Rough Magic: the Role of Evaluation in Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage

Last week we saw the publication of the Productivity Commission’s Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage (OID) 2016 Report. Predictably, it reported mixed results. I don’t propose to summarise the contents, but focus instead on the narrative around its release.

The Minister’s media release emphasised the positives, but stated that

“a great deal more needed to be done to address Indigenous disadvantage, including building the evidence of what worked”….

…. Minister Scullion also acknowledged that in the areas of incarceration, domestic violence, mental health and substance misuse, increased effort was required to improve outcomes – and better evidence was needed to drive this progress….

…. “Until recently, there has not been sufficient investment in evidence to drive Indigenous-specific mental health and suicide prevention responses.”….

….Minister Scullion said it was also important that individual programmes within the Indigenous Affairs portfolio were properly evaluated to determine their effectiveness….

… “The Coalition Government is working hard to build a better evidence base than there has been previously for Indigenous Affairs. We are increasing the use of quantitative data and using a variety of mechanisms to evaluate the success of individual Indigenous Affairs programmes”.

Coincidentally, the Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department, Martin Parkinson in a recent speech noted:

The current Closing the Gap framework is coming up to 10 years old and many of the targets about to expire. We should not be fearful of where we go from here but rather seize the enormous opportunity this presents. This is our chance— Government and Indigenous people—to take the lessons of the past decade and work together to reset the agenda, to focus our efforts to truly close the gap in the outcomes for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

 A high proportion of what we fund has, at best, a weak evidence base of how it affects Indigenous peoples. We must gather evidence which shows we are improving the lives of Indigenous Australians. And if that evidence tells us otherwise, we must change our approach. 

We need to put our minds to many questions—what did we get right and what did we get wrong? And why? We need to commit to the economic development for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples based on accumulated knowledge. We know that the keys to self-reliance, independence and improved social outcomes are: higher levels of employment; Indigenous business ownership; and the opportunity to use and develop culture, knowledge and land assets to generate wealth.

Joining the chorus, the Deputy Chair of the Productivity Commission, Karen Chester, made a robust case for more evaluation of Government programs on ABC Radio National’s AM program (audio here) and in The Australian.

Digressing briefly, The Australian’s story was headlined “Lack of account in $5.9bn spend ‘beggars belief’”. The misleading headline managed to simultaneously imply that the report found that there is a widespread lack of accountability for public funding, and that the problem lies with funding recipients rather than the governments who are responsible for the effective management and oversight of funding programs. This inaccurate message was reinforced by the apparently misleading text under the photo of Ms Chester (in the online story) which quotes her as saying she is “staggered by the programs’ lack of success” whereas she is quoted in the article as saying “she was staggered at the lack of attention paid to assessin­g what works, ….Evaluation is missing in action­ and it beggars belief that it’s missing in action…”

So what to make of the narrative that the problem we face with Indigenous policy is fundamentally about insufficient evaluation?

There are at least three potential interpretations. 

The first is that the explanations offered by the Government and bureaucracy should be taken at face value, and that once we manage to successfully evaluate the key programs, and adjust our policy and program settings in response, we will be back on track.

A second is that those at the centre of devising, developing, implementing policy in relation to Indigenous affairs are working from a set of deeply entrenched and extremely technocratic assumptions both as to how the public policy system works and how Indigenous communities respond to policy initiatives. In this rational and technocratic framework, policies, laws and programs are devised to structure and if necessary change behaviour so as to accord with a set of values and expectations largely determined by mainstream interests (eg cutting benefits to parents whose children don’t attend school, or income management of welfare payments to ensure expenditure is not directed to gambling or alcohol consumption) through the imposition of incentives both positive and negative. These types of technocratic approaches can often miss the mark as, apart from the inevitable implementation challenges and shortcomings, they are often perceived by Indigenous citizens as irrelevant to Indigenous concerns, poorly targeted, culturally insensitive, externally imposed, inappropriately coercive, or even discriminatory.

In this technocratic world of unidimensional causation described by a process of inputs, outputs and outcomes, evaluation and remediation is the final link in the circular process which closes the circle. We should not be surprised then that evaluation will work from within the technocratic frame and assumptions adopted by mainstream policymakers, and will be unlikely to identify underlying and fundamental issues driving policy failure which lie outside the technocratic mindset.

A third more cynical interpretation is that the Government knows that its policies, laws and programs related to Indigenous citizens are not working, but doesn’t understand why, or is not prepared to resource programs effectively, or is not prepared to drive the states and territories to perform effectively, or is focussed on politics to the exclusion of policy, or plays favorites, or won’t take advice, or tries to be all things to all people, or actually isn’t prepared to give the Indigenous policy sector the priority it needs to cut through the inertia which surrounds every policy domain to a greater or lesser extent, and so on. In this interpretation, the calls for more evaluation are in effect a cynical distraction aimed at buying time and political cover, along with a hope that by the time the next Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage Report is issued, the electorate and stakeholders will have forgotten what was said two years previously, and in any case, life will have moved on.

