RSAS Up: The Commonwealth's Remote School Attendance Strategy

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PMC) published, on 4 March 2016, an interim progress report dated October 2015 on the Remote School Attendance Strategy (RSAS), the Commonwealth’s flagship initiative in relation to remote education.

The Commonwealth also supports a number of smaller pilot initiatives such as the SEAM program which operates in a number of remote and urban NT (and previously Qld) communities and links school attendance to parents’ welfare payments, and the Learning on Country Program which operates in four Arnhem Land communities.

The SEAM program was assessed by the ANAO in a 2014 audit which found ‘mixed’ results, and the program was evaluated in a May 2014 report which appears very comprehensive, but largely equivocal in terms of its results. The Learning on Country program was evaluated in a report dated May 2015; refer to Minister Scullion’s media release dated 15 November 2015 reporting a qualified yet positive evaluation of the pilot. In addition, one of the five components of the Indigenous Advancement Strategy (IAS) relates to Children and Schooling, and presumably this component funds initiatives proposed and implemented by third parties.

RSAS commenced in 2014 and involves the engagement of around 400 local school attendance supervisors and officers to work with students, families, and school communities, involving 77 remote schools. The program was rolled out in two phases in 2014, across five jurisdictions, and was funded for two calendar years, 2014 and 2015 at a cost of $46.5m. In September 2015, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs announced that the ‘successful’ program was being extended for a further three years to the end of 2018 at a further cost of around $80m.

Extraordinarily poor educational outcomes in remote Australia have been an issue of concern for at least two decades. In our 2007 book Beyond Humbug, Neil Westbury and I identified education as an example of governmental incapacity to implement effective delivery of essential services. We cited 2005 Productivity Commission data which indicated that in remote areas of the NT in 1999, only 3 to 4 percent of Indigenous students achieved the national reading benchmarks.

The most recent NAPLAN report includes data which indicates that current Year 3 reading achievement of Indigenous students in very remote regions of the NT is that 27.4 percent are at or above the benchmarks, and 71.2 percent are below. The comparable national figures for very remote regions are 52.3 percent below the benchmark and 46.6 percent are above (refer Table 3.R6).

For Year 9 students, in very remote NT, 84.6 percent are below national accepted benchmarks, while in very remote regions nationally 69.7 percent are below national benchmarks (refer Table 9.R6).

Clearly there is a strong policy rationale for additional government action. Two in three remote Indigenous students are not achieving a year nine reading standard, with the concomitant lifelong consequences for employment, income-earning capacity, and the substantial personal and social opportunity costs which that entails.

The issue then is what is the appropriate and/or most effective policy response? And which level of Government should drive that response?

Education is primarily a state and territory responsibility, but is an area where the Commonwealth has longstanding interests, normally advanced through the provision of funding to public and private education providers. The Commonwealth has long-standing mechanisms for using the power of the purse to incentivise states and territories to advance Commonwealth priorities.

For the Commonwealth to directly intervene in one aspect of the education system, Indigenous student attendance, as opposed to the other areas which influence indigenous educational outcomes (teacher education, teacher quality, curriculum, capital works, facilities, overall resourcing levels, etc) and to do this only in a subset of all remote schools is, in my view, the most risky and potentially most problematic approach to addressing the issue of poor educational outcomes.

Inadequate investment in all aspects of education by the states and territories, both financial and intellectual, has clearly been a longstanding issue in remote education provision. Unless the Commonwealth is absolutely certain that there is only one issue in remote education, and that issue is poor attendance, then the Commonwealth’s actions are likely to lead to sub-optimal outcomes, and most importantly, will delay the day when effective policy responses will be brought to bear.

In particular, the states and territory have little incentive to take responsibility for outcomes, because in political terms, the success or failure of remote schooling will be seen to be the responsibility of the Commonwealth.

School attendance is an issue the Commonwealth has traditionally left to the states and territories. School attendance is certainly a function of a complex array of factors outside of education, some in the Commonwealth’s domain like welfare policy, but most in the domain of state and local governments. More importantly, school attendance is also a key component in the system comprising a set of complex and inter-related administrative, intellectual and professional activities, which together comprise the schooling system. This system is fundamentally the responsibility of the relevant state and territory education departments.

So I would argue that any policy response to poor educational outcomes should, in the absence of a strong countervailing rationale, be implemented by the states and territories.

