The institutional drivers of remote disadvantage

 

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will.

Hamlet, Act five, Scene two

 

We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape till custom make it
Their perch and not their terror.

Measure for Measure, Act two, Scene one.

 

In a recent article published in Pearls and Irritations (link here), political strategist and pollster Kos Samaras provides an insightful analysis of the reasons behind the rise of One Nation, and the structural bifurcation embedded within its base. As he says

There is an old cohort that came to Hanson on identity and a new one that came on grievance, and they do not want the same things. 

I found his argument to be persuasive, but my aim here is to repurpose his analysis to explore one element of an issue that I have previously articulated in a number of contexts (link here and link here), namely the importance of leveraging and reforming mainstream policy frameworks in seeking to address Indigenous disadvantage. More pointedly, I emphasise the risks of not engaging with mainstream policy and relying solely on the fiction that the solutions to Indigenous disadvantage can be found in greater utilisation of Indigenous specific policy approaches and/or are solely the domain of Indigenous interests.

The element of this mainstream/Indigenous specific tension that I focus on here is the related but conceptually distinct divide between remote Australia (and its remote communities) and urban and regional Australia.

In his article on One Nation, Samaras has this to say about the origins of the cohort of voters that are focussed on identity. They were people who while they owned their homes in the towns that range right across Australia’s hinterlands:

In the narrow, cash-flow sense this voter was not poor. The mortgage was gone. What had gone with it was a sense that the world they grew up in, and raised families in, had gone too: not replaced, but declined.

The paid-off home sits in a part of Australia that has been quietly stripped of institutions, industry and services. Since 2017 around 37 per cent of the country’s bank branches have closed, and in the space of three years more than 600 towns were left with no banking service at all. In the Riverina alone, 22 towns have lost their last bank, and Grenfell lost all four of the majors.

The hospital tells the same story. More than 130 rural birthing units have shut their doors, so an expectant mother now drives hours to deliver. There are about 437 full-time-equivalent doctors per 100,000 people in the big cities and roughly 264 in the very remote. Close to one in five remote Australians cannot see a local GP, around 60 per cent have no specialist within reach, and life expectancy runs up to seven years shorter than in the capitals.

And the people are leaving. The young go first, to the capitals for work and study, which has pushed the median age in the regions to 42 against 36 in the cities, with only about 30 per cent of residents outside the capitals now in the prime 20-to-44 band. Whole districts are contracting: wheatbelt towns like Northampton and Morawa shedding three and four per cent in a single year, the old mining centres of Broken Hill, Mount Isa and Port Augusta bleeding numbers, and in a growing list of places the deaths now outnumber the births.

Samaras documents, in a highly revealing graph showing the level of voter support for One Nation, that in September 2025, that support was just above 10% nationally (essentially the Party’s original identity based cohort) and grew over the succeeding four months to over 25% and in the subsequent four months to the present rate of 31% support nationally. This later growth is due to the second of Samaras cohorts, younger voters with cost-of-living grievances.

In analysing the implications of his analysis, Samaras explains why One Nation's place based cohort support base is so resilient:

If the vote is anchored in a place-formed identity rather than in the world the iPhone made, two things follow.

The first is that it will not be bought off. A budget measure can ease a mortgage. It cannot return a voter to a country that feels like the one they grew up in, because that country was partly a function of being younger in a smaller, more legible world. The grievance is real, but at root it is not fiscal, which is why fiscal answers keep sailing past it. [I don’t explore the second factor here].

I’ve quoted the Samaras analysis here, because it resonates strongly with and even parallels my own analysis of the reasons Indigenous residents of remote Australia over the past five decades have had their world upended.