These potential interpretations raise a number of general issues. If evaluation is so important now, why has it been neglected for the past three years, or indeed the past ten years? What work is proposed to understand why the focus on evaluation (particularly in Indigenous programs) has been allowed to fade and lapse? And what about the various audits, coronial inquests, reviews, and the like which have been undertaken over the past decade? Did we learn nothing from them? Was the Hope Coronial Inquiry into 22 Kimberley suicides a waste of time? Did we fail to learn anything from the Mullighan Royal Commission into the abuse of children in the APY Lands? How is it that the Office of Evaluation and Audit established under the ATSIC legislation, with an independent statutory remit, has been dismantled, and absorbed into the ANAO?  And where has the ANAO been while this systemic ‘lack of attention’ to evaluation has emerged? And how might the electorate and Indigenous citizens be assured that the same deterioration in focus won’t occur in the future?

Whichever of the three interpretations one accepts, we can expect more attention to be directed to evaluation issues by Government. Under the first two interpretations, there will likely be an increase in the number of evaluations, reviews, and effectiveness audits commissioned and undertaken. Under the third, policy failure will continue, periodic disasters or crises will emerge, and questions about policy effectiveness will continue to be raised, if not by governments, then certainly by others.

Contrary to most accepted wisdom, I am not entirely persuaded that more evaluation would be an unalloyed positive. Like Prospero in The Tempest, “this rough magic/ I here abjure”. Too often, in my perhaps jaded experience, evaluative work (especially when undertaken within the executive arm of government) is an exercise in going through the motions, designed to provide confirmation for policies and decisions which are based on political imperatives or ideology rather than evidence.

In my experience, effective evaluations inevitably revolve as much around value judgments as objective analysis, but few policymakers are prepared to justify their decisions on values over ostensible evidence. Yet statistical analysis can be, and often is, shaped to support (or at least not contradict) a predetermined policy or political narrative. Moreover, apart from the substantial cost of effective and independent evaluations, there is a real opportunity cost both in terms of what those resources might have been directed towards, and in terms of policymakers inwards focus into what the evaluation or review will say rather than towards making programs and policy initiatives more effective.

Implicit in this critique is a view that in most areas of policy, we actually know what will deliver positive outcomes, and the challenge is to deliver the basics, not the optimal. We know that provision of police services will improve community safety. We know that provision of adequate housing and reducing overcrowding will improve health and education outcomes. This is not an argument in favour of zero evaluation, but rather is an argument in favour of targeted and risk based evaluation activity with an eye on the expected net benefits of the proposed evaluation. It is an argument in favour of short and sharp evaluations designed to identify, say, the three most significant changes that might be made to a policy, not the list of fifty (or more) recommendations which comprise all conceivable changes. It is an argument for a focus on policy effectiveness, and against mechanistic evaluation processes which claim to be comprehensive, but are in reality drivers of yet more complexity and process. It is an argument for doing good, not achieving perfection.

One of the reasons governments call for more evaluation activity is the fact that evaluations rarely lead to the fundamental questioning of the government initiative under review. Indeed, in my more cynical moments, it seems to me that an anthropologist from Mars studying our evaluation culture might easily describe it as akin to a ceremonial ritual activity, designed to reassure all who participate that the world as we know it will continue, that the future though uncertain will not be disastrous, and that if we participate in the ritual, we will all receive our just rewards, if not in this life, then in the next. In other words, don’t rock the boat now; things will improve in the future if only we participate in the ritual ceremony of evaluation.

Clearly I am conflicted about the merits of evaluation. Nevertheless, given the general acceptance of the ritual of evaluation in our public policy life, there is a case for establishing some benchmarks. In particular, it seems incontrovertible that the quality of evaluations will increase to the extent that there is greater transparency around its commissioning, greater independence in the process of reaching conclusions, and increased accountability in monitoring the implementation of the responses to evaluations by governments.

One further point worth noting regarding the recent Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage reports are that they are technically not owned by the Productivity Commission, but by a Steering Committee made up of bureaucrats from across the states and territories as well as major federal agencies. The same is the case for the Indigenous Expenditure Report produced by the Commission. While the undoubted technical capacity of the Productivity Commission is brought to bear in producing these reports, it does mean that the bureaucracy effectively controls and determines the way in which the reports are framed and completed. Secondly it has the consequence that the Indigenous portfolio is likely to receive less access to the Productivity Commission’s independent research capacity. This is because the Commission when allocating its finite research resources, will usually take the view that it is already allocating substantial resources to the Indigenous sector. The recent Commission research paper on Primary School Achievement is the exception which proves the rule. Thus paradoxically, while the Productivity Commission plays a crucial independent role in devising and formulating innovative policy solutions to many of the most challenging public policy issues the nation faces, it does not often do this in relation to Indigenous affairs. This is an issue which requires reconsideration if we are to commit to a stronger evaluation culture in the Indigenous policy sector.

On its face, if the Government is serious in its view about the need for greater focus on evaluation of Government programs impacting Indigenous people, it should commit to action designed to establish a new and more robust evaluation framework for the Indigenous policy sector.