As for the design of the most appropriate intervention, this is a huge topic, and I do not claim particular expertise. My own instincts however are that ensuring that remote schools have access to experienced and high quality teachers (with a capacity to engage with their school community as well as running effective education programs) and an effective curriculum are key. Noel Pearson and Chris Sarra have both written persuasively on these topics and have effectively laid out a policy roadmap for governments to consider. If quality teaches and curriculum is the key, then while attendance is important, it becomes essentially a second order issue (insofar as getting the right teachers and curriculum will assist in maintaining attendance rates at acceptable levels). Or to put it another way, high attendance without quality teaching involving high expectations and a quality curriculum will achieve very little.

For better or worse, the Commonwealth has decided to focus its additional intervention virtually solely on school attendance through RSAS and to a lesser extent SEAM. PMC is to be congratulated for releasing the interim progress report on RSAS and for commissioning the evaluative and analytical work which underpins it.

The report includes both quantitative and qualitative components, and concludes that the program has had a positive impact on school attendance overall with an increase in attendance over the first year in a majority of schools – in Queensland and the NT, 72.5 percent of schools (29 out of 40) had an increase, and across the NT, the average number of students on any one day in term three of 2014 was 13 percent higher than in term three 2013.The qualitative evidence was much less clear cut, identifying a range of reasons for poor attendance cited by departmental staff in their weekly reports, but also noting significant issues with recruitment and retention of staff to deliver the program.

The report raises at least four significant issues which are worthy of comment.

In relation to state and territory governments the report notes that they ‘are simultaneously operating their own school attendance programs and strategies which RSAS aims to complement’ (page 3). However the qualitative report which is based on the traffic light reports provided by RSAS staff each week has very little to stay about the inter-relationship with these programs. Moreover, it is apparent (but not explained ) that at least two Governments, South Australia and Western Australia were not prepared to allow data from their states to be utilised in full in the report’s analysis. This is in my view a significant issue as it goes directly to the potential of the program to influence outcomes more generally in the state education systems.

A second comment concerns the data for particular schools. What is immediately apparent from an examination of the tables (and is glossed over by a focus on the percentage change, positive or negative) is that there is a large variability in the absolute attendance levels amongst the various schools, and indeed a number of schools which are improving in percentage terms are nevertheless subject to extremely low attendance levels, particularly in the NT. Thus Table 1.3 on page 6 indicates that 19 of the 29 schools in the RSAS program in the NT had absolute attendance levels in 2014 of less than 60 percent, and 7 schools had attendance levels below 50 percent.

Moreover, the review analysis is focussed entirely on average attendance levels at each school. Yet learning is incremental and requires sustained skills acquisition. Learning deficits quickly emerge if there are gaps in attendance. So it is important to understand whether the non-attendance is confined to a particular cohort within each school, or is more widely shared. Fifty percent attendance might mean 50 percent of students attend every day and fifty never attend, or it may mean that all students miss 50 percent of the school year. The latter outcome has much worse educational consequences than the former, but these differences have not been addressed in the review’s analysis.

Finally, the qualitative analysis is based entirely on the reports of the Commonwealth officials working in each location. This is an inherently limited information base, and merely compiles and analyses the reasons listed for attendance changes by RSAS staff. There is a place for qualitative analysis, but it needs to test particular hypotheses and should engage with actual stakeholders (students, parents, teachers, community members) to have any chance of drawing insightful conclusions which policy makers might then use in devising policy or adjustments to policy.

Conclusion

The Commonwealth’s current policy on remote school attendance appears to be fundamentally flawed. It bears all the hallmarks of a policy initiative designed to be seen to be doing something, yet runs the risk that it will actually allow the states and territories off the hook . There are clearly interactions with the operation of SEAM in the NT (administered by PMC and DHS), but neither program’s design logic appears to recognise the existence of the other. RSAS operates in a limited number of remote locations, and thus will only ever have a partial impact. A more effective alternative would have been to allocate the funds to the relevant education departments utilising an incentive structure which rewards not merely improved attendance (an output), but ideally improved NAPLAN scores (an outcome), leaving the methods to be employed to the education experts.

Of course, RSAS clearly has political benefits for a politician seeking to win votes, particularly in the NT, in that it sets out to create employment for local community members across 29 key school communities. Interestingly, the more structural impediments within communities for improved school attendance appear to make these jobs quite difficult to carry out, leading to high turnover and poor retention. Nevertheless, the potential political motivation is easy to discern. Moreover, naming a program a strategy doesn’t mean that there is a strategy. The Commonwealth has not published a comprehensive policy based rationale for the program.

