Deflect, defer and delay: the Commonwealth strategy for closing the gap

                                         Defer no time, delays have dangerous ends.

    1 Henry IV, Act three, Scene two.

 

Inside Story has just published a short article I wrote titled Gap Years (link here). It outlines my reaction to reading the Closing the Gap Commonwealth 2023 Annual report and 2024 Implementation Plan, published together as a single document (link here).

 

I will let my arguments speak for themselves. In terms of policy proposals, I argue for three substantive policy shifts:

 

First, the Commonwealth must step up and take seriously its role as the national government and ensure that the national level reforms implicit in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap are co-ordinated and thus coherent. This is the position that was inherent in the result of the 1967 referendum which gave the Commonwealth a constitutional head of power to legislate in relation to First Nations and by virtue of the principle that Commonwealth legislation overrides inconsistent state legislation, the power to effectively shape the institutional architecture of the Indigenous policy domain. The states continue to have a role, but the Commonwealth should stand up and assert its place as the first amongst equals.

 

Second, the Commonwealth should apply much greater rigor and discipline to the formulation of the Implementation Plan for closing the gap it committed to in signing up to the National Agreement, and consistent with the first point above, must ensure that the states and territories do so as well. This issue was identified as a shortcoming in the recent Productivity Commission report.

 

Third, the Commonwealth should look to the defence portfolio for guidance on how best to think about the complex and challenging dynamics of the Indigenous policy domain. I argue that it is time the government commissioned an independent strategic review of the Indigenous policy domain, akin to the recent 2023 Defence Strategic Review (link here), aimed at bringing a much greater degree of discipline, rigour and, most importantly, urgency to a worsening crisis blighting the life opportunities of many tens of thousands of First Nations citizens. The government should also initiate action to estimate the cost of closing the gap over the next decade. This would do two things: it would give greater prominence to the actual economic costs (but not wider social and cultural costs) of the disadvantage, trauma and structural exclusion too many First Nations citizens live with; and it would allow the electorate at large to build a greater understanding of the financial and policy effort that will be necessary to close the gap.

 

None of these three policy reforms involves legislation, significant financial outlays, and adverse impacts on other interest groups. They are what is required for any serious attempt at closing the gap. The failure to pursue them is a sign that we Australians are prepared to live with a national tragedy which involves the continuing diminution of thousands of First Nations citizens’ life opportunities.

Energy regulation disparities in remote Australia

 

Comparisons are odorous.

Much Ado About Nothing, Act three, Scene five.

 

This week, the journal Nature Energy published an extraordinarily important article titled Geographies of regulatory disparity underlying Australia’s energy transition (link here). Authored by researchers at the ANU, University of Melbourne, and Tangentyere Council in Alice Springs, the article lays out in in stark and disturbing detail how remote and Indigenous communities are structurally and systemically disadvantaged in terms of regulatory protections related to the ongoing – and arguably accelerating – energy transition towards reliance on renewable energy resources. What makes this research particularly important is the extraordinarily detailed levels of analysis that provide irrefutable evidence of the patters and extent of systemic disparities.

 

This research article is the latest in a series of pathbreaking research papers that have opened up a line of sight into the complex energy related challenges facing remote Australia as it confronts the consequences of climate change. I have previously published a post on earlier research by members of this research team (link here). See also references #8, #19, #52, #61, and #68 in the current article.

 

The abstract to the most recent article states the primary research finding, which focusses on:

the geographic and socio-demographic characteristics of settlements likely to be underserved by regulations to: protect life-support customers, guarantee service levels, clarify connection requirements for rooftop solar, require disconnection reporting and set clear and independent complaints processes. Assessing whether communities receive fewer than four of five protections, we find that Indigenous communities are 15% more likely to be underserved across multiple metrics and remote communities are 18% more likely to be underserved. 

 

As the authors note in their introduction, summarising the paper’s conclusions:

Our study identifies settlements with fewer extant legal protections for electricity services, mapping those at risk of further exclusion from the benefits of energy transition. We find that life support protections, guaranteed service levels and disconnection reporting that are ubiquitous for residential customers within urban and regional areas are often absent in remote settlements. Remote settlements and settlements with majority Indigenous population are respectively 18% and 15% more likely to lack comprehensive regulatory and legal protections compared with non-remote and non-Indigenous settlements.

 

The authors have undertaken an extraordinarily detailed level of analysis and produced a series of vivid maps that illustrate the geographical extent of disadvantage, but also the complex inconsistencies in regulatory coverage that permeate the energy system nationally. I strongly recommend readers access the full paper (it is open access), scan through the maps to get some sense of the geographical spread of the disparities in regulatory coverage, and read (at the very least) the Discussion section of the paper.

