Indigenous hyper-incarceration: a remote problem?

 

Were such things here as we do speak about? Or have we eaten on the insane root that takes the reason prisoner?

Macbeth, Act one, Scene three.

 

Yesterday, I read an important and I suggest ‘must-read’ assessment of the state of carceral policy in Australia. Published in The Conversation (link here), and titled Prisons don’t create safer communities, so why is Australia spending billions on building them? The article is co-authored by a disciplinary diverse team of academics headed by Emma Russell from La Trobe University. The article summarises available data by jurisdiction and while the focus is on the mainstream, it refers in passing to Indigenous incarceration rates which have been skyrocketing across the nation.

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.

This was supplemented with an extraordinary graph titled Percentage of the Population in Adult Prison, showing the incarceration rates for each Australian jurisdiction since 1860. What jumps off the page is the stratospheric growth in incarceration rates in the NT, rising from 0.22 % in 1980 to 0.66 % in 2020, and then to 1.03% in 2025. No other jurisdiction records any such increase, though virtually all jurisdictions have recorded close to a doubling in their incarceration rates off a low base over the same period.

The ABS released data on incarceration rates on 19 December 2025 (link here). The report a national prison population of 44,403 persons on 30 June 2024. Of these, 15,871 were Indigenous. The Indigenous prison population increased by an extraordinary 2019 persons or 15% over the previous year.

The remote angle

While The Conversation article is extraordinarily valuable, it strikes me that it underplays the role that the hyper-incarceration of remote Indigenous people is playing in driving the rise in incarceration rates. The article points to changes to policy for these trends (longer prison sentences and less access to bail) and cites Andrew Leigh’s 2020 article The Second Convict Age: Explaining the Return of Mass Imprisonment in Australia in the Economic Record (link here). The abstract to Leigh’s article states, inter alia:

Fully 2.5 per cent of Indigenous adults are incarcerated (2,481 prisoners per 100,000 adults), a higher share than among African-Americans. The recent increase in the Australian prison population does not seem to be due to crime rates, which have mostly declined over the past generation. Instead, higher reporting rates, stricter policing practices, tougher sentencing laws, and more stringent bail laws appear to be the main drivers of Australia's growing prison population.

These reasons are fine as far as they go, but where are these stricter policies being applied, and why? The answers to these questions are required to find the appropriate policy responses.

My hypothesis is that the accelerating growth in incarceration rates is associated with more punitive approaches by governments to criminal behaviours in remote regions, which are themselves a response to increasing dysfunction associated with alcohol and drug abuse, and longstanding lack of investment by governments in finding substantive policy solutions. To be clear, social dysfunction is an institutional affliction impacting Indigenous communities, but its causes can be traced to the long-standing failure of governments of all persuasions to establish and maintain the institutional and economic frameworks required to ensure social cohesion is guaranteed. Intuitively, it seems clear that the causal relationship between social dysfunction and alcohol and drug abuse goes in both directions; that it they are mutually reinforcing.

In the NT, according to an NT Treasury paper (link here), in 2021, 74.6% of the NT Aboriginal population resided in remote or very remote locations. The Aboriginal population of the NT comprises around 30 % of the NT total population of just over 250,000.

Unfortunately, while the Productivity Commission Closing the Gap Information Repository / data dashboard includes a number of disaggregations in its reporting on Target 10 related to over-representation in the criminal justice system (link here), the dashboard does not record the geographical status of prisoners and/or arrests leading to imprisonment. Nor does it record any information related to the association or role of alcohol or drugs in the crimes leading to incarceration. Nor does the ABS publish this data. We are left to extrapolate pending some detailed demographic research by academic criminologists or geographers…

In an earlier post titled The drivers of stratospheric rates of Indigenous incarceration (link here), I spent some time discussing the recent research report by Don Weatherburn, Michael Doyle, Tegan Weatherall and Joanna Wang titled Towards a theory of Indigenous contact with the criminal justice system (link here).

The following paragraph from the Executive summary of the Weatherburn et al paper supports my hypothesis:

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….

According to the ABS (link here) the total NT prison population on 30 June 2024 was 2284. Of these, 2023, or 88.5%, were Indigenous. The extraordinary increase in NT incarceration rates is almost entirely Indigenous, and three quarter of the NT Aboriginal population reside in remote or very remote locations. It seems clear that Indigenous hyper-incarceration is predominantly a remote issue in the NT. Based on my experience of some decades, and the anecdotal media reports on social dysfunction in remote communities in WA, SA, and Qld, it seems likely that similar trends will be found to exist in these jurisdictions. The only reason they are not apparent is that the Indigenous populations of these states is proportionately much lower than in the NT.

The other gap in The Conversation article (which flows perhaps from the line of argument above) is that role of alcohol or drug abuse in driving criminal behaviour particularly in remote regions. There have been longstanding calls by Western Australian police for alcohol controls in remote regions of WA (link here), and the debate over alcohol controls in the NT has been in play for decades. I don’t propose to recapitulate the case on the damaging impacts of alcohol and the case for stronger policy action on the availability of alcohol in remote regions, but will merely point readers to some previous posts on this blog (link here; link here; link here; link here; link here; link here; link here; link here; and link here).