Breaking my rule about limiting recommendations to three, here is my list of ten recommended actions for a more robust evaluation framework in Indigenous affairs:

1.       Initiate an urgent review to take stock of all evaluations relevant to Indigenous affairs over the past five years, identify outstanding recommendations, and publish the results;

2.       Develop and publish a regular (say biannual) Evaluation Plan for  the Indigenous Affairs portfolio;

3.       Commit to publishing the terms of reference and expected timeframe for completion of all reviews and evaluations as they are initiated.

4.       Commit to establishing an Evaluation Oversight Committee which includes external members including evaluation experts and representatives of key Indigenous peak bodies, with functions which ensure it sees and comments on all evaluation Terms of Reference, receives copies of and comments on all draft reports provided to Government, and provides formal comment on the Government’s response to all evaluations.

5.       Commit to publish all evaluations within two weeks of their receipt and to publishing a formal response to the recommendations of all reviews within six weeks of receipt.

6.       Request the ANAO to undertake a regular (say every three years) meta-evaluation of the state of evaluation in the Indigenous policy sector.

7.       Commit to publishing the formal advice from the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council to the Government.

8.       Review the regular reports oversighted by the Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision and determine if the Productivity Commission ought to be granted a more autonomous role in developing the reports and in reviewing the Indigenous policy sector.

9.       Encourage the states and territories to adopt similar approaches to evaluation given that most of the programs which impact on Indigenous lives are delivered by state and local governments.

10.   Convene a national evaluation conference each year (similar to the annual native title conference) where Indigenous groups can present their perspectives on the successes and failures in government programs, and identify issues which require further evaluative attention.

I am not holding my breath on seeing these recommendations implemented. But it does seem to me that the preparedness of Government to develop a much more transparent and robust framework for the evaluation of Indigenous programs will provide a much clearer indication of which of the three interpretations discussed above best describes the reality of Indigenous public policy in Australia today. 

The Post-Colonial Door - link

As promised in my earlier post, here is the link to Canadian Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould's 2016 ANU Reconciliation Lecture titled Reconciliation: Walking Through the Post-Colonial Door. The video is also available on the ANU National Centre for Indigenous Studies website: link here.

Victoria’s new Water Plan: a roadmap toward reconciliation

I came across this document by chance. Water for Victoria is the State’s strategic plan for water management. The plan was released on 20 October by the Premier and Minister for Water. Media release is here. There does not appear to have been much media coverage.

What both impressed me and surprised me is that the Plan explicitly includes Victorian Aboriginal traditional owners as a key stakeholder. Chapter Six (pages 98-109) deals specifically with Indigenous access to water. The Implementation Plan in the Appendix explicitly identifies Victorian traditional owner groups as a key stakeholder across a range of areas.

While I don’t propose to make a detailed assessment of the merits of the Plan, it strikes me as both comprehensive and refreshingly transparent. It is apparent that there has been a good policy process underpinning its development.

The Plan foreshadows the establishment of an Aboriginal Water Reference Group, with a role to advise on strengthened Aboriginal involvement in the water sector, and commits the Government to incorporating Aboriginal values and knowledge in water resource planning.

It seems clear that since the passage of the Traditional Owner Settlement Act in 2010, (an innovative approach to short circuiting lengthy native title claims across Victoria), Aboriginal Victorians have been taken much more seriously across the breadth of government. This current plan is tangible demonstration that this is the case.

One lesson is that institutional reforms provide stepping stones to greater political influence for Indigenous interests, and create a social and political environment where diversity thrives, and Aboriginal communities can feel that they belong not just to ‘country’, but to the wider society. To reprise Canadian Minster Jody Wilson-Raybould’s argument (see previous post), reconciliation requires changes to the distribution of political power across society, relevant interests and stakeholders. On the evidence of this Plan, the Victorian Government appears to be laying out a roadmap with real potential for greater inclusion of Aboriginal interests, at least in the water sector.

A second complementary insight however is that roadmaps do not take you to a destination.  They need to be acted upon; not once, but on a sustained basis. In the case of Victorian water policy, there will be opportunities for Indigenous interests to engage with the policy process, interact with other interest groups (all of whom are likely to be professionally supported) and be actively involved in the day by day interplay of policy development. To do so effectively, Indigenous interests will need to be organised, have access to professional support and briefings, apply a strategic vision, and work in unison amongst themselves. This may well be the larger challenge for Indigenous interests. And in the longer term, a failure to take up opportunities by Indigenous interests will not be in the interests of the Victorian Government either.

If the Government appoints random individuals to the proposed reference group, without the backup support that organised interest groups provide to their representatives, then the opportunity presented by Water for Victoria will be wasted.

For their part, Victorian Aboriginal groups should consider their own mechanisms for representation in water policy, and ensure that whoever is appointed has access to professional advice and briefing. I don’t know enough about water policy nor Victorian Indigenous politics to know if this will be an issue or not, but it is an issue which resonates more broadly and so is a point worth making.

For example, the Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council appears to suffer from this exact issue. Its Indigenous members while all extremely well networked, as a group appear to bring limited institutional affiliations to the Council and as a consequence the Council appears to have played a more limited role in policy development than might have been expected.

In summary, the strategic plan for water policy in Victoria is at once a source of optimism, given the opportunities inherent for greater inclusion of Indigenous interests, particularly in relation to the management of ‘country’; but also presents risks and challenges for both Government, and in particular Indigenous interests, to ensure they make the most of those opportunities.

