Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out.
King Lear, Act five, Scene three.
Two recent posts have elicited some commentary which I think deserves to
be shared more widely, not least because the comments raise important issues in
relation to policy development that are rarely discussed or considered.
My 25 May post, The drivers of stratospheric rates of Indigenous incarceration (link here), discussing an important Australian Institute of Criminology research report by Don Weatherburn, Michael Doyle, Tegan Weatherall and Joanna Wang elicited the following comment from Tim Rowse (emphasis added):
It is important that you write: 'a substantial
"underclass" of excluded citizens, many of whom are Indigenous'. In
his largely ignored 2022 Boyer Lectures Noel Pearson referred to the 'bottom
one million'. Like you, he did not specify them as 'Indigenous', though he
would probably agree that many of them are. What is at stake here is our
theory of social exclusion: it is too much coloured by an assumption that the
Non-Indigenous/Indigenous difference is the primary determinant of social
exclusion, as if a person's relationship to colonisation (as coloniser or as
colonised) is the primary determinant of their life chances. Don
Weatherburn continues to assault this paradigm.
In my most recent post, A legacy of plunder (link here) I argued inter alia that:
… the gradual and incremental deterioration of what
were once reforming and pathbreaking institutional frameworks can, in worst
case scenarios, facilitate the continuation (often in new guises and incremental
steps) of economic and social dispossession.
Rather than expressing surprise at how recently people
have been behaving very badly towards indigenous people, I think you should
turn the question around. Why did they
stop? For 10,000 years, since the advent
of agriculture, people have been taking land from indigenous people, and nobody
much cared, except the indigenous people.
This really only became an issue post WW2 with the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights. But even then we here
were still discriminating against Aboriginal people in many ways, cancelling
the reservation of lands set aside of the use and benefit of Aboriginal people
and employing them on low wages up until the 1960s, as you well know. I think
this perspective is very important to getting the present into perspective.
Implicit in the second comment is the notion that the long and enduring historical propensity for powerful nations or societies to dispossess Indigenous peoples reflects the willingness of, and structural necessity for powerful interests to take whatever action is required to strengthen their own economic, social and ideological position vis a vis potential competitors and/or to make use of the human capital of less powerful interests to strengthen more powerful interest groups’ position. In such a dynamic (which I would argue is almost universal among human societies and particularly prevalent in more technologically complex modern societies), Indigenous societies are likely to be vulnerable to dispossession and exclusion. But so too are comparatively less powerful interests built around or associated with various economic or religious or social characteristics.
Instead, I am seeking to focus more on the challenge of identifying appropriate policy responses in post-colonial contexts. The framework I see as being of most use relates to the nature of the power relations that apply within particular nations or societies. I acknowledge the potential importance of symbolic and in some contexts the real consequences of normative values such as are reflected in human rights declarations, but have formed the view that while these frameworks are essential in assessing policy outcomes, they are rarely decisive in shaping policy outcomes. In other words, policy outcomes are overwhelmingly shaped by the balance of power between competing economic and social interests which reach an equilibrium that establishes in effect a dominant coalition of (competing) interests.
If I am right, the prospects for decolonisation (defined as the reversal of dispossession and exclusionary political structures) in Australia are extremely limited. The normative case for decolonisation may be extremely strong or even incontrovertible, but it will not persuade policymakers structurally beholden to maintaining an equilibrium between the most powerful competing interests in society.
Moreover, the equilibrium between key mainstream interests in any society is inherently dynamic and unstable, and those core interests are in perpetual tension vying for access to scarce public rents and resources. In these circumstances policymakers are loathe to unilaterally upset the equilibrium. Instead, they use a range of tactics to ensure the existing equilibrium within the dominant coalition is not threatened. In relation to conflicts between more powerful interests within the dominant coalition, policymakers explore compromise and trade-offs of various kinds. In relation to comparatively weak interests (such as the unemployed, or remote Indigenous communities) policymakers’ tactics include delay, protracted ‘consultation’, promising but not delivering, engaging in insincere ‘codesign’, co-option of individual leaders, over-engineering policy implementation, using funding to silence calls for substantive reform, and of course, from time to time, just plain dissembling and obfuscation.
In my view the only viable strategy for substantively advancing Indigenous interests (and indeed the interests of other groups subjected to systemic exclusion) is to progressively build the alliances and coalitions necessary to exercise real power within society. There is a place for normative argument and ideology in prosecuting a real politik policy agenda, but to be effective normative arguments must contribute to building a power base, and thus they must be strategically targeted. Much more important than normative arguments are investing in building cohesion and unity, and building the capacity to engage on policy detail in ways that are sustained over time and which utilise policy language relevant to and understood by mainstream dominant interests and policymakers. In particular, the very process of building and sustaining policy relevant capabilities contributes to the accretion of greater power.
In such a world, from time to time, windows of opportunity open for talented individuals with influence to drive and implement reform. For example, Gough Whitlam and the NT Land Rights Act; or Paul Keating and the Native Title Act; or Gerry Hand and ATSIC. There are probably many other examples at a smaller scale. Yet all such reforms are vulnerable to being wound back as the dominant interests in society exert pressure on policymakers to reverse the gains and return to something approximating the status quo ante.
In these circumstances, as I suggested in my recent post on the Legacy of Plunder, it is crucial that Indigenous interests allocate advocacy and policy resources to protecting past gains as well as investing in further reforms. Of course this is never easy, but the first step in building the capacity to influence policy in modern Australia is to be clear headed and clear sighted about what will be necessary to drive sustained policy reform. In my view, one element of the necessary strategy is to look forward, not backward. The normative arguments against colonisation are irrefutable, but the past cannot be undone. A second element is to build the policy expertise and capability to apply sustained pressure on policymakers on strategically important key policy issues (ie not just on the political issue of the day). A third requirement would be to develop a strategic framework which identifies the crucial issues worth allocating significant time and attention.
The import of Tim Rowse’s comment quoted above is that structural exclusion is broader than past or ongoing colonisation (or racism) and that this points to a cohort of potential allies for Indigenous interests seeking to build the political power necessary to overcome systemic exclusion, and join the key interests in society who are included in the dominant coalition that shapes the institutions that in turn allocates the distribution of society’s available resources. The import of the second comment by my un-named friend is to point to the longstanding propensity of the members of the dominant coalition in any society to determine/define what are ‘core state imperatives’ (to use a phrase coined by the political philosopher John Dryzek). These determinations operate to maximise or even monopolise the societal dividend going to members of the dominant coalition, and to justify the exercise raw power to achieve that objective where feasible, including by shaping institutions to systemically exclude less powerful groups where they can.
In other words, reversing exclusion requires excluded interests to lift themselves by the bootstraps and progressively accumulate the political power to force entry into the dominant coalition of interests. In the absence of a successful revolution, the only viable pathway for excluded interests to reverse their exclusionary status is the gradual accumulation of policy influence using sustained and strategically informed advocacy, and the accumulation of organisational and political skills. Normative arguments can assist in such a process, but on their own are not sufficient to drive change.
Note: the ideas in this post draw on political settlement theory. For those
interested, a good place to start is with Kelsall et. al. (2022) Political
Settlements and Development: Theory, Evidence, Implications, Oxford
University Press, https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/58143
18 June 2024
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