Policy Solutions

While there is undoubtedly a case for much greater investment in developing alternatives to incarceration both in mainstream contexts and in relation to Indigenous incarceration across the whole nation as advocated by the extraordinary and energetic work of the Justice Reform Initiative (link here), reversing the dire state of social dysfunction across remote Australia is in my view the only way to address the extreme hyper-incarceration of Aboriginal people.

I am under no illusions that the political vibe nationally has taken a more punitive turn and like the authors of the Conversation article, I see this as deeply counterproductive. Reversing the cataclysm confronting remote communities will require sustained political vision and commitment, and a substantive focus on expanding and accelerating some clear policy priorities.

The policy solutions outlined by Don Weatherburn and his co-authors in their Institute of Criminology research paper referenced above were framed as follows:

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 long term reduction in the scale of Indigenous over-representation in prison.

I wholeheartedly agree.

Yet each of these three identified actions, are themselves comprised of assemblages of complex policy measures involving legislative and/or regulatory changes, access to adequate and increased funding, and most importantly, an institutional structure that can operate at scale, and is guaranteed to be sustained over at least a decade. To take an example of a recent national priority, AUKUS, each of these elements have been provided for. Unfortunately, the operation of our day-to-day political system, especially in relation to an issue that is invariably defined as the responsibility of the states, does not normally guarantee that these essential elements are provided for. I will repeat this point: our democratic politics as usual is not working to fix this issue.

Below I set out one potential model designed to ensure progress is made in reversing the worsening crisis of Indigenous hyper-incarceration. The details are less important that its description of the level and intensity of action that would in my view be required to drive real change.

As the issue of hyper-incarceration has bedevilled the nation for decades, it is clear that new approaches and ways of operating are required. The first, and most obvious, is that the issue of Indigenous over-representation in our prisons should be made, substantively and not merely rhetorically, a national priority. To this end, the Commonwealth should step up and exercise its constitutional powers granted in the 1967 referendum to develop and drive a truly national policy framework on Indigenous incarceration.

Second, for the purposes of delivering the necessary policy and program reform initiatives to underpin the incarceration reform agenda, the Commonwealth should carve out notional jurisdiction across remote northern and remote Australia and drive a comprehensive and coordinated reconceptualisation of core service delivery across remote communities and their associated service.

A core element would be the establishment of a legislated ten-year policy framework providing for ministerial regulations to implement key reforms, and the establishment of a small five-person Commission comprised of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous members to develop policy and program recommendations to apply across remote Australia. The Commission should aim to work cooperatively with existing bodies (state and local governments, Commonwealth agencies, community organisations, landowners) to drive innovative reforms and to recommend policy and program changes to governments at all levels. Its recommendations should be public and would need to be agreed and implemented by governments. The Commission’s legislated powers and functions would be such as to ensure that Commonwealth agencies and states and territories alike would be required to cooperate and to respond to recommendations within three months.

Such a Commission would not be required to delve into each and every policy issue but should be statutorily required to decide which issues are most relevant to the continuation of dysfunction and to focus on identifying reform strategies for the Commonwealth to implement, hopefully in conjunction with existing service delivery institutions. Obvious areas for attention would include controls on the availability of alcohol across remote Australia; upgrades to educations systems and infrastructure, and the necessity or significant expansion of subsidised remote employment focussed on community needs such as land care, ranger programs, appropriate policing models, disability support, and community maintenance.  A key assumption of this model is that the Commonwealth should be responsible for outcomes, and for bringing the states and territories to the table.

Third, a parallel structure to the remote Commission, perhaps relying more on the National Coalition of Indigenous Peaks, should be developed for addressing the challenges of reversing Indigenous incarceration rates in regional and urban areas of the nation.

Conclusion

The extraordinary levels of Indigenous hyper-incarceration are a national disgrace and are causing untold and ongoing harm to myriad Indigenous families across the nation. There are no short-term solutions, but it is clear that the punitive approaches being pursued by jurisdictions right across the nation will not be successful in preventing recidivism and repeat offending, will be extraordinarily expensive for taxpayers, will likely weaken social cohesion, and are causing permanent emotional and psychological damage to hundreds of thousands of Indigenous family members.

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.

To allow this level of dysfunction to emerge, to grow and develop, and to persist as if it is somehow outside the nation’s field of vision is both a political failure and an indictment on the moral underpinnings of our nation.

 

24 January 2025

 

A shaft of sunlight: the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee 2024 Report

                                                 Men judge by the complexion of the sky

The state and inclination of the day…

King Richard II, Act 3, Scene 2.

 

The 2024 Report of the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee (link here) chaired by Jenny Macklin was released on 26 April 2024, some two weeks before the 2024 Budget is due to be delivered. In my view, this is an excellent report, extremely well argued, quite technical at times (reflecting a bias towards identifying the evidence for its recommendations), and as one might expect, encompassing an admirable mix of ambition and pragmatism.

