Indigenous evaluation: selected links

   

His promises were as he then was, mighty,

But his performance, as he is now, nothing.

Henry VIII, Act 4, scene 2.

The Productivity Commission has recently published its draft report on Indigenous Evaluation, and is seeking further submissions by 3 August from the public.

I thought it timely to post links to the PC document, and to a few documents I have authored in relation to the topic of Indigenous evaluation. I wont add further commentary here; the documents speak for themselves.

Link to a previous post, ‘Marshmallow and Fudge: evaluation and the Indigenous policy domain’, here

Link to the Productivity Commission Draft Report on Indigenous evaluation here. The final report is due by the end of the year.

Link to my initial submission to the Productivity Commission here

Link to my recent evaluation policy insights paper on the CAEPR website here. It is titled Evaluation and review as drivers of reform in the Indigenous policy domain.

From the Abstract:

This Policy Insights Paper seeks to assess the influence of evaluation and review in influencing policy in the Indigenous affairs policy domain. The paper examines four high-level case studies of strategically significant policy issues within the Indigenous policy domain to assess the impact of evaluation in driving reform over time. 

Vale John Ah Kit

I woke this morning to the very sad news that John Ah Kit had died over the weekend in Darwin. My relationship with Jack was primarily professional, as I served as his department CEO from 2002 to 2005. We had crossed paths many times previously going back to the early 1980s when he worked as the CEO of the Northern Land Council and I was working for the Central Land Council.

Both the ABC (link here) and the Guardian (link here) have stories celebrating his life, his many admirable personal qualities and noting his pathbreaking achievements across four decades. I concur with their assessments.

As usual, I went for a walk this morning. In soft rain, I found my rhythm, and my mind turned to Jack and what his life meant and continues to mean. I remembered the times we had spent together, both relaxed and enjoyable, and stressful and pressured, as we grappled with the multiple issues that inevitably confront a cabinet minister in the NT. Others knew him better, spent more time with him, and are undoubtedly better qualified than me to comment on his life.

Nevertheless, I think there are some insights that I observed over the years working with him that are worth sharing.

He had an insatiable capacity to put his ear to the ground. He always knew what was happening from a community perspective, and he brought that knowledge to bear in his policy decisions. He understood intuitively that top down policymaking was inadequate in addressing Indigenous aspirations and policy challenges. 

He also understood the value of organised action in exerting influence. He had been a key player in the 1980s in developing the Federation of Land Councils, a loose alliance of Indigenous land councils that spent a lot of time lobbying the Federal Government on national land rights issues, and created the momentum that ultimately led to the High Court recognising the existence of native title in the Mabo Case.

These qualities and perspectives made him a formidable political operator (in the best sense of the word), someone who could find solutions to tricky issues, who was prepared to drive for substantive reform and tangible policies, and who understood that compromise with progress was preferable to ideology with stasis.

The sadness I feel for his passing relates to his personal qualities: his innate decency and lively good humour, and so much more. However, his enduring contribution to Territory and indeed Australian public policy is to be found in the institutional frameworks he was instrumental in improving as a key member of a reformist Labor Government out of power for over 20 years. And perhaps most importantly, in the track he carved that has created a much more inclusive environment in Territory politics than existed before he arrived. 

The full and considered history of those times is yet to be written. When it is, John Ah Kit will be recognised as a pathbreaking reformer and contributor to shifting the Territory into the 21st century.

Joint sovereignty: is the tide coming in?

There is a tide in the affairs of men…

Julius Caesar Act 4, scene 3

The New York Times reports on the recent US Supreme Court decision in McGirt v Oklahoma relating to Treaty rights in Oklahoma (link here) which appears to confirm the ongoing operation of native American sovereignty over Native Americans residing in much of eastern Oklahoma. I recommend readers look at the report in full.

The Times report summarised the core of the case as follows:

The court’s decision means that Indigenous people who commit crimes on the eastern Oklahoma reservation, which includes much of Tulsa, cannot be prosecuted by state or local law enforcement, and must instead face justice in tribal or federal courts.

The rationale for the majority decision boils down to a decision that Congress should be required to uphold promises made. The NY Times reports states, inter alia,

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, a Westerner who has sided with tribes in previous cases and joined the court’s more liberal members to form the majority, said that Congress had granted the Creek a reservation, and that the United States needed to abide by its promises.

“Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law,” Justice Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion. “Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word.”

The case raises the obvious question for Australian readers: what does this mean for Indigenous rights in Australia?

