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.