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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