The 2016 Reconciliation Lecture: lessons for Australia from the Canadian experience.

The annual Reconciliation Lecture, hosted by the National Centre for Indigenous Studies at ANU and Reconciliation Australia was given last night by the Canadian Justice Minister and Kwakwaka’wakw leader from Vancouver Island, Jody Wilson-Raybould PC, QC, MP. There is unlikely to be much media focus given the almost simultaneous results of the US election. Here is the National Indigenous Times story.

The event was of interest for a number of reasons.

A short preliminary speech by the CEO of Reconciliation Australia (RA), Justin Mohamed, summarised the findings of a report, The State of Reconciliation in Australia, recognising the 25^th anniversary of the establishment of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, a forerunner of RA. The report was published by RA in February 2016 (media release here), and seeks to assess the state of reconciliation today by considering progress against five interrelated criteria or dimensions: race relations; equality and equity, institutional integrity, historical acceptance, and national unity.

Not surprisingly, the report’s assessment is that the nation faces considerable challenges in its path towards reconciliation. The state of race relations is problematic, interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians are low, trust is low, and racial discrimination and prejudice is a lived reality for many indigenous people. Equal access to life opportunities does not exist. Key institutions in Government, business and the community do support the reconciliation process. There is widespread community understanding that past policies led to ongoing Indigenous disadvantage, but the desirability of formally addressing those wrongs is more contentious. Accordingly, unifying the nation is broadly accepted as an aspiration, but leaves much to do in practice.

The report identifies an agenda for change, aimed at sparking ‘a renewed national conversation about how, over the next 25 years, we can move toward becoming a reconciled, just and equitable Australia’. The proposed agenda is set out under seven headings: overcoming racism; renewing the focus on closing the gap by all governments; recognising and respecting Indigenous cultures and collective rights; capitalising on social change generated by RA’s Reconciliation Action Plan program; improving the governance of government; establishing a process to recognise Indigenous Australians; and acknowledging our nation’s past treatment of Indigenous peoples through truth, justice and healing.

In essence, this report makes the argument that Governments have a moral duty to implement just policies. I certainly agree; however the pragmatic reality is that Governments rarely do what it right without the encouragement of organised and sustained political pressure. It is worth re-assessing this report in the light of the core argument in the Canadian Minister’s Lecture summarised below.

The Minister’s Lecture was an incisive overview account of the history and state of play of Indian policy in Canada, and her speech was titled ‘Moving Through the Post-Colonial Door’. I won’t try to summarise the speech and will provide a link once it is published (I understand a text version is likely to be made available in a couple of weeks).

Ms Wilson-Raybould began by providing a succinct yet comprehensive overview of salient events in Canada’s history of Indian policy. As many have observed, including the Minister, there are many parallels between Australia and Canada in the treatment of Indigenous peoples and our shared colonial legacies. The Minister argued that the Indian Act had long been used to assimilate Canadian Indians, and went on to outline the Trudeau Government’s agenda which includes a comprehensive review of the justice system, a process to ‘deconstruct’ the Indian Act and replace it with self-determining communities, a review of litigation approaches by governments aimed at adjusting the default of automatic opposition to every Indigenous claim or application, the implementation of the recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission modelled on South Africa’s post-apartheid commission to address the outstanding legacy of abuse of women and children in residential schools (the subject of a scathing 4000 page report in 2015), and the exploration of alternative justice strategies such a justice reinvestment.

While it is easy to see the parallels with Australia in the issues and challenges that are being confronted, it is clear that the Trudeau Government is determined to move Indian policy issues to a new level. It is not so clear that the current Australian Government, nor indeed the Australian community generally, are prepared to do likewise. To the extent that Canada makes tangible and substantive progress, it will inevitably increase pressure on Australian Governments to do more.

There were three key points which emerged from the Lecture which resonated with me.

First, Minister Wilson-Raybould argued very persuasively that reconciliation is fundamentally about changing power relations. It is not just about changing selective laws and policies, but requires a fundamental and systemic change to the distribution of political power within society. This is not how we in Australia tend to conceptualise reconciliation; and is not how the RA report discussed above is framed and argued.

We tend to see reconciliation as something which governments will voluntarily promulgate and engender, because it is morally right to do so. We tend to frame reconciliation as improving communication, improving respect, improving trust. The focus is on persuading mainstream society and mainstream governments to do better, to consult more, to acknowledge culture, and so on. In this sense, the Canadian Minister’s speech laid out a much more radical (and challenging) vision for Australia, for our governments, and for RA. Implicit in her argument is that Indigenous peoples need to work to acquire political power (not assume it will be voluntarily given to them) and thereby engender the respect, and substantive recognition that those with power automatically receive.

Second, Minister Wilson-Raybould argued that by reforming the Indian Act, and putting substance back into the treaties which underpin most Indian communities/populations, a pathway based on a ‘new federalism’ would emerge which would provide a decentralised and institutional basis for greater powers to be exercised. She cited the Canadian Supreme Court’s decision in Williams as providing a strengthened basis for self-governing Indian communities. Here is a link to an analysis of the implications of the case. Thus Canada has by virtue of past treaties, the strengthened legal requirements on Governments to respect Indian territoriality, and the Government’s fiduciary duty towards Indian peoples, an institutional basis for Indian communities to take on greater governance responsibilities and concomitantly exercise greater power within the Canadian federation.