If the decline of a pre-existing institutional footprint of government and the economic impacts of modern capitalism (or neoliberalism) is such that small towns become economically and socially unviable, and this in turn leads to the political earthquake of national significance we are seeing today with the rise of One Nation, is it surprising then that the failure of successive governments to invest in and establish these institutions in remote Indigenous communities for the past half century would also have major, extensive and cumulative impacts on the social and economic viability of remote communities? And is it also surprising that the subsequent demographic shifts, which have seen an increasing exodus from communities and influx into regional centres like Kununurra, Halls Creek, Tennant Creek and Alice Springs, would also bring with them the mayhem and despair of their prior world turned upside down? My point is not that the processes of remote community displacement and the hollowing of the local economies of regional Australia are equivalent, but rather to point to the fact that the loss of institutional frameworks by citizens structurally included within the Australian political settlement while earthshattering, is nevertheless overshadowed by the ongoing impact on citizens excluded from the Australian political settlement because they have never had access to the benefits of the institutional frameworks most Australians take for granted.

While colonisation and the expansion of settlement across the nation was violent, and extremely traumatic for Indigenous societies, with the establishment of the pastoral industry across the northern savannahs, missions in the most geographically remote areas, and various Aboriginal reserves in desert and other non-pastoral areas, a social and economic equilibrium was established that created widespread stability within remote communities. It was an equilibrium built on access to rations, seasonal employment on pastoral stations for both men and women, and in many respects was an accommodation which averted the ongoing violence and economic cost for both sides of continuing frontier violence, but also had embedded within it mutual misunderstanding of what the accommodation involved and where it might lead in the future. See my brief discussion of Tim Rowse’s insightful book White Flour, White Power in this earlier post (link here). Historian Shannyn Palmer has also written persuasively on the reasons for the demographic shift from the deserts to remote communities in central Australia prior to World War Two, emphasising the role of Indigenous agency in the choices Aboriginal people made.

In my assessment, the equilibrium established was neither just nor institutionally inclusive. This led in turn to a decades long project by progressive Australians and increasingly Aboriginal advocates for civil rights, human rights and land rights. On one metric, the extent of legally acknowledged Aboriginal land ownership, that struggle has been extraordinarily successful. The land rights movement has seen the establishment of a complex array of institutional reforms leading to acknowledged Aboriginal land ownership of one form or another rising from effectively zero to some 58% of the Australian land mass being either owned, managed or subject to special rights (link here) in 2024.

Yet despite those successes, and the associated policy shifts away from assimilation, and towards self-management, and later self-determination, the social and economic equilibrium in place across remote Australia in the 1970s has seriously fractured. Perhaps the most significant shift was the well-intentioned decision in 1967 to force the pastoral industry to pay Aboriginal workers equal wages. It led to an immediate and significant loss of Aboriginal pastoral employment, which in turn led in many cases to the eviction of Aboriginal people from access to their country. Simultaneously, Government ration stations were closed, mission funding began to dry up and most closed or took a back seat as the Commonwealth stepped in to fund self-managing communities. These settlements were in locations where state government and local government services were not provided since they were structured around servicing ratepayers (who often were paying only nominal fees). Over subsequent decades, the Commonwealth (through DAA first, and later ATSIC) put significant pressure on states and territories to lift their game and support Indigenous citizens. In recent years, the Commonwealth has pre-emptively pulled away from the provision of comprehensive support to remote communities even in circumstances where the states and territories were not locked into the provision of sustained funding arrangements.

The situation of First Nations citizens in urban and regional Australia is also fraught but has different manifestations and thus requires different policy approaches (in my view). I do not address those issues here.

The drivers of the political shifts that underlie the accelerating loss of political and social equilibrium across remote Australia are not well understood. My own diagnosis is that the dominant coalition of the most influential economic and social interests in Australian society is itself in a perpetual process of internal bargaining and ongoing pressure on governments over the institutional frameworks which comprise the national political settlement, and that these interest-focussed processes structurally ignore, and where feasible exclude, weaker interests, including remote Indigenous interests. For a detailed discussion, see the Policy Insights Paper titled Overcoming Indigenous Exclusion which I co-authored with Neil Westbury in 2019 (link here).

Whatever the reasons, the reality of the breakdown of the social equilibrium that was established in the 1970s across remote Indigenous communities is beyond question. I have written extensively about social and economic dysfunction in remote communities in this blog. For example, I list 16 former posts in this omnibus post from August 2025 (link here). This is why the Samaras analysis of the disenchantment of mainstream voters across regional towns struck a chord with me,  and why his account of the economic and social decline due to the withdrawal of private and public sector services reminded me of the argument I made (with Neil Westbury) in our 2007 book Beyond Humbug (link here).

