Remote crisis: déjà vu all over again and again and again and again …

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!

Macbeth, Act two, Scene three

I sat down to write a post that considered the recent media stories regarding the ongoing crime wave in the NT, NAPLAN, Closing the Gap, the extraordinary Indigenous unemployment levels in remote Australia and the ongoing and worsening incarceration crisis in the NT including the hyper-punitive response of the current NT Government. Then I realised that in doing so without the necessary contextualisation, I would be entering the perpetual motion machine that controls and shapes our media cycle and ensures that we never stop and ask how did we get here? I haven’t done the detailed research to write such a post, but my intuition told me that it was more important just now to remind readers of the underlying dynamics and forces which are shaping the outcomes that feed into daily life in remote communities, major towns like Katherine and Tennant Creek, and our daily media diet in south eastern Australia.

One way to do this is to list and link to the previous posts I have written on the theme of remote crisis. Below I list most (but perhaps not all) of the posts I have written on this topic since January 2022. I could have gone back further, but there is already more than enough material to digest. For each post, I have selected a short excerpt which illustrates some of the issues in play. The excerpts do not necessarily encompass the major argument of each post, and are not always the key point, but they do make in my view a contribution to providing the context that assists interested readers in forming a judgment of the underlying issues and causes in play when we read about the latest outrage or tragedy. I have left text bolded where I bolded it in the original post. I do recommend readers dip into at least some of these posts.

 

1.    Energy insecurity in remote Australia 13 January 2022 (link here)

The abstract of a recent academic article states:

Indigenous communities in remote Australia face dangerous temperature extremes. These extremes are associated with increased risk of mortality and ill health. For many households, temperature extremes increase both their reliance on those services that energy provides, and the risk of those services being disconnected. Poor quality housing, low incomes, poor health and energy insecurity associated with prepayment all exacerbate the risk of temperature-related harm … We find that nearly all households (91%) experienced a disconnection from electricity during the 2018–2019 financial year. Almost three quarters of households (74%) were disconnected more than ten times. … A broad suite of interrelated policy responses is required to reduce the frequency, duration and negative effects of disconnection from electricity for remote-living Indigenous residents.

 

2.    See How We Roll 24 January 2022 (link here):

It strikes me that this is, more than any other I have come across recently, an important book for policymakers engaged in shaping policy in the Indigenous domain. It shatters preconceptions regarding the distinction between remote and urban contexts, and makes clear the parallels between disadvantaged Indigenous people and other disadvantaged citizens. Most importantly, it should make policymakers question their assumptions and preconceptions regarding Indigenous life choices, and the potential for policy instruments and measures of various kinds to articulate or engage with the altogether different world views and approaches to living of many Indigenous people.

 

3.    The ongoing social and governance catastrophe in remote Australia 8 May 2022 (link here):

In October 2009, Nicolas Rothwell, writing in The Australian, published a scathing analysis under the title ’The failed state’… Rothwell’s opening sentence sums up his argument: ‘The Northern Territory is a lost cause’. He goes on:

There is, though, a failed state in our midst. That state is not Aboriginal north Australia, where the social fabric is in shreds and tatters. No: it is the jurisdiction largely responsible for entrenching this degree of Indigenous disadvantage: the modern-seeming, self-governing Northern Territory.

I quoted these observations in an earlier post in August 2016 (link here)… I would add however that the responsibility for entrenching Indigenous disadvantage is shared with the Commonwealth.

 

4.    Systemic myopia: Public investment challenges in remote Australia.19 December 2022 (link here):

To sum up, over the past two decades at least, public funding in core capital investments related to essential services, social housing, and community infrastructure has been severely deficient. This has undoubtedly reduced the levels of recurrent funding by governments in remote settings, and also limited the opportunities for local employment, and stronger economic development and progress. It is undoubtedly one of the key contributors to limiting the opportunities available to the rapidly growing youth cohort within communities. While reversing the sustained under-investment is not sufficient to address all the challenges facing residents of remote communities, it is a necessary element in any viable transition to a more stable future for remote communities. The onset of climate change is making addressing these challenges even more urgent.

 

5.    Cataclysm and Crisis 10 December 2022 (link here):

The inability of governments to envisage, understand and put in place effective strategies to address the multiple facets of the economic and social cataclysm facing remote communities amounts to a massive and fundamental failure. This failure is in and of itself a crisis; a crisis of governance capability, a crisis of will power, and ultimately a crisis of government legitimacy.