There would be merit in developing and publishing a strategic plan (or mini white paper) on the overall Commonwealth’s strategy for achieving improved educational outcomes in remote Australia. Such a plan would ensure that a comprehensive and coherent program logic would be devised, and would canvass how best to harness the resources and expertise of the states and territories, and thus lay out a comprehensive rationale for the Commonwealth’s involvement.

If the states and NT were not prepared to cooperate, the Commonwealth should then canvass options for the Commonwealth to take over the whole school education system in remote Australia from start to finish rather than inject random interference as at present.

In the absence of such a strategic rationale for the Commonwealth’s involvement in remote education, interested citizens can be forgiven for seeing RSAS as merely another instance of politics subverting good policy. It will most likely end up on the scrap heap of failed policies in Indigenous affairs, with Indigenous citizens wearing the reputational damage of yet another policy fiasco, taxpayers being $125m worse off, and yet another generation of remote citizens reaching adulthood without the literacy and numeracy skills which will allow them to fully participate in our nation’s future.

When Noel Pearson referred to a crisis in Indigenous policy, he was talking about more than education and schooling. Yet it is apparent that the crisis runs deep in remote education and is embedded not so much in the communities, but in the structures of government itself. Part of the reason we have as a nation found it so difficult to address indigenous disadvantage is that we have been looking for solutions in the wrong places.

The Worsening Crisis in Remote Employment Programs

Last week I attended a very insightful seminar at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the ANU (where I happen to be a Visiting Fellow).

The seminar reported the results of recent research on penalties imposed on remote welfare recipients undertaken by ANU researchers Lisa Fowkes and Will Sanders. I understand that a research paper is in preparation and will be published in the near future. I have linked to the slide presentation at the seminar, so wont attempt to summarise the seminar in detail, but rather will cut to the bottom line.

The data available shows that since the introduction of the RJCP program in 2013, which has now been replaced by the Community Development Program  (generally known as CDP),  penalties for breaches of job search requirements have increased substantially while in non-remote Australia, the quantum of penalties is steadily reducing. Moreover, these trends are much sharper when one focusses on the most serious breaches which lead to cessation of benefits and complete disengagement from any potential employment.

So for example, serious breaches in mainstream JSAs (with a total caseload of 760,000) dropped from 8000 to around 2000 in the two years up to June 2015, whereas in remote Australia, where RJCP has a case load of 37,000 or around five percent of mainstream JSAs, serious breaches rose from close to zero to over 1000 – refer to the graphs presented in the slide presentation. In other words, the rate of serious breaches imposed in remote Australia is about 20 times the rate imposed in non-remote Australia.

The researchers went on to ask the obvious question: why is this happening?

Their answers boil down to three key reasons: the requirements being imposed on remote job seekers (to use the terminology favoured by these schemes) are more onerous than those applicable to non-remote jobseekers; the protections built into the system to tailor responses to individual needs are weaker in remote Australia than elsewhere; and the responses of local people/job seekers to the incentives established by the penalty regime are counter-intuitive (at least to those administering the schemes).

The arguments for applying different requirements on remote jobseekers are not well articulated by governments, but one can assume that they are based on a rationale that the circumstances of remote communities are different both economically and socially and thus different approaches are required. Indeed presumably this is the rationale for having a separate scheme to JSAs at all.

While the CDP scheme is non-discriminatory in nature, applying to all jobseekers in remote Australia, the vast majority of its caseload – over 80 percent - is Indigenous. It is no coincidence that the Minister for Indigenous Affairs has administrative responsibility for the scheme. There is thus an ongoing potential vulnerability for the scheme related to compliance with the Racial Discrimination Act, although to the extent that it is based on subsequent legislation to the RDA, a court may hold that the subsequent legislation overrides the RDA. This potential vulnerability suggests that the Government would have been wise to have ensured that the second reason identified, the poor protections offered to remote residents by the scheme to ensure that individual needs are properly assessed in taking decisions about access to basic income, would not be an issue.

The third key reason, the counter-intuitive local responses, is in my view potentially the most significant driver of the increase in serious breaches (though it seems likely that all three drivers synergistically reinforce the outcomes we are seeing).

