfortunately, those arrangements aren’t supporting the kinds of massive nation-building efforts needed in Australia’s north, where the Australian Government should be considering ambitious investments. Private–public partnerships focused on providing national and regional energy resilience should be given priority (page 25)….

... The government’s policy position that ‘the most appropriate and sustainable structural solution to the maintenance deficit in public infrastructure is a transition to a user-pays model’ isn’t helping to build a safe and secure northern Australia.

Covid-19 has provided the Australian Government with an enormous opportunity to review and reset its nation building policies. Case studies such as the one presented in this report highlight the complexity of the challenge, but they also illustrate how post-covid-19 nation-building and economic stimulus packages could be used to build our national resilience (page 27) [emphasis added].

There is not much to disagree with in these extracts from an Indigenous policy perspective. Perhaps my only caveat would be to suggest that in the Indigenous policy domain, housing provision should be the policy priority. The reasons are intuitively obvious; reduced overcrowding will deliver multiple ongoing benefits: it will improve children’s educational outcomes, reduce domestic violence, reduce the risk of disease transmission, provide opportunities for local employment in construction, repairs and maintenance, and assist the recruitment of locally engaged teachers, nurses and police.

Moreover, going forward, key policy themes for governments in relation to remote communities should be risk and resilience: building community resilience, and reducing the risk of the current and importantly future pandemics. These objectives require increased and sustained new investment. If not now, when?

The key constraints to implementing the policy prescription outlined by the ASPI report authors, but transposed to an Indigenous context, are twofold: a lack of vision by governments – unlike the authors of this report, governments appear unable to recognise that the stimulus will be ongoing (see this article by Adam Triggs – link here) and needs to be channelled into nation and community building, and a lack of an appropriate institutional framework for converting the stimulus that will likely be ongoing for the next five years (see the short article I wrote recently advocating a post-pandemic reconstruction agency for the Indigenous policy domain – link here) to building Indigenous resilience and economic and social opportunity.



[1] Coyne J., McCormack, T., & Crichton-Standish, H. (2020). Running on empty: a case study of fuel security for civil and military air operations at Darwin airport, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Canberra. There is much else of interest in the report that I haven’t been able to comment upon.

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