 

6.    Alice Springs crisis: observations on remote policy. 25 January 2023 (link here):

The Alice Springs hospital has 16 beds in its Intensive Care Unit. Minister Burney mentioned that she was shocked to learn that last night, 14 of those beds were taken by women who had been the victims of violent assaults. This window into the lived experience of too many remote women and their families is more than a warning of the seriousness of the rolling crisis across remote Australia. It is more than a prompt for governments to take action. It is more than an indictment on the quality and legitimacy of our systems of governance across northern Australia. It is damning evidence of the complicity and responsibility for these outcomes of those Australians (myself included) who take an interest in public policy. 

 

7.    The ongoing remote housing debacle 5 March 2023 (link here).  

In conclusion, the policy choices made over the past five years in relation to remote housing are retrograde and will have very real consequences: for taxpayers, for the population of remote Australia, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and most importantly for the residents of these overcrowded and under-maintained houses across remote Australia. Over fifty percent of those individuals are under 25 and the overcrowding will have lifelong consequences for the opportunities that are within their reach.

 

8.    The structural underpinnings of the tragedy in Yuendumu 10 March 2023 (link here):

Yes, at the micro level, individuals on both sides of the cultural divide, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, have and had agency. But they were and are operating within an overarching set of institutional structures which have been in place for decades and were either explicitly designed to constrain and control Aboriginal people’s lives, or reflect longstanding and entrenched structures of underfunding that were oblivious to, and independent of the level of need. If we wish to prevent further micro level tragedies, we as a nation must move beyond allocating blame or responsibility at the micro level and also address the macro level issues. Micro and macro are both part of a single social system, one that is responsible for both extensive social and cultural harm, and ongoing mainstream governance failure.

 

9.    Dodge dip and dive: eight ‘data points’ on remote policy 1 May 2023 (link here):

What is clear however is that given the synergistic interactions of multiple policy domains, the current model of policy design and implementation has not worked. This raises the potentially unsettling prospect that, at a fundamental systemic level, governments and policymakers are not incentivised to take the policy decisions that are required to make a substantive difference to the policy challenges that exist. Instead they are incentivised to manage difficult issues, oil squeaky wheels, and engage in a performative ritual designed merely to persuade an electorally significant non-Indigenous constituency (and a less electorally significant, but more animated, Indigenous constituency) that they are doing what is required to address the policy challenges that surface periodically in the public consciousness.

A recent review of a book on Boris Johnson (link here) described his motto for governing as ‘dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge’. As it turns out, this is an extraordinarily apt description of the systemic approach of Australian governments to remote policy challenges.

 

10. The remote community education scandal in the NT 24 September 2023 (link here):

It is time that the Commonwealth accepted that the NT Government is incapable of delivering remote education in a manner consistent with the public and national interest, and in such a way that it actually delivers outcomes. These poor outcomes are feeding directly into the social dysfunction that is endemic in parts of remote Australia, and which I have previously argued is a slow burn catastrophe (link here).

 

11. Looking ahead: the architecture of Indigenous policy in 2050 1 March 2024 (link here)

My advice to First Nations and progressive mainstream interests, and in particular their peak advocacy groups, would be to invest as much as possible in building their capabilities to advocate for Indigenous interests, to focus squarely on the absolute deficits in remote policy outcomes, including education, employment, housing and essential infrastructure, and to pursue a strategy of simultaneously protecting the institutional frameworks that presently exist, while pursing incremental change across the breadth of the public sector. In particular, Indigenous advocacy interests should explore avenues to gain much greater independence from Government funding as it comes with a hidden cost; the silence it implicitly requires reduces the necessary pressure on governments to fix the extraordinary policy problems that exist across the board, and the social and economic catastrophe that exists in remote Australia.

 

12. The ongoing attendance crisis in remote schools 10 September 2024 (link here):

In relation to remote attendance, there is a need for the Commonwealth to step up and acknowledge it for the national crisis it is…. The Commonwealth should work with the states cooperatively on these issues, but devise incentive-based payments to the states and territories rather than indulging in the politically driven negotiation that currently predominate. Robust support to Indigenous community leaders aimed at encouraging and assisting them to raise expectations of parental involvement within their communities are essential. But so too are getting financial resource allocations for schools better targeted, and if necessary increased. Rewarding effective teachers much better and ensuring that the curriculum is focussed on the needs of the least capable cohort of students are both — to use a colloquial expression — ‘no brainers’. This suggests that the adoption of curriculum methodologies (such as Direct Learning) that do not allow any student to fall behind must be a priority.