 

The following paragraph provides an insight into the extent of the analysis upon which the analysis rests:

We reviewed each of the 284 documents recording legal protections pertaining to 3,047 settlements across Australia as of 1 July 2022, including those small settlements with fewer than 200 people. Of these 3,047 settlements, the 51 settlements missing data on relative socio-economic advantage are included in mapping but not the subsequent statistical analyses. Our review indicates that an estimated 5 million Australians (approximately 20% of the population) are living in settlements where not all customers are guaranteed protections across the five dimensions of life support, rooftop solar connection, disconnection reporting, guaranteed service levels and clear and independent complaints processes.

 

The Discussion section of the article is essential reading and makes a number of arguments that have enormous force and merit. I have not sought to summarise the authors arguments in that section here, but in what follows I don’t seek to detract from them in any way. There are however two important additional points I would make that readers should consider when reading the research article.

 

The first relates to the argument the authors make about the rationale for removing energy regulatory disparities. The authors argue that regulatory disparities in the energy sector should be addressed because Indigenous peoples’ lands will be crucial to the nation’s energy transition — a point made in a recent seminar by Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh (link here) — and it is thus likely that they will at once be contributing to the nation’s energy transition while simultaneously missing out on full access to energy related services. This point is obviously correct, but as a rationale for addressing disparity it is in my view incomplete.

 

The systemic disparities afflicting remote and indigenous communities extend well beyond the energy sector and demand a more extensive and wide-ranging investment of public resources. Remote housing provision, water infrastructure, communications infrastructure, investments in quality services in educations, health and ecological services all demand greater attention, yet are not assisted by focussing solely on the desirability of a just energy transition. The policy rationale for addressing systemic and structural disadvantage must be found in a more comprehensive and dare I say it, a more radical rationale based around the notion that Australian citizens deserve to have equal access to citizenship ‘entitlements’. The power of this research is to demonstrate once again, and with extraordinary analytical rigour, that this notion has never applied across remote Australia, and the gap continues today with no obvious policy mechanism or commitment in place which will address it.  

 

The second argument that needs to be made, and which is only implicit in the analysis of the research article, is the role of the Commonwealth in the federation and under the Closing the Gap National Agreement. For the past decade, the Commonwealth has run dead on taking a robust role in pushing the states to deliver services to all Indigenous citizens. The 1967 referendum gave the Commonwealth power to legislate because the states and territories were not delivering across the board: in energy, housing, health, employment, essential services, communications and more.  Of course the Commonwealth should step up on energy disparities across the nation, and actively and proactively pressure the states and territories to address these systemic services deficits. As the paper notes, the Commonwealth lacks access to data that even measures these energy disparities (refer to footnote 70 in the Discussion section of the article). But, in line with my first point above, the Commonwealth should step up across the board in pressing the states to deliver equal levels of services, including regulatory arrangements to all citizens residents across remote Australia.

 

Next month, we will see the Productivity Commission’s final report on its Review of Closing the Gap (link here). Whatever that report says, the lens which will best give the best measure of the quality of the Commonwealth’s response to that forthcoming report will be the extent to which it decides to shift its approach: that is, away from being just one of the nine government parties to the Agreement (an assemblage that at present might accurately be likened to a clowder of cats whose only skill is in producing policy confusion and turmoil) and towards an approach which proactively adopts the role of ringmaster or overseer, focussed on ensuring consistent and policy relevant processes are applied to the management of the Closing the Gap Agreement.

 

Such a shift in approach would increase the likelihood that policy and program inputs are made accessibly transparent, that states and territories will be held accountable for and therefore that tangible outcomes are delivered across the Indigenous policy domain including in areas such as energy regulation. One obvious and simple example of the sort of change I am advocating would be for the Commonwealth to promulgate a template for the state and territory Implementation Plans under the agreement that radically simplifies their format and length to say five or ten pages (like a Cabinet submission), rethinks the decision that they are produced each year, and lays out a template that ensures that they become real working documents rather public relations exercises and interminable lists of supposed actions and activities. At present these Implementation plans are a joke, and if they are not fixed, the National Agreement will be a joke.

 

Moreover, the Commonwealth should substantively acknowledge that there is more to Indigenous disadvantage than focussing on 19 closing the gap targets and broaden its current approach to the Priority Reforms at the core of the National Agreement (especially Priority Reform 3) to ensure a tangible focus on issues such as energy regulation shortfalls across remote Australia.