Of course, Australia has no history of treaties, the courts and our Constitution have not seen fit to determine that Governments have a fiduciary duty to protect the rights and interests of Indigenous Australians, and native title is conceptualised as a mere property right, and not a right to exercise territorial sovereignty. In these circumstances, Australia’s Indigenous peoples, and particularly their leaders, will need to forge an alternative route to acquiring and retaining greater political power than that outlined by Minister Wilson-Raybould for Canada.

My third reaction to the Lecture was a sense that the Trudeau Government, and Minister Wilson-Raybould may not have given adequate consideration to countering the inevitable push-back from interests who lose influence and power as a result of their proposed reforms. After all, the allocation of power and influence within society is in large measure a zero-sum game. What one group gains, another loses; and this rarely happens without the losers actively defending the status quo. I readily acknowledge that my knowledge of Canada’s policy landscape is too shallow to be certain about this; and it may be that the Trudeau Government has a strategy to lock in its reforms that it is not advertising. Alternatively, it may be that the interplay of Executive action and the Courts in Canada means that gains for Indigenous interests will be more robust than appears on the surface. Nevertheless, the aspirations of the Canadian Government to implement far reaching reform in Indigenous policy will likely be tested, either in the short or medium terms.

The lesson for Indigenous interests and their leadership, both in Canada, but also in Australia, is that they need to establish the organised, coordinated and politically effective advocacy structures and organisations that all other major interest groups within society utilise both to assert and expand their political influence, and to protect their interests from countervailing incursions.

Finally, in researching this post, I came across the Minister’s Mandate letter from the Prime Minster which the Canadian Government makes public. Here is the link; it will be seen that it reflects many of the issues mentioned in Minister Wilson-Raybould’s Lecture.

Australian Prime Ministers have previously issued charter letters to their Ministers. I am not sure if the current Government does so. It would however be an excellent initiative for the Prime Minister to do so, and to publish it, particularly in the Indigenous Affairs portfolio where it is quite difficult to ascertain what the Government’s overarching policy agenda entails. One of the lessons of the US election must be that electorates are losing faith not just in politicians, but in Government itself. An obvious way for Government’s to engender greater trust is to seriously commit to greater transparency (as the Canadian Government has already done), and the release of ministerial charter letters would be an obvious place to start. If Canada can do it, so too can Australia!

What's Past is Prologue

“….what's past is prologue, what to come

In yours and my discharge.” The Tempest Act 2, Scene 1.

The recently opened National Museum of African American History and Culture is a staggering achievement. Located in a prime position on Washington’s mall, the museum is an imposing and thought provoking architectural presence, at once part of but apart from the raft of other galleries along the mall.

Rightly acclaimed both for its design, but more importantly its symbolic importance, its establishment implicitly challenges Australia to reconsider its own record in documenting and acknowledging the history of our First Peoples.

The genesis of the museum can be traced through advocacy and agitation over more than a century, recounted in the short account of its establishment by Mabel Wilson: Begin with the Past.   It parallels in some respects the establishment of the National Museum of the American Indian whose enabling legislation was passed by Congress in1989. That gallery adopts (in my view) a less satisfactory approach which emphasises the distinctiveness of the hundreds of different tribal groups and their traditional cultures.

The new museum adopts a more eclectic and unified approach, which traces the origins and history of slavery in the Americas, the pathways through to the civil war, reconstruction, and the arrival of the so-called Jim Crow laws which reversed most of the gains of reconstruction, and in turn the process of incremental deconstruction exemplified most potently by the passage of the Civil Rights Act due to the political skills of Lyndon Johnson. Along the way, it highlights the myriad and indispensable contributions of individual African Americans and communities to making the USA what it is today.

As President Obama said in his powerfully insightful speech opening the Museum only a few weeks ago, African Americans are not the underside of American history, but are an essential part of it. His speech is worth reading or listening to for its sophisticated defence of the proposition that understanding national history framed in terms of the lives of both the powerful and the powerless is essential to any attempt to map a national pathway for the future.

The heart of the Museum starts 80 feet below ground level, with vivid accounts of both the history and experience of the trans-Atlantic transportation of African slaves, a transporting in both physical and moral terms. The displays then wend upwards to develop into accounts of the experience of slavery, the heart wrenching break up of families, resistance and uprisings, the freedom railroad to the North, the political machinations which led to the Civil War, and the post bellum outcomes, initially positive and ultimately deeply discriminatory.

All of this is told through numerous individual narratives, of both famous advocates such as Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman, and ordinary people and families. This part of the exhibition is backed up by thousands of exhibits, documents, photographs, and objects. On the top level is an extraordinary and almost overwhelming melange of the tangible contributions of African Americans to the nations identity, from popular culture in all its manifestations through to the intellectual, economic and artistic contributions of both individuals and African American culture generally.