 

The report makes 22 broad recommendations across the span of the social security policy domain, and identifies five policy priorities for 2024:

1. Substantially increase JobSeeker and related working age payments and improve the indexation arrangements for those payments.
2. Increase the rate of Commonwealth Rent Assistance.
3. Create a new employment services system to underpin the goal of full employment and ensure a more positive focus on supporting Australians seeking work.
4. Implement a national early childhood development system that is available to every child, beginning with abolishing the Activity Test for the Child Care Subsidy to guarantee all children access to a minimum three days of high quality early childhood education and care (ECEC).
5. Renewing the culture and practice of the social security system to support economic inclusion and wellbeing.

 

In this post I propose to point to the areas of the report, and the specific recommendations, that have salience for First Nations policy outcomes.

 

Of course, while the reports overarching focus is on mainstream policy, it must be remembered that First Nations citizens will be impacted by mainstream policies as much as indigenous specific policies, and perhaps more so.

 

There are I think three elements of the Committee’s report with particular significance for Indigenous interests.

 

The first element relates to the Committee’s discussion of the Remote Area Allowance and recommendation 4. They base their analysis on work undertaken by Francis Markham from the ANU, and which I published a post about in February (link here). In that post, I extended the argument to argue for an overhaul of the Community Development Program, an issue that the Inclusion Committee has not addressed directly but see the second element below. The Committee recommendation states:

Recommendation 4. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) or an appropriate researcher or research centre in partnership with remote communities should be funded to undertake analysis of the additional costs of living in remote areas, but the case for an immediate increase in the Remote Area Allowance (RAA) seems particularly strong.

 

This recommendation, if adopted and implemented, would lay out in detail the case for much more targeted cost of living support for remote communities, including in relation to food security, energy costs, transport costs, and rent costs. At a strategic level, it begins the process of developing an evidence base for a more comprehensive policy approach to remote Australia, an issue I have been advocating for over 25 years.

 

The second element relates to employment services reform and is perhaps the most significant of the Economic Inclusion Committee’s recommendations for First Nations interests. The recommendation states:

Recommendation 6. The Government commit to a full-scale redesign of Australia’s employment services system by adopting the recommendations in the report from the Select Committee on Workforce Australia Employment Services. As a priority the Government should: a. Finalise an implementation plan and enact necessary legislative changes in 2024. b. Commit to a full redesign of the mutual obligations and compliance settings in the Workforce Australia system that focus on building capability and confidence to support people into work, consistent with the directions outlined in the Select Committee’s report. c. Build and refine a new practice model that genuinely meets the needs of people furthest from the labour market, including through: [details omitted; refer to page 10 of the report].

 

I published a post on the Select Committee’s report last December (link here) where I spelt out the specific elements that were of relevance to First Nations interests. I recommend readers look at that post. While the Economic Inclusion Committee has not framed its discussion and recommendation on these issues as mainstream, there are enormous, embedded implications for remote Indigenous interests, particularly in the Inclusion Committee’s comment about the needs of people furthest from the labour market. The elephant in the room here is the issue of direct employment creation by the Commonwealth. The Prime Minister in his comments upon the release of the most recent Commonwealth Closing the Gap Implementation Plan described the Community Development Program (CDP) as a failure, announced (link here) the creation of the Remote Jobs and Economic Development Program, and funding for the employment of 3000 CDP participants by organisations working in remote regions. Yet the result was to leave around 27,000 CDP participants in a ‘failed program’.

 

The third element relates to First Nations Housing, and in particular building a better evidence base for assessing both need and ongoing management of housing stock. Again, this is a hugely significant policy issue for Indigenous interests, with implications for disability policy, educational outcomes, the social determinants of health, child welfare outcomes, the prevalence of domestic violence, and not least, economic inclusion. Again, while not limited to remote Australia, it has long been clear that housing need for Indigenous interests is most acute in remote regions, not least because there is a limited private market in housing provision. The Committee’s recommendation (edited) is as follows:

Recommendation 10. The Government urgently commit substantial investment to address need in public housing and homelessness for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, including maintenance and upgrades, community infrastructure and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander housing sector.

To improve the economic efficiency of investments, the Government should fund a National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Housing Data Register to improve data availability, quality and sharing… To better target existing investment, including from the Housing Australia Future Fund and Social Housing Accelerator Fund, the Government should: a. Negotiate improved performance reporting and data sharing within intergovernmental agreements and arrangements. b. Undertake rapid needs assessments of homelessness and overcrowding, maintenance, repair and community infrastructure requirements in remote hotspot areas. c. Commission a redesigned Community Housing Infrastructure Needs (CHINS)- like survey, which considers limitations of earlier iterations and subsequent advancements in data collection…

 

The import of this recommendation is that it explicitly focusses on establishing a much better and transparent evidence base for this most crucial area of policy. It will mean that Indigenous advocates such as the Coalition of Peaks and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Housing Association will have the means to make a much more persuasive argument for needs based assistance into the future.

 

The Economic Inclusion Committee report appends an excellent detailed consultancy report addressing First Nations Housing issues. That report is too detailed for me to summarise here, but I commend it to readers as an excellent summary of the state of play in relation to First Nations housing policy in Australia today.