We argued not that key institutions had been present and were now being withdrawn across remote communities, but rather that governments had failed to pursue policies that ensured that the institutional footprint of government was ever established in those communities. That missing institutional footprint includes not just economic frameworks that encourage and incentivize commercial activity (e.g. banks, surveyed residential land titles, and the like) but the public sector footprint that ensures there are effective properly funded and staffed schools, access to specialist health care such as dentists and optometrists, aged persons care, disability services aligned with the service delivery models being pursued at state and federal levels, properly regulated social housing systems, and so on.

From time to time, it is argued that geographic remoteness goes hand in glove with the absence of economic viability, and that this undercuts the rationale for any support for remote communities. Indeed, a decade of so ago, the West Australian Government openly canvassed options for closing some or all remote communities. Ultimately, they backed down in the face of sustained outrage and opposition from Indigenous land councils and wider interests and the Commonwealth.

My own view is that framing policy reform opportunities in terms of remoteness/viability issues quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Long term under-investment erodes the institutional viability of communities, and the residents ultimately vote with their feet (albeit in directions that governments do not anticipate). Yet, for example, governments do not decide where to locate military infrastructure across the north based on an assessment of the economic viability of the locations under consideration. They determine that the defence of the nation is in the national interest and then invest accordingly. While an under-appreciated proposition, I take the view that keeping people on country across the north is a key component of the national interest, is also in the public interest, as well as being something that the Aboriginal people of the north see as important. With land ownership goes responsibilities for land management. Without land and coastal management, important biosecurity issues will be ignored and will create risks for the nation that extend beyond the lands in question. There are strategic benefits in ensuring the north remains populated not just along the coast, but inland.  If I am correct, then policies that incentivise residents of remote communities to leave their communities and move to regional urban centres are ultimately counterproductive to advancing that national interest.

It is incontrovertible that there are economic costs to the budget of building social and economic footprint of government in remote and northern Australia. Similarly, there are costs to building infrastructure designed to contribute to the defence of the nation. While governments do have fiscal constraints, if something is in the national interest, it deserves to be funded at some level over a sustained period.

Moreover, there are strong arguments in support of strengthening the institutional footprint in remote Australia, ranging from normative/ethical ones to more practical arguments based on the benefits of not creating a permanent class of citizens that are structurally excluded from the benefits (and responsibilities) of effective citizenship. The economic and social costs of the current levels of community dysfunction across remote Australia are not listed in the annual budget papers, but they are substantial and growing. More importantly, the opportunity costs of that ongoing dysfunction on communities and families, but also on the nation are considerable.

A key implication of this analysis is that it is for governments to expand the footprint of mainstream institutional frameworks to remote regions and communities. That is not to say that the mode of implementation ought not to take into account local and cultural concerns and aspirations, but fundamentally it is not an Indigenous specific responsibility, but a task that falls to mainstream government.  Moreover, it is both intellectually (and politically) lazy and fundamentally incorrect to ‘blame the victim’ for persistent social dysfunction. Just as the planning and construction of roads and highways is governed by generalised algorithms and policy approaches, other institutional frameworks should also be provided nationally and not be artificially constrained in their application by structural and systemic biases that are built upon the structural exclusion of Indigenous interests. The risk of seeing the challenges of remote Indigenous communities solely through the lens of Indigenous specific policy frameworks is that it can contribute to leaving longstanding and enduring structural exclusion in place and ultimately may lead to the premature or unnecessary depopulation of those communities, and the concomitant influx of remote migrants into regional towns.

The bigger risk is that by not investing in the institutional frameworks necessary to include remote populations within the mainstream institutional architecture of the nation, thus ensuring that these places and populations are governed as part of the nation, we are creating the conditions where systemic exclusion metastasises beyond remote communities and ultimately in ways that both rebound on Indigenous people and corrupt the wider body politic.