My purpose is not to describe the content of the Museum in detail so much as to give a sense of its extraordinary vitality and energy, alongside its tangible evocation of the injustice and suffering engendered in the name of commercial and economic ideology, and ultimately directed to the imposition of political domination and subjugation.

The Museum was a throng of African American visitors, vibrant, laughing, exuberantly taking in the top floors; while down below visitors were deeply subdued, apparently stunned by the visible proof of both the cruelty involved and meted out to their ancestors and struggling to take in the implications of it all. I too found it extremely moving, and was surprised that there weren’t more visitors in tears. It clearly had a deep impact on virtually every visitor. The stated purpose of the Museum, that it is designed to tell a national story as much as the African American story, appears to be how African Americans are interpreting it too.

For me, the object which has stayed in my memory is the stone block, two-foot-high, two-foot square, originally from a town square where it had been used to display slaves as they were auctioned to the highest bidder. It had been preserved over the centuries because it had also been used by Henry Clay and Andrew Jackson to give stump speeches, and this was the plaque which had been affixed. President Obama too mentioned this object in his opening speech, pointing out the irony that it had only been preserved because two powerful white men, both opponents of abolition, had given unmemorable speeches upon it.

So what are the lessons for Australia? Our history has strong parallels with North American experience: British heritage, institutions and colonialism, a shared national language (albeit one that is increasingly being replaced by Spanish in the US), genocidal wars against Indigenous peoples, nation building on a foundation of immigration and individual enterprise. Our national paths differ in key respects too: Australia’s roots are in its convict heritage; the US has come through the scarifying furnace of slavery and civil war; our immigrant inflows have come at different phases in our national experience.

Australia is yet to make the leap of imagination to establish a national museum dedicated to acknowledging our Indigenous history, and the shared experience of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians since settlement. Our National Museum has dedicated substantial resources and effort to explaining and recording the history of our Indigenous peoples both before and after settlement. One of three key objectives in its legislation relates to Indigenous Australian histories. However, from the start it was hog-tied by a push from a small group of conservatives appointed to the Board who opposed any attempt to tell the truth about our Indigenous history, labelled it as ‘black armband’ history, and who ultimately forced the removal of Dawn Casey the first Director of the Museum, and a strong advocate for including our national Indigenous narrative in our National Museum as well as for a standalone Indigenous History Museum. The current strategic plan appears to gloss over the Indigenous objective, though the Museum does have an active Indigenous unit and newsletter focussed on Indigenous histories as well as an Indigenous Reference Group.

The US experience tells us that we have a long way to go in Australia in terms of our preparedness to acknowledge the standalone identity of Indigenous peoples. Our insistence on limiting our formal expositions of Indigenous history to our National Museum, and even then to constrain the way in which we tell the story, suggests an underlying insecurity about who we are and how we have treated Indigenous citizens.

I mention this not to re-prosecute controversies of the past, the so called culture wars, nor to criticise the National Museum of Australia, but to make the comparison between Washington and Canberra, the US and Australia, and to draw relevant lessons form that comparison.

We believe ourselves to be engaged in a national dialogue on recognising Indigenous Australians in the Constitution, but are stuck in a revolving door where we have movement but no progress. Without an agreed proposal for change, we are unlikely to succeed in recognising our nation’s Indigenous history in our founding document any time soon. While Museums are not solutions in themselves to issues such as inequality or disadvantage, or political recognition, they are powerful indicators of the tenor of the national conversations which underpin our national political debates.

In the light of the US experience, Australia’s failure to establish a national museum of Indigenous History and Culture amounts to a lost opportunity. Far from reinforcing separatism, the US experience suggests it would send a powerful signal of inclusion, while providing a platform for Indigenous achievement and contributions to be celebrated and contextualised.

Such a Museum would provide a firmer foundation for the inevitable political conversations about our intertwined national and Indigenous histories as we grapple with issues such as the republic, Indigenous recognition, and more diffusely, our distinctive national identity in a globalising world. A world which is shaped in our imaginations by global media corporations largely based in the US; where social media is ubiquitous and paramount, news feeds are tailored to our internet search histories, and events in the US have ten times the news value as similar events in China or Nigeria.

If we value our national story, our national narrative, if we believe in an Australian national identity, then we should take deliberate steps to institutionalise it and give it a tangible recognition in the national capital. We have a War Memorial, an Australian National Gallery, a National Library, and a Portrait Gallery. The logical next step is a National Museum of Indigenous History and Culture.

Temporary reduction in service

I apologise to my small but loyal readership for the recent drop off in postings. I have been distracted by other projects.

I am about to head overseas for six weeks, and will likely only get the opportunity to post occasionally

I hope to be back on deck and posting weekly from mid November

thanks for your forbearance

Michael Dillon

A Ramble through the Indigenous Policy Maze

Indigenous affairs is in an interesting phase at the moment. There is much going on, but largely in the shadows. No one issue appears to be dominating public debate, much that is important, or which has significant implications for Indigenous citizens, either goes unreported, or rises to the surface in the media for a moment, before submerging into the shadowy depths. Of course, this has always been the case to an extent, but I am struck by the disjunction between the substantial and negative impact of the issues at community and regional levels and the low levels of ongoing attention which they receive in public discourse and by Governments. It is as if the community is viewing these issues through coke bottle lenses, the issues failing to gain focus and definition, leading to a rather diffuse public debate on Indigenous policy issues.