 

Conclusion

The Economic Inclusion Committee has made an excellent contribution towards sharpening the policy agenda for First Nations interests. Clearly there are a swathe of other issues of relevance to Indigenous interests that deserve attention by the Commonwealth Government. But there are limits to what governments, and their advisers, are prepared to take on and prioritise. From my perspective, I consider that the Inclusion Committee has done an excellent job in highlighting key areas that deserve prioritisation and continuing attention. Of course, the real issue will turn on what the Commonwealth Governments response will be, and whether they allocate the intellectual and financial resources to deliver on whatever commitments they do make.

 

In any case, the publication of this report provides a shaft of bright sunlight that bodes well for the days ahead.

 

26 April 2024

Dodge dip and dive: eight ‘data points’ on remote policy

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players

As You Like It, Act two, scene seven

 

A consistent theme on this Blog has been the social, economic and environmental crisis facing remote Australia, and in particular, remote Indigenous communities (link here, link here, link here, link here and link here).

 

It is perhaps time for me to chance my arm and lay out a high level outline of a potential policy strategy along with the accompanying rationale to address this crisis, albeit one that will take time to devise and implement, and longer to gain traction. Nevertheless, the alternative is to keep muddling on, at serious and ongoing cost to the life opportunities of the 150, 000 remote Indigenous residents across Australia.

 

Before doing so, hopefully sometime in the next month, I thought I would present a random and non-prioritised assembly of key remote ‘data points’ or markers that I have been collecting over the month or so. In laying out the data points, I will add some brief contextual commentary. My point in approaching this issue in what is a deliberately adventitious way, without suggesting an order of priority, importance or significance, is to provide a sense of the breadth and interdependence of the policy challenges facing remote Australia and its residents as well as the temporal cycles that permeate this domain.

 

I am hoping readers think about the underlying implications of each data point, but also consider what it means if the data point is replicated more widely. While it is clear that not every remote location and community faces the same circumstances, it is also clear that individual data points are replicated more widely, albeit to an unknown extent, creating notional data sets. Moreover, the interactions of the totality of different notional data sets operate are not independent or constrained, but reinforce each other in ways that resist the constrained and limited policy horizons of governments and policymakers confined by self-imposed bureaucratic silos. The implication of this insight is that policy responses must also be designed and implemented as assemblages of reinforcing initiatives.

 

Remote data points

Data point one: A recent ABC news article reports that in Halls Creek in the Kimberley region of WA, school attendance at the District High School has dropped from 38 per cent in 2021 to 26 per cent last year, compared to 80 per cent across Western Australia's public schools (link here). An earlier August 2022 ABC news article (link here) reported that the Western Australian Coroner had found that poor school attendance was a common factor in the deaths [by suicide] of young people in the town between 2012 and 2016.

 

Data point two: In 2022, ANU researchers finalised an extensive 140 page report on Groote Eylandt for the Anindilyakwa Land Council titled Social Indicators and Data Governance to Support Local Decision Making in the Groote Archipelago (link here). It is worth reading in full for the contextual background. Three sets of issues from the report caught my attention for their policy implications:

The first issue relates to overcrowding: The report notes (pages 87-88) that in 2006, 39% of the community-controlled housing stock was uninhabitable ...The number of Indigenous occupied dwellings in the Archipelago as defined by the census has increased by more than 50% over the past 15 years ….The percentage of census-identified dwellings that are overcrowded declined from 49% in 2016 to 37% in 2021 (pages 87-88). My comment: What the report does not do is to explicitly draw out the policy implications of this data. Notwithstanding the improvements over the past 15 years, overcrowding is clearly a significant issue with a third of houses overcrowded. Yet clearly the substantial investment included in the now discontinued National Partnership on Remote Indigenous Housing had a positive impact. What is unclear is whether the current NT Housing program at a considerably lower level of overall investment will have the momentum to overcome the ongoing rate of housing asset deterioration (in a worsening climate) and continue to eat into the overcrowding backlog. As an aside, the ANU report does not address the quantum and allocation of mining royalties by the ALC on Groote: in many respects, Groote is unique amongst remote communities in northern Australia, and it is the major driver of royalty equivalent payments that fund the operation of all four NT Land Councils plus the ABTA. Royalty allocation decisions are an important issue on Groote as mining will not last for ever. The allocation of royalties must be directed to capital investment (including private housing investment) rather than recurrent expenditure if it is to have a lasting impact. That is an issue for separate consideration and study.

The second issue relates to health: the Report notes (page 106) that for residents of Groote Eylandt, hospitalisation rates are higher now than 20 years ago for all leading causes, except in the case of genito-urinary diseases which includes renal failure …. Other notable increases in the rate of hospitalisation have occurred for external causes and alcohol-related diseases. The latter have been much higher over the decade 2011–2020 compared to 2001– 2010 … Intentional self-harm hospitalisations have also been much higher over the past 10 years, with the rate for females double that for males. My comment: the important, but unanswered question here is what has caused these retrograde developments. It may be a reduction in the quality of health services, but my intuition is that the problem lies more in the area of the social determinants of health.