The bottom line is that remote disadvantage is primarily a function of systemic exclusion, and as Kos Samaras points out (in the context of analysing the grievances underpinning the rise of One Nation) the solution is not merely one of allocating more funding (however necessary that might be) but expanding the governance and institutional footprint (both public and private) of the nation’s governance to the whole expanse of the nation.

 

15 June 2026

ERRATUM

Contrary to my statment above, the Equal Wages decision for Aboriginal pastoral workers was handed down in 1966, but the Commission agreed to a phased implementation timetable which meant it was not implemented in the NT until December 1968. There were some variations in this timetable in the other states. See this informative talk by Sally Skyring from 2009 at the National Museum focussed on the Kimberley implementation of equal wages (link here).

 16 June 2026

The drivers of systemic exclusion

                                    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.

 In response to that post, an un-named friend emailed me in the following terms:

 

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.

 Both these comments direct attention to the importance of how the analysis of issues and events are framed in order to (a) understand their internal dynamics and (b) identify appropriate policy responses. Implicit in Tim Rowse’s comment is the notion that social exclusion (which I would argue is defined by having a systemic element or basis embedded institutionally) has historically facilitated violence against those excluded; that it is an endemic feature of human society; and that it can encompass, but is broader than, racial or ethnic discrimination, and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples.

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.

 In other words, in terms of understanding the reasons for colonisation and dispossession, I would argue that the best analytic frame is built around assessing the comparative power of key interest groups within or beyond national boundaries. Given the focus of this blog is on policy, I don’t propose to explore this issue further here.

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

The drivers of stratospheric rates of Indigenous incarceration

                                                            I have been studying how I may compare

This prison where I live unto the world.

Richard II, Act five, Scene one.

 

The Australian Institute of Criminology has just published a research report authored by academics Don Weatherburn, Michael Doyle, Tegan Weatherall and Joanna Wang titled Towards a theory of Indigenous contact with the criminal justice system (link here). In my view, this report represents the most important policy relevant research paper published in relation to Indigenous Australia in recent memory.

 

Over one third of the nation’s prisoners at any point in time are Indigenous. The ABS reports that at any one time, there are around 42, 000 people in prison in Australia, a rate of just over 200 per hundred thousand. Of these, some 14,400 prisoners are Indigenous, a rate of 2,549 per hundred thousand (link here). These data lead inexorably to a conclusion that Indigenous incarceration rates are a national disgrace.

 

Extremely high levels of Indigenous incarceration are directly and indirectly expensive for taxpayers, and impose extraordinary personal costs on those who are imprisoned and their families and on communities. These costs include diminished and constrained life opportunities; the economic and social ramifications of imprisonment; ongoing mental and physical health impairments to prisoners and their families; and ongoing intergenerational trauma. In addition, the opportunity costs (which we might conceptualise as the lost opportunities of high levels of incarceration) on both the Indigenous and mainstream Australian communities, while largely unmeasured and intangible, are bound to be substantial. In these circumstances, addressing over-incarceration of First Nations people should be a major policy priority for governments at all levels. 

 

Of course, under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, the parties have determined that there is a target to reduce Indigenous incarceration rates. Using a baseline of incarceration levels in 2019, Target 10 aims to reduce the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults held in incarceration by at least 15% by 2031. This is a pathetically unambitious target, as (on my calculation) it merely aims to reduce the incarceration rate from 2549 per 100k down to 2167 per 100k. This extreme lack of ambition raises serious questions regarding whether the Commonwealth (and its state and territory government partners) were ever serious about addressing the underlying disadvantages arising from this target that the Closing the Gap framework claims to be focussed on.

 

Even so, according to the Productivity Commission (PC) dashboard (link here), incarceration rates nationally have worsened since 2019, albeit there has been improvement in some jurisdictions. Of greater concern, incarceration rates nationally are projected by the PC to continue to rise through to 2031. Given the lack of progress, it is unsurprising to observe that governments have singularly failed to outline a comprehensive methodological model (or hypothesis) underpinning their actions directed at decreasing incarceration rates for Indigenous people.