 

13. Infrastructure shortfalls in Alices Springs town camps 24 December 2024 (link here).

What is particularly clear from the Guide is how exclusionary institutional complacency emerges in myriad instances of quite prosaic neglect: the absence of footpaths, of surveyed lots, of safe play grounds for children, of street signs, of shade and community shelters; in short, this neglect reflects the longstanding and widespread refusal of mainstream institutions such a local governments to see their roles as universal rather than sectional. The details vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but the impacts are longstanding and have a certain consistency….

The authors and publishers of the Guide to Housing and Infrastructure Standards in Town Camps have made an extraordinarily significant contribution to laying the groundwork for better advocacy for remote Indigenous communities on essential services reform both in Alice Springs, but importantly across northern Australia. They deserve wider recognition and indeed acclamation. What is also clear is that without the efforts of Tangentyere and its community leadership over almost 50 years, the progress made to date on the town camps would not have been possible. Their historically significant work is not yet complete; I only hope that it will not be another fifty years before Aboriginal people in town camps in Alice Springs and beyond are included as fully entitled citizens in the provision of essential services.

 

14. Indigenous hyper-incarceration: a remote problem? 24 January 2025 (link here):

One data point quoted stood out:

As of January, the Northern Territory hit a grim milestone. More than 1% of the territory’s total population is now incarcerated in adult prison.

….

It is the case that the process of colonisation turned the world upside down for Indigenous people across the nation, and the people of remote Australia are generations closer to that social cataclysm.

Mainstream Australia cannot undo those social processes, and the world has moved on for all Australians. However, given the clear evidence of deep dysfunction arising from those social processes that were neither chosen nor desired by Indigenous people, and the impacts those changes inevitably imposed and continues to impose, the nation and its policy elites must be prepared to consider policy options that turn established modes of policy formulation upside down. Not to do so would amount to an extraordinary admission of national policy failure. Indigenous incarceration is just one of the impacts that arise from widespread social and economic dysfunction across remote Australia and woven through pockets of urban and regional Australia.

 

15. Misdirected focus: the case for institutional policy reforms to alcohol supply 18 March 2025 (link here):

The subliminal message from the NIAA then is don’t look to the Commonwealth to drive institutional policy reform, its someone else’s responsibility. See this page on their website too (link here). For what it’s worth, I just don’t buy that argument.

The appendix to the NIAA submission ( #140 at this link) which I strongly recommend readers seek out and read very usefully provides a comprehensive and powerful snapshot of the impacts of alcohol on various sectors. Here are a few data points I have cherry picked from the NIAA submission appendix:

… First Nations people were 4.2 times as likely to die from alcohol-related causes as non-Indigenous Australians. They were also 3.8 times as likely to die from alcoholic liver disease, and 4.7 times as likely to die from mental and behavioural disorders due to alcohol use….

AOD are involved in more than half of all police-reported family and domestic violence incidents in Australia, and are likely to be involved in a substantially greater proportion of all family and domestic violence…. For homicides in the period from 1989–90 to 2016–17, 72% of First Nations offenders were under the influence of alcohol at the time of the incident, as were 71% of First Nations victims…

If Australia was serious about reducing Indigenous incarceration,…  reducing family violence within Indigenous contexts, … improving Indigenous health status, … [and] improving socio-economic status within the Indigenous community, we would implement significant policy reforms in relation to alcohol advertising, taxation and retail availability.

If Australia was serious about closing the gap, the Commonwealth would step up and lead, and one of its first steps would be to implement significant policy reforms in relation to alcohol advertising, taxation and retail availability.

Unfortunately, it is quite clear from a close reading of this report that neither the Government nor the Opposition are serious about any of these issues.

 

16. The Domestic and Family Violence crisis in the NT: a symptom of wider chaos 29 April 2025 (link here):

The Northern Territory is in a state of perpetual governance crisis, where underfunded schools are no longer fit for purpose, jobs are not within reach of young Aboriginal kids, alcohol and drug abuse is rife, as is domestic and family violence, and where violence and mayhem are increasingly spilling into the major towns and cities….