The third issue relates to education: on school attendance, the report notes that the overall attendance rate at Groote Archipelago schools (% of those enrolled attending only some of the time) has been consistently low at 40–50% since 2011. The overall attendance level (those attending >90% of the time) has been consistently very low at <10% since 2011. In effect, this means that a large share of the current generation of school aged children have missed an effective education. My comment: this is an extraordinary indictment on the NT Government and its education policies.

 

Data point three: A recent academic article on the organisational depth, robustness and footprint of political parties in remote Australia, authored by Griffith University political scientists Duncan McDonnell and Bartholomew Stanford, titled The Party on Remote Ground: Disengaging and Disappearing? (link here and link here). This research documents the weakening and extremely thin footprint of organised political parties in remote electorates such as the Barkly in the NT and the Kimberley in WA, and points to the adverse implications for democratic participation and engagement, including amongst Indigenous citizens. My comment: what the authors don’t say, but perhaps should have, is to emphasise the crucial role of political parties in shaping public policy, and the concomitant consequence that political party remote disengagement risks exacerbating the ongoing remote policy vacuum. See the discussion in my submission to the Joint Select Committee on the Voice Referendum (#65 at link here). I previously posted on the low voting turnouts in remote Australia (link here).

 

Data point four: in a recent Submission (link here) to the Standing Committee on Community Affairs Legislation Committee Inquiry into the provisions of the Social Security (Administration) Amendments (Income Management Reform) Bill 2023, ANU researchers Matthew Gray and Rob Bray  used ABS and AIHW data to track Indigenous imprisonment rates in the NT over the past twenty years against non-Indigenous rates in the NT and nationally (see Figure 1) and Indigenous school attendance rates in the NT over the decade from 2009 to 2020 (Figure 4).

In relation to incarceration, they observe that compared to non-Indigenous adults, Indigenous imprisonment rates have dramatically widened since 2000, exceeding 2700 per 100, 0000 in 2020, up from just under 1000 per 100, 000 in 2000. Non-Indigenous incarceration rates have remained stable throughout these decades at about 200 per 100, 000.

In relation to school attendance, they report declining school attendance across the NT over the past decade, reaching mid sixty percent levels for remote schools and mid forty percent levels for very remote schools. To which I would add two comments: this data is consistent with the Groote statistics cited above, suggesting Groote is not an outlier; and second, the statistics in Figure 4 do not cite the most educationally significant data, namely, the proportion of students who attend 90 percent plus of the time. These data are consistent however with the extraordinary conclusion that a substantial proportion of remote Indigenous students over the past decade are missing out on an education, and there is no policy initiative on the horizon to suggest this will change over the coming decade.

 

Data point five: the Gray/Bray submission referred to above, along with a number of other submissions, comprehensively demonstrates that the continuation by the current Commonwealth Government of universal compulsory income management across remote communities in the NT lacks a robust evidence base. The submission points out that policy breaches Labor’s pre-election promises, and points to departmental efforts to ignore or not publish relevant data. My own comment on this situation is as follows: the underlying rationale for continuing this selective policy can only be a blunt and indirect attempt to limit expenditure on alcohol by remote residents in circumstances where the NT Government is incapable and unwilling to impose robust regulation of the alcohol sales across the NT. This policy is increasingly at risk of tipping into being racially discriminatory, as its status as a ‘special measure’ under the Racial Discrimination Act requires it to have a beneficial impact. Yet if the evidence does not support this, the ‘special measures’ rationale falls apart.

 

Data point six: a recent research publication by ANU researchers (led by my CAEPR colleague Bradley Riley) and representatives of two Central Australian Aboriginal organisations documented the impact of COVID on energy security amongst remote NT residents. Titled Disconnected during disruption: Energy insecurity of Indigenous Australian prepay customers during the COVID-19 pandemic (link here), the research reported that:

The risks associated with the regular de-energization of prepay households have long been overlooked by government reporting and this contributed to a lack of visibility of energy insecurity and available protections for this group during the pandemic response. In contrast to the rest of Australia, energy insecurity in the form of disconnections remained unrelentingly high or worsened for prepay households during this time. COVID-19 magnifies pre-existing health and socio-economic inequities. 

I have previously posted about this issue, and the potential destructive interplay of high levels of pre-pay disconnections and rising temperatures (link here). The recent publication pays particular attention to the lack of comprehensive data. The paper concludes:

While the national moratorium on disconnection provided to post pay customers during COVID-19 meant that experiences of energy insecurity decreased for most Australians, remote living Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prepay customers did not receive commensurate protections …. While there are few published metrics relating to avoiding or reducing the frequency and duration of involuntary self-disconnection events experienced by prepay customers, what data there is shows that frequent de-energization of Indigenous prepay households continued and, in many cases, worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

Data point seven: In early February, the ABC had reported that ‘Data reveals 50 per cent spike in alcohol-related emergency presentations after lifting of bans in Alice Springs’ (link here). These bans related to the consumption of alcohol on town camps around Alice Springs, and numerous other remote communities.