 

These concerning trends, and the concomitant social and economic pain that they impose on First Nation communities, provide an unassailable rationale for further policy reform and action by governments at all levels. The key question then is what should those policy changes focus on?

 

The AIC Research Paper is framed quite narrowly as a statistical exercise aimed at testing a particular hypothesis. The Abstract to the research paper describes it in the following terms:

The Australian Indigenous imprisonment rate is currently 16.7 times the non-Indigenous imprisonment rate. The leading proximate cause of this over-representation is a high rate of Indigenous arrest. In this report we develop and test a model of Indigenous arrest in which the primary drivers of risk are substance use, stress and trauma, adverse social environment, exposure to arrest, human/economic/social capital, and state/territory of residence. We test the model using data from the 2014–15 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey (emphasis added).

 

The following paragraphs are extracts from the Research Paper designed to elucidate its major findings. I strongly recommend that interested readers look at the Research Paper as there is much nuance and detail (including a detailed account of the statistical analyses undertaken) that I have passed over.

 

From the Executive Summary:

Though the point is often overlooked, most Indigenous Australians are never arrested or imprisoned. It is impossible to understand Indigenous over-representation in prison without coming to grips with the factors that differentiate those who are arrested and, in many cases, imprisoned, and the majority who are not. In this report we outline and evaluate a preliminary theory of Indigenous arrest. The explanation we give treats Indigenous arrest as the interplay of two sets of factors, one of which increases the risk of arrest and the other of which reduces that risk. The first set includes factors such as age, gender, psychological distress, membership of the stolen generation, illicit drug use, alcohol use and state and territory laws and policies. The second (protective) set includes social embeddedness, income, school completion, marital status and living conditions that reduce contact with police. We evaluate the theory using the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Survey (NATSIS), a large nationally representative survey of Indigenous Australians. The results are largely consistent with the explanation we put forward. The risk of arrest is higher for males than females, rises to a peak around 21–30 years, and declines rapidly thereafter. Illicit drug and alcohol use increases the risk of arrest, as does a high level of psychological distress, being a member of the stolen generation, living in a problem-affected neighbourhood and having a higher level of exposure to police. The risk of arrest is lower among Indigenous Australians who are married, who have never been homeless, who have people they feel they can confide in, who have completed school, and who have an income in the top four deciles.

The strongest risk factor is having used illicit drugs and alcohol over the preceding 12 months, which increases the marginal risk of arrest by 14 percentage points…The strongest protective factor is school completion, which reduces the risk of arrest by 7.9 percentage points….Measures to reduce illicit drug and alcohol use, improve school retention and improve economic outcomes for Indigenous Australians are essential if Australia is to achieve any longterm reduction in the scale of Indigenous over-representation in prison(emphasis added).

 

I omit any summary of the model description and the detailed statistical results, though I recommend readers examine Figures 1 through to 4. I have taken the following text from the concluding ‘Discussion’ section of the paper.

Discussion. We set out in this report to test a theory that linked the risk of Indigenous arrest to age and gender, illicit drug and alcohol use, stress and trauma, environmental factors associated with a person’s neighbourhood, state laws and regulations, exposure to police, and human, economic and social capital. Broadly speaking, our findings are consistent with that hypothesis…

As in past studies, illicit drug and alcohol use emerged as having the strongest relationship with the risk of arrest…More than one in 10 of those who do not use illicit drugs or alcohol had been arrested at least once in the past five years, compared with almost a third of those who use illicit drugs and alcohol. The fact that this difference in risk persists over such a long period (35 years), even after controlling for a wide range of other factors, underscores just how large a contribution illicit drug and alcohol use makes to the volume of Indigenous arrests and, therewith, to Indigenous imprisonment (emphasis added) ….

The two strongest protective factors are completing school, which was associated with a 7.9 percentage point (or 35%) reduction in the risk of arrest, and having an income in the top four deciles, which was associated with a 7.4 percentage point (or 33%) reduction in risk…Reducing the risk of arrest by improving Indigenous school completion and income clearly requires a concerted effort to address the sources of Indigenous disadvantage in the home, school and labour market (emphasis added)….