The problems in the NT have been decades in the making and have their roots in the failures of governments at all levels to adequately support the maintenance of a viable social and economic institutional infrastructure in remote communities. Reversing this longstanding policy neglect is not susceptible to some quick fix. In recent years however the systemic dysfunction in remote communities that governments have been prepared to tolerate for decades because they were metaphorically ‘out of sight’ has begun to colonise mainstream Territory cities and towns….

One way or another, remote Australia requires more serious policy attention (as opposed to political froth) from national policymakers. A good first step would be to progressively and incrementally strengthen controls across the board (ie mainstream and Indigenous) over the availability and price of alcohol. But much more than this will be needed to reverse the progressive decline in governance and its silent handmaiden, economic security, that is currently underway and gathering momentum. The alternative to serious reform is progressive decline into systemic chaos not just in remote communities, but across the NT and potentially elsewhere in remote Australia. Unfortunately, it seems things will have to get much worse before the political willpower to reform will emerge either in Canberra or Darwin.

 

1 August 2025

 

Youth detention, incarceration, closing the gap, and who we are

 

Your dishonour

Mangles true judgement, and bereaves the state

Of that integrity which should become it.

Coriolanus Act three, Scene one.

 

According to ABS census data from 2021 (link here), one-third (33.1%) of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians were aged under 15 years compared with 17.9% of non-Indigenous people in the same age group.  The median age nationally of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population was 24 years. While remote and very remote Indigenous populations comprise only 15 percent of the national Indigenous population, and two less than one percent of the Australian population, they are amongst the most disadvantaged citizens across virtually every social indicator.

In recent months, there have been several articles focussed on the plight of remote communities; places where the demographic profile is heavily slanted toward those under 24.

In October, Daniel James, a Yorta Yorta man wrote a searing indictment of government policy in Central Australia in The Monthly titled Children of the intervention (link here). More recently in The Saturday Paper (link here), Ben Abbatangelo, a Gunaikurnai and Wotjobaluk writer wrote a searing — yet hopeful —  indictment of the situation in Wadeye titled  Yidiyi Festival returns hope to Wadeye. I have quibbles with both articles related to their focus on particular places thus de-emphasising the wider structural drivers of disadvantage across remote Australia generally, and their implicit choice of temporal perspectives. Both articles are nevertheless extremely powerful critiques of Government policy neglect and ineptitude, while not ignoring the complexity and nuance which bedevils any close analysis of these issues.

It was within this overarching policy context that the Joint Council on Closing the Gap met last week. The Joint Council includes every Minister for Indigenous Affairs in the federation plus representatives of the Coalition of Peaks. Their communique (link here) mentioned a number of issues, but focussed particular attention on one specific issue:

Joint Council discussed critical matters regarding youth justice and agreed that Target 11 of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap (the National Agreement) is an urgent priority that requires collective action across multiple government portfolios and jurisdictions to deliver on the ground results. Target 11, to reduce the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people (10 – 17 years) in detention by at least 30 per cent by 2031 is not on track to be met. Joint Council agreed to escalate this urgent priority and progress work that will achieve improved accountability, coordinated jurisdictional actions and outcomes. It was agreed that Joint Council Co-Chairs write to First Ministers to seek details of how their governments are currently taking steps to meet Target 11, including consideration of remand, alternative accommodation and health and disability care and education in youth justice facilities.(emphasis added).

According to the Productivity Commission Closing the Gap dashboard (link here):  

Nationally in 2022-23, the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people aged 10–⁠17 years in detention on an average day was 29.8 per 10,000 young people in the population (figure CtG11.1). The 2022‑23 rate is above the previous three years (from a low of 23.6 per 10,000 young people in 2020‑21) but it is a decrease from 32.1 per 10,000 young people in 2018‑19 (the baseline year). Nationally, the trend for the target shows no change from the baseline. This assessment is provided with a low level of confidence.

So while current levels of youth detention are less than the baseline, they have been rising in the last year.