In effect, young community residents are making an assessment that they are prepared to be breached, and lose their benefits for an extended period, rather than comply with the requirements to work twenty five hours every week of the year in order to receive a welfare payment. The trade-off decisions involved are based on a range of factors: innate attitudes to income and cash; attitudes to saving and consumption; availability of alternative sources of income; lack of any normal market infrastructure in communities, availability of access to food and drink from family and kin; and preparedness and capacity to live without an income.

I suspect that it is this third key reason which is of most significance in driving the increase in RJCP / CDP breach rates, and points to the inter-cultural complexity of designing effective programs in remote Australia. Nevertheless, it is not the case that policymakers (or at least those with experience in Indigenous affairs policy domain) have not had an appreciation of these realities. Indeed, the capacity of remote citizens to make these trade-offs have been  an issue in a range of contexts for at least two decades, notwithstanding that they only occasionally surface in public policy debate and discussion.

So for example, much of the justification offered by the Howard Government when introducing income management as part of the NT Emergency Response was to address what they termed ‘humbugging’, a negative inflection on the widespread cultural practice in remote indigenous communities of kin-based sharing. These behaviours can have both positive and negative elements, and can be particularly negative when alcohol or drugs are involved. The existence of culturally embedded kin based sharing obligations is likely a significant element in the trade-off calculus facing remote jobseekers.

Returning to RJCP and its successor the CDP, there seems to be little point in having a stand-alone employment services / welfare program for remote Australia, justified on the basis that circumstances are different in the regions, to then not take account of local realities in designing the program.

The Community Development Program came into operation in July 2015 after Minister Scullion formed the view within months of coming to office that the RJCP program was ineffective, and announced a series of immediate changes. He noted in the media release:

“RJCP is a disaster. People aren’t turning up for work and are returning to alcohol. That’s why I’m acting quickly to re-engage people before it is too late,” Minister Scullion said.

“The design and implementation of RJCP was bungled by Labor, with the late announcement of providers, confusion over the funding model, and a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that did not consider the differences between regions.

The Minister has now announced that a revised version of CDP (let’s call it CDP2) will come into operation as of July 2016. PMC has published a fact sheet on the proposed changes. The legislation was introduced in December 2015, and has recently been considered by the Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the report  splits along party lines, with Government members recommending passage and the Greens and Labor recommending against.

I won’t attempt to summarise the report in its entirety (though it deals with a range of salient issues), but merely point to the major substantive concern of many of the submissions which is the degree of discretion proposed to be granted to the Minister, who will be able to determine areas to which CDP2 will apply and the details of compliance requirements in regulations rather than legislation.

I share this particular concern especially in an environment where government actively minimises the amount of transparency involved in administering the program. For example, the contracts with job service providers administering the program on the ground apparently require PMC to approve any contact with media and researchers and information on the levels of resourcing to the program are not accessible to citizens.

The Minister’s approach appears to be to ‘toughen up’ the incentives for non-compliance with the CDP rules, and as a consequence, we are likely to see continued growth in the levels of breaching applied to remote job seekers, leading to increasing numbers of remote citizens being denied welfare on the misguided assumption that denial of welfare will incentivise compliance.

The consequence will be that levels of income flowing into remote communities will be potentially significantly reduced, with consequent flow on effects for economic activity, and potential exacerbation of social issues such as substance abuse and its correlates.

To sum up, we have now had three years of substantial policy flux, with the concomitant confusion and uncertainty on the ground which is an inevitable consequence. By July 2016, there will have been four major changes to remote employment in three years:

RJCP was introduced in July 2013 following a gestation period of a number of years;

·         ‘immediate changes’ were announced by Minister Scullion in late November 2013;

·         the new CDP program was introduced in July 2015; and

·         substantial further changes (CDP2) are scheduled to come into effect in July 2016.

Moreover, the data presented in the ANU seminar last week clearly indicate that the levels of disengagement with RJCP/CDP are increasing, and if the arguments outlined here are accepted, are likely to worsen as CDP2 adopts increasingly tougher penalty regimes on the mistaken assumption that penalties will incentivise engagement. Yet this was exactly the reason Minister Scullion gave for overhauling RJCP in the first place:

“RJCP is a disaster. People aren’t turning up for work and are returning to alcohol. That’s why I’m acting quickly to re-engage people before it is too late,”

It is little wonder that Indigenous leaders consider Indigenous policy to be in a state of deep crisis.

