Dr John Gardiner-Garden, Social Policy Section
There has been widespread agreement on a range of goals in
Indigenous affairs, but desired outcomes have been elusive. Do we
need different policies or just better policy delivery?
Issues and questions for the new Parliament
There has long been broad agreement on the need to close the gap
in health, housing, education and employment. This goal has been
pursued under different headings—the tripartite agreements
and strategies of the Hawke and Keating governments, the Howard
Government’s ‘practical reconciliation’, and the
Rudd Government’s Council of Australian Governments (COAG)
Indigenous Reform Agenda and National Partnerships. However, the
socio-economic indicators show very little improvement. The latest
hope for remote housing, the Strategic Indigenous Housing and
Infrastructure Program, appears to be significantly behind
schedule.
There has been broad agreement on the need to protect children
in Northern Territory Indigenous communities and for most of the
measures introduced as part of the 2007 Northern Territory
Emergency Response (NTER or ‘the intervention’).
However these measures can have draw-backs. For example, does
income management re-empower those caring for children by slowing
the flow of cash to alcohol or does it, in part, stigmatise people
and fail to address problems underlining community dysfunction?
Would liberalising permit access to communities increase scrutiny
and bring economic opportunities, or increase the ease with which
alcohol can be brought in and disempower the community?
There has been broad agreement on the desirability of acting in
accord with the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (RDA) and
the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of
Racial Discrimination (CERD). However, is it enough to reverse
the suspension of the RDA effected by the original NTER legislation
and to modify intervention measures to provide for more
consultation so that they will apply also to non-Aboriginals? The
reversal and modifications by the Labor Government did not prevent
the United Nations (UN) Committee on the Elimination of Racial
Discrimination, in its 27 August 2010 report, expressing concern
that the NTER continues to involve discrimination; that RDA
‘special measure’ provisions are being misused; and
that there is no entrenched Constitutional protection against
racial discrimination.
There has been broad agreement on the desirability of
recognising Indigenous Australians in the Constitution and acting
in the spirit of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples, but such constitutional recognition has not yet been
achieved. Nor has Parliament’s endorsement of the UN
declaration been yet translated into any increased valuing of
language (such an important part of Indigenous culture), if funding
for language maintenance and the offering of bilingual education in
Australian schools featuring an Aboriginal language is any
measure.
There has been broad agreement on the desirability of greater
Indigenous participation in decision-making. Successive governments
have supported a National Aboriginal Consultative Committee, a
National Aboriginal Conference, an Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander Commission (ATSIC) and a National Indigenous Council, but
all of these models have fallen short of engendering a widespread
sense of Indigenous participation in decision-making. How might the
newly envisaged National Congress of Australia’s First
Nations be different? To what degree will there be a sense that the
Congress members represent Indigenous Australians, and how broad
and deep is the participation in decision-making that the body
might facilitate likely to be?
There has been broad agreement on the need to recognise past
injustices, but does Parliament’s National Apology of
February 2008 go far enough, or should there be some formula for
monetary compensation as suggested by most submissions to the
Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs
Inquiry into the Stolen Generation Compensation Bill
2008?
There has been broad agreement on the need to reduce welfare
dependency and increasing economic self-sufficiency, but decades of
policies under the various banners and programs delivered by the
Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Aboriginal Development
Commission, ATSIC and Aboriginal Development Corporation have
produced only limited progress toward this goal. Nor it would seem,
has the more recent mainstreaming of programs, the refocusing of
funding on regional and remote communities and the recasting of
employment support away from Community Development Employment
Projects. Should the Commonwealth Parliament see the Queensland
‘wild rivers’ legislation as constraining opportunities
for Indigenous economic advancement or appropriately balancing
environmental and development considerations? Would a push towards
carbon-trading and renewable energy offer opportunities to
Indigenous communities?
There has been broad agreement on the desirability of empowering
Indigenous people culturally and economically by recognising their
attachment to land, but the introduction of a National Native Title
Tribunal process and Indigenous Land Fund has not radically changed
either the land-tenure map or the welfare-dependency landscape.
Concerns persist that the standards of proof of attachment have
been set too high to expedite claims, and there has not been a
discernable follow up to the Government’s 2008 discussion
paper, Optimising Benefits from Native Title
Agreements.
There has been broad agreement on the need to reduce
disproportionate Indigenous incarceration rates, but despite many
initiatives following the 1991 Report of the Royal Commission
into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, and the more recent 2009
agreement of a National Indigenous Law and Justice Framework, high
incarceration rates persist.
There has been broad agreement on the need to better define
responsibilities. The Howard Government sought to clarify these at
several levels—at an agency level by establishing COAG
sponsored whole-of-government trials and an Office of Indigenous
Policy Coordination; at the community level by introducing Shared
Responsibility Agreements and Regional Partnership Agreements; and
at the individual level by measures such as making communally owned
homes available for individual purchase and converting some CDEP
positions into paid jobs. However, limited success of these
strategies might suggest a gap between defining responsibilities
and fulfilling them; and between offering opportunities and seizing
them.
In pursuing these goals, would outcomes be stronger if greater
weight was put on moving some levers, anticipating they will then
move others. If so, which should come first, health or housing,
education or employment, better defining rights or better defining
responsibilities? Is it, as the Coordinator General for Remote and
Indigenous Services (whose second report is due to be released
soon) wrote in his first report of December 2009 that strong
community governance and leadership (as well as strong government
engagement) are preconditions for effective community-government
relations, improved service provision and closing the gap in remote
Indigenous communities? Or is it that incremental improvement
across all fronts is not only the best that can be expected, but
that which is necessary and will in the end bear fruit?
Library publications and key documents
J Gardiner-Garden and J Simon-Davies,
Commonwealth Indigenous-specific expenditure
1968–2010, Background note, Parliamentary Library,
Canberra, 2010,
http://parlinfo/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query%3DId%3A%22library%2Fprspub%2F216438%22