The Joint Council response is entirely bureaucratic in nature, and reeks of going through the motions. It is unclear why they focus on youth detention and not also on incarceration more generally. Writing to First Ministers for information that should be in the Implementation Plans required by the National Agreement will take months, and as it turns out, if you dig deep enough in the Productivity Commission dashboard, half of the jurisdictions will be able to point to recent improvements and those that can’t will find some other bureaucratic formulation to describe their efforts as deeply committed and focussed on improving accountability and coordinated consultation to prioritise urgent action….or some such …

The real problem, which goes to the heart of the renegotiated targets under the 2020 National Agreement is that nationally, detention rates for First Nations youth are currently 28.8 per 10,000 compared to mainstream youth detention rates of 1.1 per 10,000. In Queensland, detention rates for First Nations youth are 46 per 10,000. Of particular interest is the fact that in Western Australia in 2010, youth detention rates were 79.7 per 10,000 and have dropped to 34.6 in 2022-23, a halving of the rates over twelve years (although still at levels above the national rate for Indigenous youth detention). I don’t know how WA have achieved that outcome, but that would be a question worth asking. It demonstrates that progress can be made. But the bottom line is that nationally, First Nations youth are 28 times more likely to be in detention than non-Indigenous youth. That is the real issue and the real tragedy. It should be cause for a national strategy to fully (not partially) close the gap, to bring Indigenous youth detention rates down to 1.1 per 10,000. It is worth remembering that these are point-in-time statistics; the levels of Indigenous youth that are placed in detention in any one year will be considerably higher. The current levels of Indigenous youth detention should be a national scandal. And it should be a focus for governments to commission detailed and independent analysis from criminologists, sociologists and anthropologists as well as their policy advisers.

Instead, governments have squibbed the issue by inventing an arbitrary target, with the aim of lowering the detention rate from 32.1 in the baseline year to 22.5 in 2031. Not only did they invent an arbitrary target, they have failed to articulate a coherent national strategy (and coherent state and territory strategies) to meet this arbitrary and inherently unambitious target. By their inaction, they are continuing to squib this issue day in and day out.

This is bad enough. But target 11 under the Closing the Gap process is just one of numerous targets which replicate the same strategy. Invent an arbitrary target that is reasonably achievable; shift the responsibility from the Commonwealth to nine separate jurisdictions each with their own policies and approaches, thus making real accountability impossible. Avoid developing coherent and realistic policy implementation plans by loading them up with hundreds of pages of bureaucratic flim flam, thus avoiding real political accountability.  And whenever an issue arises that emerges into the public consciousness, claim to be concerned and throw a few dollars at it.

So for example, there was no mention by the Joint Council of the challenges related to Target 10 which is framed as follows: By 2031, reduce the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults held in incarceration by at least 15%. The baseline adopted in the National Agreement was from 2019 a convenient and almost surreptitious way of diminishing the magnitude of the trends that point to not only an extraordinary level of hyper-incarceration of First Nations citizens, but a substantial increase in indigenous incarceration rates vis a vis mainstream population rates over the past fifteen years.

Interrogating the dashboard reveals the following key data points:

• Nationally the level of mainstream incarceration in 2023 is 149 per 100,000. It has barely changed from 2009, when the national rate was 137 per 100,000.
• For Indigenous citizens, the national level of incarceration is 2235 per 100,000 in 2023, up from 1539 per 100,000 in 2009.
• In WA, the Indigenous incarceration rate is 3469 per 100,000 in 2023, up from 2817 per 100,000 in 2009.
• In the NT, the Indigenous incarceration rate is 3029 per 100, 000, up from 1700 per 100,000 in 2009.

The national indigenous incarceration rate in 2023 is thus 15 times higher than the mainstream rate. In 2009, it was 11.2 times higher.

While it is difficult to visualise the impact of these statistics, Ben Abbatangelo’s article includes a description of the internal community violence that sporadically breaks out, its consequences for the whole community, and notes, almost in passing, the extraordinary statistic that that today, around 5 percent of the Wadeye’s population is incarcerated.

What I find particularly frustrating is that the blatant hypocrisy of governments, laid out in plain view, fails to resonate in the public domain. Political Oppositions across the federation (whether progressive or conservative) find it easier to look away or pretend that the issue is being dealt with appropriately; after all they hope to be in government at some future date and don’t wish to have made commitments they don’t intend to make meet.

The media (with honourable exceptions mentioned above) largely doesn’t look beyond the scandals or antics of the previous week.

Indigenous citizens become inured to the normalisation of violence in their lives, much of it is lateral violence and fuelled by poorly regulated and controlled alcohol and drugs.