The short answer is ‘very little’. In Australia, we do not have formal treaties, and nor did past Governments make formal and legally enforceable promises.

There are however in my view at least two broad implications for Australian policymakers to seriously consider.

First, the decision does however create yet another north American precedent of the legal system (in this case the highest court in the USA) acknowledging the legitimacy of recognising Indigenous sovereignty albeit constrained by the terms of the original Congressional commitments. 

Australian policymakers appear set on a course of resisting any substantive reform notwithstanding the huge accumulation of evidence that Indigenous citizens are the subject of structurally exclusionary policies.

Second, the decision appears to acknowledge and recognise the reality and indeed desirability of joint sovereignty in Oklahoma and by virtue of this perhaps more widely in the future. Neil Westbury and I explored the concept of joint sovereignty as a potential way forward in the Australian context in our 2019 Policy Insights Paper Overcoming Indigenous Exclusion (available online here).

Indigenous representation in the APS: more talk

I praise God for you sir: your reasons …have been sharp and sententious, pleasant without scurrility, witty without affection, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange without heresy.

                     Love’s Labour Lost, Act 5, Scene 1.

The Australian Public Service Commission last week released the Commonwealth Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Workforce Strategy 2020-2024 (link here). The core objectives of the Strategy are laid out in the text below (graphics removed):

Overall Commonwealth workforce representation targets

The Commonwealth aspires to achieve a stretch target of 3 per cent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employee representation for the Senior Executive Service by 2024, the final year of the Strategy.

To achieve the desired outcome, the Commonwealth should aim to invest in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representation at the APS 4 to APS 6 levels (or equivalent) to 5 per cent by the end of 2022, this will help build the pipeline; and representation of 5 per cent at the Executive Levels 1 and 2 by the end of 2024.

Initially this will be achieved through targeted recruitment with a longer term focus on developing employees within the public sector to enable promotion into the more senior roles.

Commonwealth stretch targets

Portfolio workforce representation targets

To support the Commonwealth in building the talent pipeline, each portfolio should aim to achieve a stretch target of 3 per cent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representation  at each classification level in their workforce by 2024, the final year of the Strategy.

The Mandarin reported on the release of the Strategy (link here) and quoted the Public Service Commissioner, Peter Woolcott as saying the plan would set the direction for all employers across the Commonwealth, and would ‘accelerate improvements in closing the gap in social and economic outcomes between Indigenous Australians and non-Indigenous Australians’ by building on the achievements of the previous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment strategy. Unfortunately, the new strategy provides no contextual data to assist in identifying and fleshing out the ‘achievements’ of the previous strategy.

About 15 months ago, I commented on the desultory progress in reflecting the demographic composition of First Nations within the APS, particularly at SES levels. My post, titled Indigenous Employment in the APS: a policy recommendation can be found here. I argued there that what was required was a Prime Ministerial commitment to doubling the Indigenous representation in the SES within four years. Such a commitment would send the required message to Departmental Secretaries who are the key decisionmakers on SES appointments.

The present strategy adopts a rather different approach, although it appears similar to the untrained eye. It has the backing of the Public Service Commissioner and the Minister for Indigenous Australians, but relies on something termed ‘stretch targets’. A target is not a commitment, and a stretch target is a target that we acknowledge up front will be extremely difficult to attain.

Of course, targets without resources and /or incentives are unlikely to be met. I see little in the way of extra resources for the APS to prioritise these targets over the multiple other challenges they face, nor do I see persuasive incentives in place pushing agencies to take the decisive action that will be required to meet these targets. Further, while the notion of a pipeline from EL1 and EL2 levels into the SES makes intuitive sense, the reality is that there is not enough time in a four year strategy for this to have anything more than a marginal impact on SES levels of representation.

My conclusion is that this new strategy is more about rhetoric more than reality. For comparison, look to New Zealand where agency heads have been given legislative requirements to support Maori leadership within the public service (see my earlier post on New Zealand public sector reform here).

It is also worth reminding ourselves that less than a year ago, the Government published the Thodey Review and its response. It landed with a resounding silence. My assessment of the implications of the Thodey Review for Indigenous Australians can be found here…it is salient that Thodey said very little specific regarding Indigenous representation within the SES, and the Government walked away from anything which appeared to challenge the status quo. As a result there is no cross reference in the recently released workforce strategy. More significantly, the underlying message to agencies and their leadership was that Indigenous issues are not the priority. In that sense, the current Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Workforce Strategy can be seen as entirely aligned with the status quo: all talk but little action.