 

On 20 April 2023, NT Chief Minister Natasha Fyles issued a media release which stated in part:

The Northern Territory Government will extend takeaway alcohol restrictions in Alice Springs. Over the past three months we have seen these alcohol restrictions work, and support our community and frontline workers. 

Alcohol-related emergency department presentations at Alice Springs Hospital have almost halved, and domestic violence has dropped by a third in the month since the takeaway alcohol restrictions were reintroduced into the Northern Territory town. 

 

While the Chief Minister appears to be shifting the narrative away from the earlier across the board alcohol bans which she initially opposed, and reluctantly agreed to re-introduce after pressure from the Commonwealth, the points to note for present purposes are first the extraordinary human toll of alcohol abuse, and second, the direct link between alcohol consumption levels and hospital presentations. The latest available published data on the NT Government website (link here) is for the fourth quarter of 2022, and indicates 1299 alcohol related hospital emergency presentations. There were a total of 4145 alcohol related emergency presentations at the Alice Springs hospital for the 2022 year. To put this in context, a 2018 Deloittes Report (link here) noted that there had been a total of 46, 785 alcohol related emergency presentations across Australia in 2016-17 (table 2.1). Clearly, alcohol abuse levels in the NT and in Alice Springs have been at extraordinary levels for a considerable time. 

 

Data point eight: on 28 April 2023 Guardian reported (link here) on the ABS release of updated socioeconomic indexes based on 2021 census data which take into account census data on income, education, occupation, housing, employment and family structure, among other factors, to rank each of Australia 547 local government areas (LGAs).  The data is used to create a score with an average of about 1,000. Lower scores indicate areas of relative disadvantage. Unsurprisingly, by my rough reckoning, the 33 most disadvantaged LGAs in Australia all have a substantial majority of Indigenous residents. Of course, even more advantaged LGAs can include pockets of extreme Indigenous disadvantage, but these index scores are moderated by the population mix within the LGA. According to the ABS, “disadvantaged areas tend to be in regional and remote communities, while advantaged areas tend to be in major cities”.

 

Conclusion

I am conscious that these random data points, and particularly the associated notional data sets, largely represent shortfalls in the performance of governments, and are biased towards issues that have received media coverage which in turn is likely to be a proxy for policy attention from governments. Issues that are in my view significant, but are not listed here, include wider health issues (including for example the long lasting effects of FASD); employment / unemployment, and in particular the interaction with the Community Development Program which delivers income support to some 35, 000 remote citizens; environmental management including the operation of Indigenous Protected Areas and ranger groups; the impact and operation of land rights and native title legislation; and issues related to commercial and economic development. Each of these policy domains along with others I have not mentioned undoubtedly interacts with and contributes to the quality of life for remote citizens, along with the policy issues I have addressed. Nor have I focussed on institutional structures such as the operations and effectiveness of Indigenous organisations, or the impact of federal governance.

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Alice Springs crisis: observations on remote policy

 

Tis much when sceptres are in children's hands,

But more when envy breeds unkind division:

There comes the ruin, there begins confusion.

Henry VI, Part 1, Act 4, scene 1

 

Yesterday, the Prime Minister, the Minister for Indigenous Australians, and three Indigenous Labor MPs (Patrick Dodson, Marion Scrymgour, and Malarndirri McCarthy) visited Alice Springs to meet with the NT Government, and local community interests.

 

I am loathe to write too much about the unfolding situation in Alice Springs given the amount to material being published in mainstream media. I don’t propose to set out a comprehensive account or summary, and instead would refer readers to the front page reports in the Australian, the ABC and the Guardian over recent days. Below is a quick snapshot of my posts in relation to alcohol policy in remote Australia over the past year or so. I include them to both provide some deeper background, and more importantly to make the point that for close observers of this policy realm (are there any in Government?) it has been very apparent for a considerable time that business as usual was not sufficient and would eventually lead to disaster. Bad as things are, it is not clear that they will not get worse before they improve.

 

In February 2022, I posted a blog reporting on what amounted to a clear decision by the previous Government not to extend the Stronger Futures legislation related to alcohol (and some other issues such as remote stores licencing which has implications for food security in remote communities). That post was titled The Commonwealth is taking us headlong into a remote policy chasm: but who cares? (Link here).

 

In May 2022, I published a post outlining the ongoing social and governance catastrophe in remote Australia (link here). That post dealt with alcohol issues only tangentially, but reinforced the deep structural and systemic underpinnings of the current crisis.

 

In early June 2022, the NT Government announced its approach to loosening the controls on alcohol regulation across remote communities and town camps. I published a post linking to criticism of this approach, and explored the likely rationale for the NTG decision (link here). I argued that the NTG decision was a cynical exercise in encouraging drinkers to remain in remote communities and out of Darwin and major towns. In the case of Central Australia, the systemic incentives to leave underfunded communities are much greater than mere access to alcohol; hence the current issues in Alice Springs.

 

In August, I published a post titled Alcohol policy reform in remote Australia: a potential roadmap. This post dealt with remote Western Australia (link here), and made the case for the Commonwealth to inject itself into the remote alcohol policy arena.