 

The pathbreaking research at the centre of this post has opened a window onto a previously hidden vista of systemic regulatory disparity in relation to access to and the provision of energy, but simultaneously reinforces out nation’s ability to ignore and live with continuing and much broader systemic disparities between remote and non-remote Australians. This is what structural exclusion looks like.

 

The citation for the article discussed above:

White, L.V., Riley, B., Wilson, S. et al. Geographies of regulatory disparity underlying Australia’s energy transition. Nature Energy (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-023-01422-5

 

19 January 2024

Closing the Gap: rhetoric trumps substance

 

I have recently published two CAEPR Discussion Papers on Closing the Gap.

 

The first, titled The first decade of Closing the Gap: What went wrong? (link here), deals with the initial phase of Closing the Gap from 2008 to 2020. This phase extends from the announcement of the new policy architecture for closing the gap by the Rudd Government, established under a COAG agreement known as the National Indigenous Reform Agreement (NIRA), through to its expiry in 2018 -2020.

 

The second Discussion Paper, titled The new policy architecture for Closing the Gap: Innovation and regression (link here), covers the second ‘refreshed’ phase of closing the gap established under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap (link here) promulgated in July 2020.

 

The first Discussion Paper demonstrates how LNP Governments from 2013 progressively dismantled and/or defunded the various National Partnership Agreements that were encompassed by the NIRA, based on an examination of key high level evaluations and reviews, and importantly, on a ‘review’ of the NIRA commissioned by COAG obtained, after extensive effort, under FOI (link here). The key point here (confirmed in the NIRA review prepared by Government officials and endorsed by the Joint Council on Closing the Gap) is that from 2013 onwards, while Prime Ministers stood up each year and delivered heartfelt reports to the Australian people and parliament on closing the gap, the overall funding allocated in phase one was progressively cut back and not renewed as appropriations ended.

 

See this earlier post for an account of the reasons the document was initially refused in full (link here). Following an appeal to the Australian Information Commissioner, and the preparation of multiple submissions countering the agency’s blustering, the Department finally released the document in full in November 2020, in advance of a pending decision by the Information Commissioner. The 15 months delay between the original request (in August 2019) and the release was justified by the agency on the basis that changed circumstances meant that it was no longer not in the public interest to refuse access. I for one was not persuaded by the agency’s rationales, both in refusing access initially, and releasing later in advance of the Information Commissioner review.

 

The second Discussion Paper critically analyses the policy architecture put in place by the ‘refresh’ process which was based on a codesign process with the Coalition of Peaks, comprising over 50 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled peak and member organisations across Australia. After describing the processes leading up to the negotiation of the new National Agreement on closing the gap, the analysis discusses the relevant academic literature and critically assesses the implementation risks that could undermine the success of the second phase of closing the gap. Those risks are more than substantial. The Discussion Paper then outlines a series of further reforms that might  be considered to address those risks.

 

While each Discussion Paper stands on its own, they are complementary insofar as they are chronologically sequential. The evidence shows that the LNP Government has for eight years cut or failed to renew financial resources directed to closing the gap. Over time, these decisions effectively eviscerated the capability of the initial policy architecture to gain traction. Looking forward, the LNP Government has deliberately shifted responsibility for much of the heavy lifting to the states and territories, and allocated what can only be described as a miserable contribution going forward (link here). In the future, any shortfall in meeting the Closing the Gap targets will be primarily the fault of the states and territories. Over the past eight years, the Opposition ALP, and to a lesser extent the Greens, appear to have run dead on these steadily accumulating incremental cuts, preferring to score vapid political points rather than mount a sustained campaign directed to holding the LNP Government to account for its (deliberate) policy failures. In these circumstances, the likelihood that the nation will get serious about closing the gap and make a substantial difference in the near future seems remote. Only sustained and effective political pressure will change this pessimistic reality.

 

I hope these Discussion Papers will go some way to highlighting the ways in which governments are failing not only First Nations, but the nation as a whole, and consequently, point towards strategies that might ultimately take us out of the wilderness. While the issues are articulated in bureaucratic and technical terms, the outcomes on the ground are measured in shortened lifespans, reduced educational opportunities, increased family violence, increased incarceration, increased out of home care, higher rates of mental illness, higher unemployment, and significantly reduced life opportunities. To some, this may sound like ‘deficit discourse’, but my point is that these outcomes are real and they are clearly and demonstrably a function of the lack of substantive policy and political commitment by governments and the political class generally.