The Indigenous members of the Coalition of Peaks on the Joint Council appear to be unable to see a way to go back to basics and call governments out for their inaction. They fear (probably correctly) that if they were to criticise government too openly, and too directly, they would first be defunded, and ultimately the whole edifice of the National Agreement would be dismantled as it would not be serving its purpose. The risks however are that they will ultimately be tainted by their perceived complicity (link here). And eventually a future, more punitive government will just decide to dismantle the whole edifice wile blaming the victims for the ongoing catastrophe.

Notwithstanding the irony of my reliance on their data in this post, the Productivity Commission blithely compiles and updates a plethora of data and statistics, apparently oblivious to its role in diverting attention from the extent and depth of the real-world crises and challenges confronting First Nations citizens. The Commission’s appears focussed on compiling a profusion of data and statistics which have limited relevance to the lived reality of many First Nations citizens, and no relationship to either policy or the concerns of governments.

For our political class and elites, the whole edifice has become an elaborate exercise in convincing mainstream Australia that our democratically elected governments really do care about First Nations when the reality is that they do not give a fig about closing the gap. In their mistaken and fundamentally narcissistic view, it is just too hard.  

Closing the gap is as much about mainstream Australia as First Nations; it is about changing the way mainstream Australia operates and shares this continent. I don’t claim that there are simple solutions to these issues. They require hard policy work, substantive political commitment, visionary political leadership, an ability to see beyond simplistic ideological humbug, and a sense of empathy and understanding that is exemplified in Australian notions of mateship, concern for the underdog and for a fair go for all. What fundamentally concerns me, to the point of disconsolation, is the deepening realisation that we live in a nation where these ideas no longer reflect who we really are.

 

Addendum: for those who might be interested in a more academic critique of closing the gap that reflects the ideas outlined here, I refer you to a couple of Discussion Papers I wrote in 2021 (link here and link here).

 

 

20 November 2024

amended to corrrect two minor typos (original struck through) 24 November 2024.

 

The Remote Area Allowance: the case for wider reform

 

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt."

Measure for Measure, Act I, Scene 4.

 

Francis Markham, one of the most insightful and competent data and policy analysts in the Indigenous policy domain has just published a short blog post on the case for reforming the remote area allowance (RAA). His post (link here) is titled: The Poor Pay More: Why the Remote Area Allowance Needs Urgent Reform, and is highly recommended.

The post links to a 2020 Productivity Commission (PC) study (link here). The Executive Summary of that report is also worth reading.

I don’t propose to summarise Markham’s arguments which are succinct, persuasive and data driven.

What struck me as I read his post however is that it raises broader issues regarding remote employment, and in particular the need for radical reform of the Community Development Program (CDP).

In 2019, in response to the PC’s Issues Paper, I published a short post (link here) identifying a number of issues that would also come into play. Unfortunately, I failed to review the PC report when it was finally published in 2020….I must have been asleep at the wheel.

Below is an extract from that earlier post which in my view is still relevant, notwithstanding that the punitive tone of the CDP program appears to have moderated under the current Government:

A further potential issue relates to the impact of conditional welfare in remote Australia (ie the CDP program: link here) and the increasing evidence that as a result of punitive penalties, significant numbers of remote Indigenous residents are not accessing their welfare entitlements and thus not accessing RAA.

One of the challenges is assessing the utility of these policy measures, is that they were primarily devised to assist and benefit mainstream interests, particularly mainstream taxpayers and businesses. Consequently, it can be easy to overlook Indigenous perspectives in assessing the changes in underlying rationales over time. As the Commission notes:

A range of justifications have been advanced for special assistance for people living and/or working in remote areas (box 3), although many of these are contentious. For those justifications drawing on the isolation and arduousness of life in the outback, the changes in transport, communications and living conditions over the past seventy years mean that their strength has diminished (at least in many parts of the country). Such arguments have also been challenged on the basis that ‘individuals have a free choice whether or not to live or work in remote areas and to compensate them, if they so choose, would lead to resource misallocation and reduced growth for the country as a whole’ (see Cox et al. 1981, p. 15).

While there have been improvements in the circumstances of remote citizens, the circumstances of remote Indigenous citizens are still highly disadvantaged. Moreover, they may not have the same level of flexibility in their choice of residence as mainstream citizens. 