 

In December 2022, I published a post titled Cataclysm and crisis: the two sides of the policy tragedy engulfing remote northern Australia (link here). That post was headed with a quotation from Hamlet: ‘This bodes some strange eruption to our state’. The post concluded as follows:

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.

The implication that inevitably follows is that the solutions (for they will inevitably be multiple) must go beyond focussing on a single issue (housing, or health or food security or alcohol, or crime, or education, or incarceration, or unemployment or economic development, or land tenure, or dispossession or the impact of colonisation). 

 

I recommend reading those previous posts to obtain an inkling of the systemic underpinnings of the current situation in Alice Springs.

 

Below, I lay out a series of observations that are not getting much critical attention in the current media tumult. They are not intended as a comprehensive analysis of the current situation nor are they in any particular order.

 

First, there have been statements by both Government, the Opposition, and the NT Government seeking to blame their political opponents for the flow on from the decision to allow the Stronger Futures legislation that curtailed access to alcohol across many remote NT Aboriginal communities. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton called on the Government to reinstate the alcohol bans that expired in July last year (link here and link here). Yesterday, the Prime Minister argued (link here) that the Stronger Futures legislation had expired before the first parliamentary session under the new Government (elected in May 2022). While technically correct, the new Labor Government always had the option of moving to reinstate the legislation, or proactively engaging with the NT Government to ensure alcohol controls were not loosened. In the final analysis, the new Government could have announced an intention to reinstate the Stronger Futures legislation in the event that the NT Government failed to legislate in similar terms. The NT Government spent months mischaracterising the Stronger Futures legislation as racially based and thus discriminatory (link here and link here) while ignoring the fact that it was designed as a special measure under the Racial Discrimination Act which allows ostensible discrimination that is designed to benefit the people of a particular race. The Albanese Government, the former Morrison Government, and the Labor NT Government all had the opportunity to ensure that the Stronger Futures legislation continued with a zero or miniscule interregnum. Rewriting history to blame political opponents while seeking to avoid responsibility merely serves to signal that politics continues to play a major role in managing the response of our political elites to the situation in Alice Springs.

 

Second, as my previous posts made clear, the current issues in Alice Springs are (i) symptomatic of underlying structural and systemic policy challenges; and (ii) are constituent elements in a much more geographically expansive crisis that has been ebbing and flowing across remote Australia for decades, and had become significantly worse in the past three to five years. Alcohol abuse is a significant element in this crisis, but it is far from the only factor in play.

 

Third, the media reports on social dysfunction across remote Australia invariably focus on events in particular places and at particular times, but rarely do reporters step back and provide a holistic and coherent narrative that joins the dots both geographically, and in terms of the multiple sectors impacted. Media hype, however accurate, rarely provides the full picture, and is not adequate for policy formulation. Yet increasingly, Governments have abdicated on their responsibility to prepare and publish comprehensive, accurate and and coherent policy relevant analyses across the breadth of public policymaking. Analysis has given way to propaganda and public relations. This abdication of responsibility is particularly costly in relation to remote Australia given the thin levels of public discussion and knowledge of what goes on in remote places and communities.

 

Fourth, in the context of the present tumult around alcohol regulation, and the promulgation of a confusing amalgam of geographically constrained temporary and ongoing policy proposals by both the Federal and the NT Government, no media outlets have asked the PM, the Leader of the Opposition, or the NT Chief Minister, to reveal the level of political donations to their party organisations from interests associated with the alcohol industry. Given the crisis of legitimacy surrounding the quality of governance in relation to these current issues, it seems an obvious question to ask policymakers and politicians: how does the community know that you are not conflicted in proposing policy solutions that should be in the public interest. Political donations are theoretically made public, albeit after a considerable delay. However, there is nothing stopping any of the political players shaping policy in relation to the social crisis rolling out from compiling and publishing in a clear and transparent form the donations received from alcohol industry corporations over say the past three years. The absence of such a transparent statement from policymakers and their political opponents should provide cause for concern in relation to the policy solutions that are being proposed.

 

Fifth, there appears to be a correlation between the substantial pull back and withdrawal of the Commonwealth from the remote policy arena over the past decade and increasing levels of dysfunction. The NT Government does not appear to have the policy and financial capability to make a difference, and nor does it appear to have the political will power. The State Governments of Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland are too focussed on managing the complex issues of urban development in their respective major cities to give the particular needs of remote regions the priority they require. The 1967 referendum gave the Commonwealth a legislative and policy remit for Indigenous affairs for a reason, yet the Commonwealth’s role is being incrementally dismantled without any public debate or consideration.

 

Sixth, this morning on ABC Radio National, Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney recounted visiting the Alice Springs Hospital last night in the company of Marion Scrymgour, the member for the seat of Lingiari. 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. 

We owe it to our children and our grandchildren to solve these issues. If we are don’t, future historians will write about us and the policies we implemented as no better than those of the perpetrators of colonial violence. Solving these structural and systemic issues, borne of sustained and ongoing exclusion and inequality, is in the public interest and the national interest.

[This post was revised on 29 January to correct a small number of typographical and grammatical errors]

 

Forward looking policy responses to the COVID 19 pandemic in relation to First Nations citizens.