The benefits associated with living in a remote area and having a permanent home are interesting, given that these variables have received little research attention in the literature on Indigenous arrest. Both are strong protective factors. If, as we assume, they measure reduced exposure to police, they suggest that simply being visible to police increases the risk of Indigenous arrest, even if no serious offence is committed. This conclusion is consistent with evidence that police make less use of diversionary alternatives when dealing with minor offences (eg offensive language, offensive behaviour) committed by Indigenous Australians than when dealing with similar offences by non-Indigenous Australians (emphasis added).

 

The authors of the AIC Research report conclude by arguing for better data to enable more rigorous testing of new or alternative hypotheses; for policy to be based more closely upon theoretical analyses of the correlates of Indigenous arrest rates; and finally for the immediate development of policies where their research finding are consistent with rigorous studies of factors that increase the risk of involvement in crime. In relation to these factors, they state:

 Research on illicit drug and alcohol use, school completion, employment and income are just four examples [references removed]. There is no need to wait for further research before developing policies to improve outcomes on these dimensions. Progress on them is essential if we are to achieve any long-term reduction in the scale of Indigenous over-representation in prison (emphasis added).

 

The AIC research paper is valuable precisely because it provides an evidence-based policy roadmap which if implemented would begin to address rising Indigenous incarceration rates. Of course, the policy reforms required will themselves take time to be designed and implemented, tasks which are themselves complex and not without risk of failure. Even when implemented, it will take time for them to gain traction and have an impact. The consequence is that even with the right policy response not only is it highly unlikely that the 2031 target will be achieved, but it is also likely that it will take at least another decade to turn around the current trends.

In these circumstances, what is required is for governments at all levels, and most importantly, for the Commonwealth to first step up and devise and implement the required reforms, and second, to stay the course. This would require the Commonwealth to come clean with the Australian community regarding the extended time frames required and the financial costs and implicit risks in the strategies being pursued.

 

The reason I consider this to be one of the most important policy relevant research papers in recent times for the Indigenous policy domain is that it substantially strengthens the policy case not just for incarceration reform, but for much more ambitious policy action on a range of other fronts, including housing, education, income support and employment policies. In other words, the AIC Research Paper is so much more than a criminological study on Indigenous  incarceration rates. With good policy design, and adequate investment of financial and human resources, each of these policy issues have the potential in their own right to substantially improve the quality of life for hundreds of thousands of the most disadvantaged Indigenous citizens. In turn, the longer term pay-off for the broader society in improved social cohesion and reduced health costs arising from widespread existence of social determinants driving sub-optimal health outcomes will be significant.

 

Yet notwithstanding the clear benefits of addressing these policy issues, our political elites and thus our political system has demonstrated a longstanding and deep-seated aversion to acting in the public interest on these issues. The likelihood that necessary action will now be taken to address incarceration is thus remote. In a very real sense, the nation’s incarcerated, its unemployed, its unhoused and its under-educated citizens continue to inhabit a realm of sustained exclusion. There is no shortage of simplistic and instant solutions: many of us have a predisposition to blame the victim, and notwithstanding the existence of systemic constraints, there is no exemption for anyone from taking responsibility for their own life. Nevertheless, the extraordinary imbalance between government rhetoric and action, and between the preparedness of democratically elected governments to play politics rather than act in the public interest, suggests that there is something very awry in the economic and social governance of the Australian nation.

 

I previously published posts dealing with incarceration issues in 2019 (link here) and 2020 (link here and link here). On re-reading them, what strikes me most is how over the past five years and notwithstanding a change of government in Canberra, nothing has changed. The underlying dynamic of apparent policy intractability and avoidance of responsibility by governments remains ubiquitous and deeply embedded.

 

While the AIC Research Paper is of much wider policy relevance than its title suggests, it does not offer a pre-fabricated policy solution to the policy issues it identifies as crucial. It merely provides a roadmap. Each of the policy areas identified requires innovative and determined policy work at both political and bureaucratic levels to transform the roadmap into real world policy. Yet I fear that without sustained advocacy from Indigenous interests, there will be no appetite within policy circles to begin the journey so persuasively mapped out by the AIC Report authors. Even with Indigenous advocacy, there is no guarantee that policymakers will listen.