In the light of the analysis above, what are we to make of this recent statement from Minister Scullion:

For too many years under successive governments, the constant change in approach taken in Indigenous Affairs has, itself, become a barrier to improving outcomes for First Australians.

That is why the Coalition is working closely with Indigenous Australians, community by community, to ensure our approaches are implemented with First Australians – not to them – as the Prime Minister outlined in his Closing the Gap statement to Parliament last month.

The most effective way we, as a Parliament, can help to close the gap is ensure we work across party lines in a genuine bipartisan way. I am hoping this will be reflected in the approach taken to the Community Development Programme legislation currently before the Senate.

For my part, I would like to laugh, but can only cry.

Disclosure: As a former official in the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, I had an involvement in the work leading up to the establishment of the RJCP program.

Hamlet on the dilemmas of political life

I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,
To punish me with this and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister.
…..
I must be cruel, only to be kind:
Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.

Hamlet Act Three Scene Four

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee….

Hamlet Act One Scene Four

The New Political Landscape in Indigenous Affairs

Recent developments suggest the coming year will involve a heightened public discussion on Indigenous issues. While the major issue on the public agenda is the progressive ramp up of public debate on potential changes to the Constitution to recognise Indigenous Australians, a swathe of other issues are simmering on the back burner, and arguably are of equal or greater importance. We can confidently expect that some at least will eventually boil over and thus enter the electorate’s consciousness, but there is nothing particularly new about that state of affairs.

What is new, or at least is coming into much sharper focus, is the much greater representation of Indigenous people in our state and federal parliaments. The ALP’s recent decisions to pre-select Linda Burney – an experienced state based politician - for the NSW seat of Barton, and to seek to appoint Patrick Dodson to the Senate casual vacancy in Western Australia, complementing Senator Nova Peris, are merely the latest and most obvious iterations in that trend. On the conservative side, people such as Ken Wyatt and Senator Joanna Lindgren are playing significant but largely hidden roles in shaping attitudes to policy issues within the Government.

At state levels, the NT has an Indigenous Chief Minister in Adam Giles plus a number of Indigenous members of the Assembly, in South Australia Kyam Maher is of Indigenous heritage and is currently the state’s Minister for Indigenous Affairs, the ACT Government has recently promoted Chris Bourke into the Ministry and in WA Ben Wyatt is the Shadow Treasurer and stands a good chance of being the WA Treasurer after the next election.

Other politicians at both federal and state levels either identify as Indigenous or have Indigenous family connections, or may be of Indigenous descent but do not explicitly identify as Indigenous.

The key point to be made here is that we are reaching a point where there is a significant level of Indigenous representation within our parliamentary systems nationwide.

The obvious follow-on question however is that given this trend, why is the quality of debate on Indigenous affairs so shallow and simplistic?

One part of the answer may be that the policy process is much broader than parliaments and politics and Indigenous people are not as well embedded in the arenas most involved in early stage policy development. Parliament is not the only forum which influences public policy outcomes.

So, while there has been a widespread focus on increasing Indigenous employment within the bureaucracy and executive arm of Government for well over a decade, the results have been less than impressive. The public sector lags leading private sector corporations in many respects. Nevertheless, there are key Indigenous public sector leaders in virtually all jurisdictions who bring a level of insight and experience of huge value to public policy development.

Data on the involvement of Indigenous players in the outer ring of public policy stakeholders – the NGOs, the think tanks, business sector peak bodies, community organisations and the like is harder to come by, but my sense is that the record here is mixed. The closer to the coal face, the more likely are Indigenous people to be employed, but policies are generally most influenced by intermediaries and advocacy groups, and here Indigenous representation is quite weak.

Returning to the parliamentary domain, what is driving the progressive increase in Indigenous representation?

Clearly individual motivations will be varied. However, in my view, one important element is an increasing level of frustration amongst the Indigenous leadership that Indigenous interests have been taken for granted, and that Indigenous interests have not been well served by the political system. Noel Pearson in his recent Press Club speech articulated an argument precisely along these lines, suggesting that were he twenty years younger he would seriously consider a career in politics. Patrick Dodson gave a version of this argument in explaining his decision to accept Labor’s approach in his press conference and subsequent interviews today.