So I thought I might in my own rambling way, and in no particular order, survey some of the recent events which have caught my attention in the hope that by pulling them together we might gain some of the definition and clarity which continues to evade us.

In Western Australia, the current Government appears to have been preoccupied by internal machinations, and is unlikely to drive any new initiatives in Indigenous policy (as opposed to announce them) between now and next year’s election (to be held on 17 March 2017). There were recent reports of morale and other problems within the State’s Department of Aboriginal Affairs, an agency which does not appear to have much policy influence at present. The Remote Services team continues to work away developing its options for the future of remote communities, consulting on the ground, but providing little regular update reporting on progress. There have been recent riots in Kalgoorlie following the death of an Indigenous juvenile. There were suggestion in the media that he was knocked off a stolen motorbike by individuals who were seeking to reclaim it. A man has been charged with unlawful killing of the teenager. The issues of suicide in the Kimberley and elsewhere continue to be reported in the media; most recently academic studies confirming the extraordinary rate of remote Indigenous suicides in WA and  nationally.

In South Australia, the issues in the APY Lands have gone quiet, but the systemic reforms required to address the deep-seated issues there have not been advanced, which means that we are sure to see further issues arise. A Royal Commission into the SA Child Protection system made some 260 recommendations, around thirty of which related specifically to Indigenous matters. The SA Government response was positive, but we will need to revisit their implementation over coming months to be assured that progress is indeed being made. More recently, an Aboriginal man on remand died in custody in an incident involving five prison guards. An inquest or coronial inquiry will no doubt have more to say on this matter in due course.

In the Northern Territory, the demise of the Giles Government and the elevation of Michael Gunner to Chief Minister and Labor to government open up the potential for a significant change in the dynamics around Indigenous policy, both in the NT and to a lesser extent nationally. The Royal Commission into juvenile detention and the child protection system has begun hearings, and will inevitably receive intense national scrutiny once it is completed next year. Expectations within the Indigenous community that major reforms will be identified, recommended and implemented will be sky high.

Given the strong involvement of the Commonwealth in the NT, relations between the Territory and Federal Governments will be worth watching, especially while Senator Scullion, a Territory Senator sitting in the Nationals Party room in Canberra, remains Minister for Indigenous Affairs. Chief Minister Gunner recently met with the Prime Minster and they agreed to work together on a range of issues.

Disappointingly, one of the first policy announcements from the Gunner Government was their decision to appeal the Griffiths case on native title compensation. While there is a superficial logic in arguing that the issue ought to be determined at a higher level than a single Federal Court judge, there is in fact no compelling reason why the incoming government ought not to just accept the Mansfield decision and get on with life. I suspect that the new Government wasn’t confident enough to stand up to the innate conservatism and robust views on native title of the Government’s in-house lawyers.

In Queensland, not much has come to my attention recently, though the issues a few months back relating to community safety in Aurukun, and the Queensland Government’s pressure in response on the Cape York Academy (a response which outraged Noel Pearson) are no doubt simmering on the back burner.

In NSW, there have been recent reports that the Baird Government is considering shifting the Aboriginal Affairs agency from the Education portfolio to the Premiers portfolio, which would mirror the arrangements currently in place in Canberra. I have set out my views on the pros and cons of this previously.

The ACT, Victoria and Tasmania have kept a pretty low profile in Indigenous affairs in recent months. The Andrews Government has actively canvassed discussion of a treaty with Indigenous Victorians, an issue which feeds into the national debate on recognition.

Nationally, it has been clear that the Indigenous policy canoe has been taking water, and facing rough seas. The Prime Minister’s decision to establish a Royal Commission into the NT youth detention issues, while rushed, was in my view the correct decision, and an example of good policy being good politics. While I am sure there are a host of detailed administrative issues the Commission will identify and address, I am less sanguine about the prospects that the Royal Commission will adequately identify the systemic issues which have underpinned youth detention and child protection issues in the NT (and by implication nationally). I hope I am proved wrong.

The sleeper issue for the Commonwealth in my view is the roll out of the remote Community Development Program.  Upon his appointment, Minister Scullion moved to overhaul Labor’s Remote Jobs and Communities Program, which itself was only a year old, and still in its teething stage. His tough approach to requiring remote welfare recipients to work 25 hours a week more onerous than other Australian) is arguably both unfair, discriminatory, and most importantly, is just not working. Breach rates are skyrocketing, as young Indigenous ‘jobseekers’ (the inverted commas are used advisedly) vote with their feet. The result in macro terms is a substantial reduction in the flow of welfare payments into remote communities, and the effective expulsion (to use Saskia Sassen’s evocative term) of Indigenous citizens from the nation’s safety net. It seems almost inevitable that Labor and the Greens will combine to force a Senate Inquiry into this program at some point in the next two years. The results, when they are in, will not be pretty. The major flaw in the Government’s policy mindset is that financial incentives can work to force individuals in remote communities to jump through the myriad hoops designed to make work more attractive than welfare. The reality is that the incentives don’t work for a substantial cohort across remote communities. It is time for a radical rethink of these combined income support and employment programs, with a much stronger focus on Government job creation rather than on welfare conditionality as the lever to push remote Indigenous citizens into non-existent jobs.  