 

In other words, for all our self-confidence regarding the seemingly unquestionable merit of our existing systems of democratic governance, it remains the case there exists a substantial ‘underclass’ of excluded citizens, many of whom are Indigenous. This should prompt serious reflection by thinking Australians. Might it not be the case that the deeper drivers of continuing stratospheric rates of Indigenous incarceration can be traced to the self-imposed captivity of mainstream Australians by beliefs and mindsets that refuse to recognise the continuing existence of systemic exclusion embedded in our political systems.

 

25 May 2024

Overcoming Indigenous Exclusion

         we know what we are, but know not what we may be.

      Hamlet Act 4, scene 5

Regular readers of this blog will have noted that I have been somewhat derelict in my duty to deliver regular posts. Part of the reason has been that I have been away overseas for an extended period, and only recently returned. Second, I have been preoccupied with finalising a publication seeking to analyse the drivers of high-level policy failure in the Indigenous domain.

That paper, co-authored with Neil Westbury, and titled ‘Overcoming Indigenous exclusion: very hard, plenty humbug’, has just been published on the CAEPR website (link here).  As the quote above suggests, it both analyses the current state of policy in the Indigenous policy domain, and canvasses future options and opportunities for both policymakers and Indigenous interests.

I now hope to resume more regular posting on this blog.

Armistice Day 2018: brief reflections

Armistice Day is always a day for reflection, but today it is particularly so being the centenary of the Armistice which ended the ‘war to end all wars’.

There has been a surfeit of media coverage and thoughtful commentary, which I won’t attempt to summarise or repeat. It seems to me that setting aside time (and a place) for a minute’s silence is a better way for us all to reflect on the events of a century ago, and the consequences and reverberations, good and bad….

My purpose today is merely to point to two Indigenous related publications related to Indigenous veterans. The first, which I am yet to see, was mentioned on the ABC Radio’s Awaye! program yesterday (link here) and will be screened on NITV tonight. It is Erica Glynn’s documentary Truth be Told: Lest we Forget and will no doubt be available on SBS on-demand.

The second is a publication of The Aboriginal History Research Services at the West Australian Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries titled No Less Worthy. Here is a link to WA Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Ben Wyatt’s media release, and here is a link to the publication.

The book documents the experiences and subsequent lives of 80 Aboriginal men who volunteered to serve in the Australian armed forces in World War One. It also documents a further 53 men who volunteered but were denied permission to serve for one reason or another. Many were rejected o the grounds that they were ‘Not of European origin or descent’. At the time, there was a legislative restriction on Aboriginal men serving in the armed forces, so those who did manage to serve in each case overcame the formal restrictions.

The book is thought provoking on many levels, perhaps most poignantly in terms of providing a window into the lives of so many individual Australians, men of their time, who faced extraordinary challenges right throughout their lives. In particular, the book documents the hardships many volunteers suffered upon their return. In a similar vein, in a blog post in April 2016, I remembered a South Australian Gallipoli veteran, Ben Murray (link here).

The common thread between Truth be Told and No Less Worthy is the way in which they document how the nation’s our institutional frameworks operated to exclude Aboriginal men from joining and most particularly operated upon their return to exclude them from full participation in Australian society. While on active service, Aboriginal soldiers were apparently mostly respected as comrades by their non-Indigenous mates. But this meant very little upon their return.

My current research is focussed on the ongoing levels of institutional exclusion which operate in Australia. Like the nation’s approach to returned Aboriginal soldiers, institutional exclusion is generally difficult to identify and recognise, and operates in ways which most of us are unable to see.

I recommend readers have a read of No Less Worthy, and watch Truth be Told if you can. But in reflecting on the consequences of World War One and the century which followed for Aboriginal volunteers,  it is worth also thinking about whether there are similar institutional dynamics at play today which deny Indigenous Australians (and other disadvantaged groups) full access to the benefits of Australia’s extraordinary economic and social system.