Defer no time, delays have dangerous ends.

1 Henry VI, Act 3, scene 2.

Here are two important policy perspectives on the current pandemic and its implications for First Nations.

First, a reader of this Blog with significant and ongoing engagement in remote Australia sent me the following comments / policy suggestions which resonated strongly with me. I set them out in full below.

Second, I also set out the Abstract to a new Topical Issues paper from the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the ANU (where I am a Visiting Fellow), which sets out eight short policy perspectives from researchers associated with the Centre. I am one of those contributors.

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Policy pathways for a COVID 19 response in remote Aboriginal communities

In recent weeks remote and regional Australia has witnessed the three spheres of Australian governments - local, state and Commonwealth - collaborate in an unusually quick and effective way to achieve the mass movement of large numbers of Aboriginal people out of regional towns and back into the many hundreds of Aboriginal Australia that are dotted across the regional landscape. This has been achieved by enlisting the support of Aboriginal leaders and Aboriginal organisations, backed up at times with wider community and industry support.

Almost every remote community across regional and remote Australia has rapidly increased in population size without evidence of the additional resources heading their way necessary to respond to these new circumstances.

Unless there is urgent response, proportionate to the magnitude of the new circumstances in which these remote communities have been thrust, the Aboriginal leadership and organisations who assisted government in delivering on this rushed population movement could understandably make themselves unavailable to subsequent government approaches when local support might be even more desperately sought.

The Federal Government’s previous policy position - implemented resolutely over the last decade - has been to walk away from earlier partnerships with the States, no longer supporting the essential municipal services and housing construction programs needed in these remote Aboriginal communities. That Federal policy position firmed up and has been pursued despite evidence of serious negative impact across Australia.

This implied new policy position of the Federal government - as evidenced by their active support for the mass movement of Aboriginal people - has been hurriedly expressed in terms that it is “for their own good” that in the face of this pandemic, Aboriginal people should move back onto country and reduce the Covid-19 risk to themselves that they are otherwise facing. An unstated objective would appear to be de-risking the regional towns of remote Australia and therefore protecting the wider population.

However, a whole host of other new risks and consequences open up as a result of the assisted sudden demographic shift. Not least of all is the risk of an outbreak of the standard lethal diseases that can too easily take hold of overcrowded populations living in unhygienic conditions.

With COVID 19 at risk of exploding across Aboriginal Australia, acute unprecedented crisis is recognised. To respond to this crisis and save as many lives as possible, rather than simply following mainstream templates, governments will need to urgently adopt innovative pathways tailored to the specific contexts of Aboriginal Australia.

Most pressing is urgent funding to deliver increased shelter, housing and ablution facilities for the remote communities of regional Aboriginal Australia; not only to ensure that Aboriginal people can avoid Covid-19 but also avoid an explosion in the standard lethal diseases; for example, dysentery.

There is a clear and real role here to support the leadership and authority of the Native Title Prescribed Body Corporates; and, in regions like the Pilbara and Kimberley, to bolster the significant Aboriginal owned and run organisations and building companies which - IF SPECIFICALLY FUNDED FOR THE TASK - could immediately step up and use their capacity and experience to deliver shelter, housing and much needed improvements in ablution facilities and protected water supplies.

During the period of this pandemic and beyond, support for on-country economic and employment opportunities for Aboriginal people will need to be embedded into the landscape of regional Aboriginal Australia. These include seed-collection programs for emerging mine revegetation and rehabilitation programs; expanded ranger programs; on-country artist development and support programs; and currently unavailable online technologies that allow Aboriginal Australians who wish to access the mainstream education, training, and employment opportunities that Australia has to offer.

Taken together, these modest policy innovations would allow remote Aboriginal Australians to stay on their communities close to country; assist in facilitating the effective maintenance of social distance and social isolation and thus minimise the risk of disease; provide increased access to employment opportunities on communities; and provide access to remotely delivered education, health and employment opportunities.

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Abstract

This Topical Issue is a compilation of eight short papers that have been written during the rapid escalation of the Australian response to the COVID-19 pandemic.   

First Nations people are being, and will continue to be, affected by this crisis in ways that differ from the effects on other Australians. The pandemic risks exacerbating deep-seated health, social and economic inequities in Australian society, especially the long-standing inequalities between First Nations people and other Australians. The pandemic has also made plain the shortcomings of the relationships between Indigenous people and Australian governments, revealing a governance gap that is difficult to ignore. But despite these inimical conditions, the disruption of the COVID-19 crisis is opening up new opportunities for public policy change. And many First Nation organisations and communities are leading the way. Unprecedented new government expenditure creates space for policy innovation, as the boundaries of what is possible become blurred.  The pandemic is a time of stark risks, but it is also a time when informed policy bravery could create new foundations for a better future. 

Contributions to this Topical Issue focus on employment impacts, social security reforms, Indigenous governance, violence against women, the Indigenous health workforce, school closures, energy security in remote communities, and a proposal for an Indigenous reconstruction agency

The link to the CAEPR Topical Issues Paper is here.