Alas,
’tis true I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gor’d mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new;
Most true it is that I have look’d on truth
Askance and strangely:
Sonnet 110
I am in the
process of preparing for a month-long break and am unlikely to post much (or
anything) until October.
My posts have
become slightly more irregular as I have been finding it increasingly
challenging to find issues across the Indigenous policy domain which I felt
were significant enough to invest the time necessary to write a post. I generally
try not to replicate analysis which is available in the media. It is not that
there are not issues playing out, or developments occurring, but I find myself unconvinced
that they will have serious systemic impact or that I have not already written
about them either directly or tangentially.
As an aside, it
is worth mentioning that this is the 350th post on A Walking
Shadow since December 2015, and there is much that is worth exploring
should readers feel inclined to use the search function or scroll through the
Blog Archive on the right hand side of each post.
I came across
the quote below from a blog post (link here) by Scott Sumner (link here), a libertarian
or classical liberal economist from the US. It struck me that his analysis applies
as much to Australia, and to the Indigenous public policy domain, as to the US,
and because it goes to fundamental values which in turn shape the norms that
underpin our formal institutions, it is worth amplifying. It particularly
applies to the remote Indigenous policy domain where the interface of
traditional Indigenous cultural values, regional and highly parochial
mainstream political cultures, and a deep-seated reluctance by national
political leaders — and the institutions they effectively control — to address policy
issues on their merits, have created and sustained what I have previously
described as a social and governance catastrophe (link
here).
Sumner states,
inter alia:
In
my view, people focus far too much on individual issues and far too little on
the essential role of integrity in the political process. We should demand that politicians tell the
truth. We should demand that politicians
refrain from corrupt practices. We
should demand that politicians adhere strictly to not just the letter of the
law, but also its intent. If we need to
pay much higher salaries to attract the best people, then we should do so. History has shown that a lack of integrity in
the public realm leads to very bad outcomes in the long run. In the end, integrity is the only way to
prevent a country from becoming a failed state.
Sumner’s quote struck
a chord with me both because it points to a fundamental value necessary for
public policy to be effective (beyond meeting the short-term interests of
politicians). But it also hints at the existence of other values that we
normally consider as relevant to interpersonal relations, but which have under-appreciated
potential systemic or structural implications in policy contexts. For example, values
such as respect, transparency, inquisitiveness, innovation, persistence, trust,
and patience.
Each of these
values are important in shaping effective public policy yet are undervalued and
under-acknowledged in public discourse around policy issues. They seem to me to
be particularly worth emphasising in cross-cultural policy contexts such as
obtain in the Indigenous policy domain where the risks of miscommunication and
misunderstanding are heightened. To provide just one example of how a
commitment to substantive truth telling is important, I was pleased to see the
Australian Financial Review publish yesterday an oped article (link
here) by an economist, Cathal Leslie, who had previously worked for the Productivity
Commission on Closing the Gap issues, and who made the point that the
institutional framework for closing the gap fails to focus on or address a
crucial determinant of Indigenous wellbeing while focussing of other issues of marginal
significance.
Finally, it is
perhaps worth mentioning the relationship between the quotes from Shakespeare and
this blog again. I provided a brief explanation in a post dated January 2016 (link
here) and refer interested readers there for that explanation. That post
also laid out a rationale for the Blog which may be of interest to some
readers. Whether I met the aspirations laid out there is for you, the reader,
to determine.
27 August 2025