Markham’s arguments on reforming the RAA and the comments I made in 2019 together strengthen the argument for a radical reconsideration of the Community Development Program (CDP). In December last year, I published a post on employment issues where I endorsed what in effect amounted to a recommendation for a pilot employment creation program to be established (link here). Upon reflection however, the case for moving decisively to reform CDP is overwhelming: lives are not just at risk but will be drastically shortened unless action is taken.

It is time Governments looked seriously at shifting the totality of the 30,000 CDP participants across remote Australia into real Government funded jobs focussed on working on country, housing maintenance, NDIS support roles, construction, language and cultural advice within the education system, climate change readiness, disaster readiness, and community health. I mentioned some of these options when my views were sought for a recent article by Michelle Grattan in The Conversation (link here).

The rationale for such a radical reconceptualisation of the CDP is an amalgam of a number of factors: the existence of market failure in job creation in remote regions; the opportunity costs of not providing opportunities for real employment, the reduction in social security payments that would go some way to offsetting the costs of job creation; and the very real benefits to individuals, families and communities that would flow not just over the short term, but the long term.

I think of this as a macro-economic intervention across remote Australia in response to what is an ongoing economic, social and environmental disaster across remote Australia. It would be aimed at creating the foundations for a viable remote Australian economy. It would require vision, and sustained commitment from Government, as the present crisis (link here) is rooted in deep-seated market failure. In effect, it would be akin to an Australian version of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Of course, the meta-issue worth considering is how is it that Governments have done nothing following the PC’s 2020 report on RAA, and more concerningly, have been incapable over at least four decades in ensuring that real employment opportunities are available for remote residents.

My own view is that Indigenous interests just do not have a sustained and powerful advocacy capability that governments find it impossible to ignore. Moreover, the Indigenous advocacy capabilities that do exist are both overwhelmed by competing mainstream interests whose claims on government effectively limit the funds available for investment in indigenous priorities. This is the fundamental reason that Government do not listen to Indigenous interests; they are just too busy listening to other interests.   

Finding the solution to that challenge is the real constraint on closing the gap, even for just 30,000 unemployed citizens across remote Australia, a cohort that totals less than 0.3 percent of AUstralias employment base, and which Francis Markham describes as ‘the most economically disadvantaged groups within Australia’.

 

 

12 February 2024

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

The structural underpinnings of the tragedy in Yuendumu

Some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands

Showing an outward pity.

Richard II, Act Four, scene 1.

 

The inquest into the death of Kumanjayi Walker in Yuendumu in November 2019 is ongoing (link here). The Wikipedia page titled Death of Kumanjayi Walker (link here) provides a high level list of the various legal and policy issues raised by the manner of the young man’s death. I previously discussed the case in a post dated May 2022 titled ‘The ongoing social and governance catastrophe in remote Australia’ (link here).

 

I have not been following the myriad issues raised by the Kumanjayi Walkers death closely, and don’t propose to seek to comment directly on the core issues under consideration in the current coronial inquiry. I am looking forward to reading the Coroner’s Report once finalised.

 

The purpose of this post is two-fold. The first purpose is to sharpen the focus on the links between on the one hand what transpired in Yuendumu in November 2019 and the concomitant political and legal ramifications and on the other hand the deeper contextual history of colonisation and the decisions and approaches adopted by governments more generally that shaped the social and economic environment which permeates Central Australia to this day.

 

The second (related) purpose is to provide readers with links to the insightful statements to the Coronial Inquiry of two academic experts with long involvement in remote communities. Those statements defy easy summary, but are worth close reading for their analysis of the realities daily life in Yuendumu and similar communities. These analyses flesh out the ways in which that quotidian experience is shaped and constrained by the evolved, and in many respects entrenched relationships between the organic cultural rules and norms governing Aboriginal life in the central desert, and the wider imposed mainstream rules, norms and laws that ostensibly govern Aboriginal lives, but in reality ebb and flow in short and longer term cycles. The interplay between these two ways of living and of being ‘governed’ are in constant tension, and as we have seen in this case, lead to unpredictable and arguably incoherent outcomes for all involved. Intercultural relations are ubiquitous, but they don’t always exist in parallel, or in some logical and rational relationship, but are entwined through the lives of individuals and families in ways which are impossible to disentangle.  Moreover, as was the case in the Kumanjayi Walker case, these intercultural tensions can and do play out with extraordinarily unsettling consequences.