Two issues which Noel Pearson has been a leading proponent for (ably assisted by many others) are the Empowered Communities program and Constitutional Recognition. Both appear to have stalled. The Government can point to reams of process, consultations, and associated funding to Indigenous organisations in relation to both issues, but precious little outcomes. The implementation of the new cashless debit card in the East Kimberley is perhaps the most tangible sign of progress across the nation. The significance of the Empowered Communities program is that it is the only opportunity on the horizon for greater regional engagement between governments and Indigenous interests.

Constitutional recognition deserves a separate post. So I will be brief and make two points: first, it is consuming an enormous amount of policy oxygen with no guarantee of an outcome in the near future. The consequence of this is that the Indigenous leadership and indeed the capacity and interest of the wider community for tangible reform is being diverted from issues which are more tangible and of greater day to day significance. The second is that progress will not occur until governments decide on the scope of the proposed change. By consulting and not governing, governments are guaranteeing that nothing will emerge. Taken together, these points lead to an extremely pessimistic prognosis for constitutional change.

Indigenous interests are placed in an invidious position insofar as they know they will only get one shot at constitutional change, and don’t wish to waste it on a token effort; however any substantive change will face the considerable and arguably insurmountable obstacles of the referendum process given the polarised state of the debate on Indigenous affairs, and public affairs generally. The only way this impasse can be progressed in my view would be for a Prime Minister to work hand in glove with the Opposition to develop a proposal which finds middle ground, and then expend the effort to sell it to both Indigenous and conservative interests. The risks are considerable as extremists at both ends of the political spectrum will campaign to stop it. My sense is that such a multipartisan commitment is highly unlikely to emerge, and be sustained over the two or more years which would be required to see constitutional change occur.

Not coincidentally, we are seeing Indigenous interests shift much greater focus towards making the case for a treaty or treaties, which do not require referendums, but raise many if not more risks of political polarisation over the issue in the wider community, an outcome I consider is not desirable. It is worth recalling that John Howard went to the 2007 election promising to recognise Indigenous Australians in the Constitution within 100 days. Almost ten years on, are we any closer?

Other issues at the national level relate to the formal mechanism for advice to Government from Indigenous interests. There are two competing models in play at the moment. The Prime Minister’s Indigenous Advisory Council chaired by Warren Mundine is wholly appointed, and appears to have zero visible influence on policy directions. Mr Mundine writes regular op eds for the Australian and the Financial Review, but these are in his own name and generally argue the case for economic or commercial development as the solution to Indigenous policy woes. In the opposite corner sits the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, which has been teetering on the edge of the viability abyss after the Government cut its funding upon coming to Office. More recently, Congress has convened a broad group of Indigenous leaders and released the Redfern Statement, and the Government has responded somewhat more positively; Minister Scullion’s media release here; Congress release here. However, in my assessment, this is more likely a process of active management of a difficult stakeholder than a substantive change of heart by the Government. A change of Minister may lead to more positive developments in this policy space.

In the meantime, the media regularly reports the latest academic and medical research which in area after area demonstrates that Indigenous Australians are severely disadvantaged, and that gaps are not closing.

My own response to the random ramble set out above is twofold. First, there seems to be a lack of agreement on what a comprehensive Indigenous policy reform agenda would look like. Second, the policy complexity and interconnectedness involved (and which has only been hinted at above) suggests that only systemic change will make a difference over the medium to longer term. Systemic change is possible, but not easy or necessarily positive and effective. It can be driven by policymakers, or imposed upon them and the nation state by external events. The former is preferable to the latter.

A Proposal

In my view, it is time that the nation developed a high level institutional mechanism with overarching responsibility for monitoring and advising on systemic policy reform in relation to Indigenous affairs. Such an institution would be sui generis within our current system of government, and would need to have built into it the scope to evolve over time. The closest example of the type of institution I am suggesting is the Productivity Commission which has built up, over forty odd years, legitimacy and authority which provides the capacity to analyse difficult issues, and independently propose a pathway forward. As an aside, while the Productivity Commission has significant involvement in the Indigenous policy space, and has played a positive role in many issues, I do not believe that it has the necessary Indigenous specific expertise required to fulfil the role I am outlining below.

In the Indigenous policy domain, any such institution would need to have built in multipartisan support including in relation to appointments, be professional and apolitical, have a capacity and remit to focus on longer term strategy, have a guaranteed degree of transparency to constrain and minimise the interference of day to day politics, have access to expert advice from within and outside government, and have guaranteed access to Cabinet (perhaps through the use of what once were termed Cabinet Memorandums which were the views of agencies, not Ministers) and thus to have been delegated some real capacity to influence and drive policy change.

Following the last election, we now have at least five Indigenous members of Parliament. They will struggle to have more than a shallow and glancing impact on ameliorating Indigenous disadvantage. One way they might leave a lasting legacy would be to explore the ideas outlined ever so briefly here for a meta-institution to oversight systemic reform to Australia’s policies in relation to its first peoples.