The implicit logic in these rationales is that ultimately it is in the party room and the cabinet/shadow cabinet where policies are made. That is, one can be more influential inside the political system than outside.

While there is certainly force to this line of argument, driving structural reform to and within our complex and in many respects deeply tradition-bound political system is not easy. While some political leaders can, by force of personality or innate political judgement and skill, drive major structural policy change virtually on their own (I am thinking John Howard or Paul Keating), most effective politicians derive influence for good or ill from the gradual accretion of authority through alliances based on shared interests or mere necessity. The one certainty is that forming these alliances will always involve significant degrees of compromise and deal-broking. In other words, being on the ‘inside’ is only the start of the journey toward influence and ultimately the exercise of power.

The paucity of sustained advocacy on crucial policy issues within the Indigenous policy domain creates a second constraint inhibiting the accrual of influence and power within parliamentary parties and ultimately governments by Indigenous leaders. The bread and butter of policymaking is the promulgation of concerns, issues, ideas and arguments by stakeholders. Yet the indigenous domain has a poorly developed advocacy infrastructure.

While some sectors have respected and established peak bodies – health being the best example with the leadership of NACHO, and land rights being another with the role of the major land councils, some key policy sectors of crucial significance to disadvantaged Indigenous citizens do not have well established sectoral peak bodies. Remote social housing springs to mind, so does remote employment. This leaves Indigenous parliamentarians and their ideological supporters with a dearth of ammunition to utilise in driving policy debates internally, ironically in policy areas involving the most disadvantaged citizens.

There is clearly a significant potential role for the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples in filling this advocacy gap, but they face serious funding constraints, are relatively new and so far have tended to give priority to higher level national issues such as human rights and constitutional change rather than the bread and butter issues facing local communities which require detailed policy work to effect structural change. In the meantime, Indigenous politicians will be rather more reliant on their own networks and contacts to discover the issues to pursue than is ideally the case.

Finally, the third constraint for Indigenous politicians is the attitude of the political machines within all political parties who share a relentlessly single-minded focus on the ‘main game’ of winning elections. In these circles, all other issues are subordinated to the overarching strategy, and this trend of insisting on rigorous message and narrative discipline in articulating a coherent message is increasingly dominant in an age of instantaneous communications and social media immersion.

As a related aside, it seems to me that one obvious motivation for Labor’s embrace of two prominent Indigenous leaders is its desire to stem the flow of progressive votes to the Greens nationally, and their decisions are not necessarily or solely a ‘road to Damascus conversion’ to lift Indigenous issues higher on the ALP’s list of policy priorities.

These constraints or challenges are not insurmountable for talented individuals, but they do mean that driving pro-Indigenous policy and political reform from ‘the inside’ is not straightforward. There is no escalator inside the Parliament and the parties which automatically takes politicians to positions of influence on policy.

On the other side of the ledger however, one the advantages of being ‘inside’ is that much of the major structural change in Australian politics is opportunistic and crisis driven, and often there is not time in a crisis for external stakeholders to marshal the political arguments and community support necessary to influence policy from outside.

Looking forward, we face an election this year, and a potential double dissolution. What will the post-election landscape look like?

This is entirely speculative territory. However the likely arrival of Linda Burney and Patrick Dodson in the Australian Parliament will open up new opportunities for the debate on a wide range of indigenous policy issues to demand more attention. This is unequivocally positive in my view.

It will unleash a new dynamic on these issues which will force a response from the current Government and potentially the Greens.

In response, it seems inevitable should the Government be returned at the forthcoming election that the Prime Minister will give serious consideration to refreshing his Indigenous affairs portfolio.

Ken Wyatt would make an attractive and highly knowledgeable Minister, particularly on matters relating to Indigenous health. Indigenous health is perhaps an area which could receive more attention from the current Government in its next term, as it tends not to have the inherent ideological tensions present in other parts of the portfolio such as land rights.

The current Minister may well decide to pack his bags and give Adam Giles (who seems likely to lose this year’s NT election) an opportunity to take a seat in the Senate, and the administration arrangements for the portfolio are likely to change. See my previous post on this latter point.

The Greens will face difficult choices, with Labor reclaiming the ideological territory it has incrementally retreated from over the past decade. How the Greens might react to this new dynamic is not immediately apparent to me.

As we head into the election, and then on towards the 50^th anniversary of the 1967 Referendum in May 2017, the debates on the place of Indigenous Australians in our nation are only going to warm up, much like the climate.