 

The first statement was authored by Dr Melinda Hinkson and is available (link here) on the Inquiry website as a tabled document dated 8 March 2023. Dr Hinkson’s statement covers the following issues:

Governance structures in Yuendumu over time, specifically the 2007 Northern Territory Intervention; Impact of these structures on Warlpiri i.e. disempowerment; Lack of infrastructure in Yuendumu and a corresponding atrophy of skills; Contributors to youth offending in Yuendumu; Community control over youth services; Empowerment of Warlpiri Elders in social structures; [and the] Contrast between Warlpiri and Kardiya notions of justice [para 1].

 

The statement provides a revealing and insightful administrative and policy history of the interaction between mainstream / colonial Australia and the Warlpiri who settled in Yuendumu and surrounding communities and outstations. I previously posted a review of her book See How We Roll (link here). As I said in the conclusion of that review post, Hinkson’s eloquent articulation of the realities of life as a modern Warlpiri person, whether in Yuendumu or Adelaide,

challenges policymakers, and the nation generally, to look harder at the underlying constraints on Indigenous lives, and our own responses to Indigenous life choices, and to truly ‘see’ how ‘we’ roll.

 

The second statement published on the Inquiry website on 9 March 2023 is by a medical doctor and academic Simon Quilty (link here). The most valuable part of Quilty’s statement, at least from my perspective, was the detailed elaboration of the significance of housing quality (or lack of it) for health and other social outcomes in the lives of Warlpiri people, and by extension, the majority of discrete community members across remote Australia. The import of these observations arises in large part form the reality that fixing housing stress, whether it is homelessness, or overcrowding, is in large measure a function of adequate funding and competent administration: that is , it is a largely technical issue.

 

In recent times, Quilty has been part of a research team focussed on energy insecurity in remote communities and houses. Their research has documented the extraordinary numbers of power cessations in remote houses across the NT, and pointed to the potential implications of this precariousness in the context of rising temperatures and climate variability. He attaches a copy of an article detailing these issues to his statement. I published a post about this article and the wider policy implications in January last year (link here). In that post, I concluded with the following recommendations:

Over and above these substantive policy responsibilities, the Australian Government has a national responsibility to oversight the complex Indigenous policy domain. The fact that the current Government resists this framing does not weaken its logical and political force. Why else did the Australian electorate vote in 1967 to give the Australian Government legislative responsibility for Indigenous affairs under the constitution? Such a national perspective is important because while the NatureEnergy article relates only to the NT, it seems likely that similar systemic energy security issues will apply in other parts of remote Australia, albeit perhaps with differing characteristics depending upon the extent to which remote communities elsewhere utilise prepaid energy systems.

One obvious step would be to commission the CSIRO to undertake a more policy oriented status report on the current state of play nationally. Another would be to substantially increase the investment in remote housing, including in ancillary infrastructure such as solar power systems. A third would be to expedite the work on redesigning the remote income support systems.

 

The micro story of what transpired in Yuendumu is not unrelated to what has been occurring across the board in remote Australia (link here), and most recently in the headlines with the events in Alice Springs (link here). Indeed, I suggest that the micro Yuendumu events are yet another manifestation of the complex macro issues that are laying waste to the lives of innumerable individuals and the ongoing viability of thousands of remote community families.

 

Yes, at the micro level, individuals on both sides of the cultural divide, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, have and had agency. But they were and are operating within an overarching set of institutional structures which have been in place for decades and were either explicitly designed to constrain and control Aboriginal people’s lives, or reflect longstanding and entrenched structures of underfunding that were oblivious to, and independent of the level of need. If we wish to prevent further micro level tragedies, we as a nation must move beyond allocating blame or responsibility at the micro level and also address the macro level issues. Micro and macro are both part of a single social system, one that is responsible for both extensive social and cultural harm, and ongoing mainstream governance failure.

 

To its credit, the coronial inquiry appears to at least be considering both micro and macro level issues. Yet there is a risk that once the Coroner reports, the political process will focus its attention on the narrow facts and causes of the tragedy, and not the wider systemic issues. To be meaningful, policy reform (which does not need to wait for the Coroner’s Report) must focus on removing the structural impediments to Indigenous life-possibilities, as well as expanding the structural opportunities available to individuals and communities in remote communities. Anything less is merely useless hand wringing.