The challenge for policymakers is to ensure that we make space to address the structural policy issues adversely impacting Indigenous Australians which drive disadvantage and welfare dependence, exacerbate racism, disrespect Indigenous cultures and languages, and reduce economic and social opportunity. Constitutional change will help, but it is not a panacea.

Jacques on the propensity of fools to draw lessons from strange places

……       and in his brain,
Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit
After a voyage, he hath strange places cramm'd
With observation, the which he vents
In mangled forms.

            As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 7

Innovation to Improve Remote Financial Services: Lessons from Somalia

This week the Government announced the establishment of an advisory committee on financial technology to help make Australia the leading market for financial technology – or FinTech – in the Asia Pacific region.

The Committee has a membership of apparently well qualified individuals involved in the development of the financial technology sector, but no-one with any obvious background in remote issues.

As the Government’s media release makes clear, the main game is in mainstream Australia as financial services is the largest sector of our economy, employing around 450,000 people and contributing over $140 billion to the economy last financial year.

Nevertheless, it is worth reflecting on the potential implications for remote Australia, where market failure in the provision of financial services is endemic, and the concomitant consequences for remote citizens, particularly the 120,000 Indigenous remote citizens are substantial. For a Government which includes ‘economic development’ as one of the two major elements in its Indigenous affairs policy narrative, the desirability of exploring the potential for greater innovation in the provision of remote financial services should be a ‘no-brainer’.

Of course, the Commonwealth is rolling out pilots for the cashless welfare card in the East Kimberley and Ceduna regions, and is exploring a third regional centre. Refer my previous blog post on this topic.

It is already clear that the Government is prepared to support the introduction of new technology in remote communities. Minister Scullion recently announced Commonwealth assistance for the introduction of CCTV into Aurukun, a community with an extremely troubled history of violence and dysfunction.

The National Broadband Network is being rolled out nationally, and while there have been criticisms that the proposed satellite based services to the 7 percent of Australian citizens resident in remote regions will be less effective than the fibre based services in urban and regional Australia, it does seem likely that services will improve in remote Australia post roll-out.

Telstra has been active in engaging with Indigenous issues, and has a range of initiatives which it is pursuing with potential application for improving financial services in remote regions. In particular, the funding of an Indigenous Digital Excellence Hub at the National Centre for Indigenous Excellence in Redfern has terrific potential and appears to be a first for Indigenous Australia. Nevertheless, Telstra’s focus appears to be still focussed on traditional phone based services rather that expanding mobile use into the financial services sector. Its initiatives to date are thus relatively modest and might best be characterised as prescient and far-sighted first steps.

In contrast, one can get a sense of the potential gains from innovation by considering developments in Somalia, a nation which has been a failed state for the best part of the last two decades. Recent media coverage suggests that Somalia is rapidly moving to a cashless society, based on extensive use of mobile phone platforms to replace cash transactions and associated traditional banking services. A report on the role of remittances in the Somali financial sector by Oxfam USA confirms the growing importance of mobile platforms.

The emergence of these innovative solutions in Somalia and other parts of Africa is clearly a response to necessity, and builds on the widespread up-take of mobile technology over the past decade.

We have seen in recent years a similar uptake in mobile usage amongst remote Indigenous communities, particularly amongst younger residents. And clearly, banks are increasingly making access to their services available to mobile phone users. Yet to date, there appears to be little indication that the banks and telecommunications sectors are facilitating the use of mobile technology to underpin widespread improvements to access to financial and banking services amongst remote community residents. The reason for this is partially structural – the remote market is miniscule compared to mainstream markets, and the particular needs of remote citizens, particularly remote Indigenous citizens, are not widely advocated. This is a small, but crucial market failure.

Given the theoretical rationale for Government support of innovation rests almost entirely on the existence of spillovers or externalities which lead to market failure, there is certainly a case for the Government and its new Fintech Advisory Committee to consider further what might be done to improve access to financial services for remote citizens.

Perhaps this is an issue which the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council might usefully take up?

Shakespeare on seeing

While Shakespeare appears to have said nothing on government transparency, he wrote much about seeing, sight, eyes as the pathway to knowledge (and love):


When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected;
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright are bright in dark directed;
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright,
How would thy shadow's form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so?
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessed made
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay?
   All days are nights to see till I see thee,
   And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me. 

Sonnet 43