Serious Whitefella Stuff: When solutions became the problem in Indigenous affairs

By Mark Moran

How does Indigenous policy signed off in Canberra work—or not—when implemented in remote Aboriginal communities? Mark Moran, Alyson Wright and Paul Memmott have extensive on-the-ground experience in this area of ongoing challenge. What, they ask, is the right balance between respecting local traditions and making significant improvement in the areas of alcohol consumption, home ownership and revitalising cultural practices?

Moran, Wright and Memmott have spent years dealing with these pressing issues. Serious Whitefella Stuff tells their side of this complex Australian story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Feb 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780522868302

Book preview

Pearson

1

The More Things Change

Mark Moran

THE INTRACTABILITY OF INDIGENOUS disadvantage in Australia is undeniable. According to the United Nations, Australia is one of the richest countries in the world, second only to Norway.¹ Universal welfare entitlements ensure a comparative lack of poverty, by international standards, but pervasive inequalities persist, most notably among Indigenous Australians.² In 2012, household income for Indigenous people was a little over half that of non-Indigenous people. The unemployment rate was five times higher. Two-thirds of Indigenous students completed Year 12 compared to their non-Indigenous counterparts.³ Indigenous men and women experienced double the rate of physical violence during their lifetime.⁴ Indigenous youth were twenty-four times more likely to be locked up in detention centres.⁵ The life expectancy for Indigenous Australians was sixty-nine years for males and seventy-four years for females, a difference of around ten years in comparison to the non-Indigenous population.⁶ While there has been progress in life expectancy and secondary education since 2008, literacy and numeracy have remained resistant to improvement and employment levels have actually declined.⁷ Indigenous disadvantage in Australia has also proven to be higher and more intractable than that experienced by their Indigenous counterparts in Canada, New Zealand and the United States.⁸

Intense public debate has ensued about the underlying causes and possible solutions. With its full might as a developed nation, Australia has thrown its considerable administrative machinery and public finances at the problem, leading to a proliferation of program and service providers. The services, collectively provided, cover most aspects of life, including housing, early childhood, aged care, sports, community justice, child protection and household financial management. The three levels of government—Commonwealth, state/territory and local—each has separate administrative arrangements. Indigenous organisations play a major role, generally operating under service delivery contracts to government. Reforms during the 2000s introduced a range of new operators.⁹ Multiple service providers, including government agencies, Indigenous organisations, not-for-profit non-government organisations (NGOs) and for-profit contractors, now compete in the same small locales. The institutional landscape of Indigenous affairs has become highly crowded, complex and fragmented.

Policies and programs are forever undergoing reform. New conceptualisations of the ‘problem’ result in new policies and programs, each being laid over the partially implemented ‘failures’ of the past. The rate of launching new programs exceeds their closure, resulting in an annual increase in the quantity of programs. At the conclusion of a Council of Australian Governments (COAG) trial at Wadeye in the Northern Territory—a reform specifically targeting improved coordination—the number of funding agreements increased by 50 per cent, from sixty to more than ninety.¹⁰ Julalikari Council Aboriginal Corporation, which manages programs for Tennant Creek and surrounding communities in the Northern Territory, acquitted eighty-one separate government grants in the 2011–12 financial year.¹¹

A 2012 audit by the Australian National Audit Office revealed the sheer number of small, short-term grants awarded to Indigenous organisations.¹² The Indigenous organisations funded under one grant system were required to submit on average twenty-five different financial and acquittal reports. The average duration of these grants was fifteen months. The Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs funded the largest number of organisations, and more than half of these were less than $55 000 in value, and a not insubstantial proportion were for less than $1000. The audit was unequivocal: the administrative burden imposed by such a high number of short-term and small-value grants, undermined the capability of Indigenous organisations that they were intended to assist.

Australia spends more than double the amount per capita on programs and services for Indigenous people than for the rest of the population.¹³ Nationally, an estimated $5.6 billion in government funding is allocated to Indigenous-specific programs. If the total level of servicing is included, by adding mainstream services like health, education and policing, the total figure is just over $30 billion.¹⁴ So what has been the result? The Department of Finance and Deregulation’s ‘Strategic Review of Indigenous Expenditure’ answered ‘this major investment, maintained over many years, has yielded dismally poor returns to date’.¹⁵ It blamed the familiar litany of under-performing programs, poor coordination across governments, and the lack of engagement with Indigenous peoples in design and delivery.

The problem is most acute for the 21 per cent of Australia’s Indigenous population who live in remote areas, who are Australia’s most disadvantaged communities.¹⁶ Remote Indigenous communities are marginalised socially and geographically, and governments face many cultural and logistical challenges in delivering services to them.¹⁷ These settlements operate in an extreme economic context, arising from limited economic opportunities, a lack of local capability, their small size and isolation, and the mobility of people between them. Aboriginal people in these remote settlements follow their social and cultural traditions more strongly than in regional and urban areas. The scale of public resources directed to alleviate their disadvantage has led to intense public debate about their ‘fiscal sustainability’. In late 2014, following a withdrawal in municipal funds by the Commonwealth, the Premier of Western Australia Colin Barnett announced the closure of between 100 and 150 remote outstations and communities. Then prime minister Tony Abbott weighed in saying: ‘What we can’t do is endlessly subsidise lifestyle choices if those lifestyle choices are not conducive to the kind of full participation in Australian society that everyone should have’.¹⁸ Following a national outcry including a number of public demonstrations, Barnett backed down, laying out a more reasoned policy.²⁰

Discrete Remote Indigenous communities. Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics.¹⁹

In threatening to close remote communities, government is not exercising powers through land title or resettlement legislation. Rather, it is exercising its power to withdraw funding and services and so rendering the settlements unviable. Public funding dominates the economies of remote Indigenous settlements, through government expenditure in the form of grants and welfare payments. These return a limited local circulation, mostly through the community store, although these too are generally externally managed and operated by a government agency, regional Indigenous organisation or NGO.²¹ There is typically very little local private economic activity, by way of retail stores, cottage industry or markets, other than Indigenous art sales, ecotourism and occasionally ecosystem services such as carbon farming. Local employment is otherwise limited to community administration and service delivery positions, with management and professional positions often filled by outsiders. Private sector employment and small enterprise are largely confined to the few settlements located near enclaves of global mining investment. Other economic benefits from mining are still to a large degree shaped by the political bargaining through which mining royalties are publicly distributed.²² There is very little internal capital, remittances, personal savings or disposable income against which to leverage socioeconomic development.²³ For all the frustrations and opportunities they bring, government policies and expenditure largely define what the outside world and economy are to remote communities. In this context, policies, services and payments assume a disproportionate importance beyond that experienced by other Australians, and in many ways define the potential for socioeconomic development. For this reason alone, it’s important to understand what is actually happening with policy and how it actually unfolds in practice on the ground.

PUBLIC OPINION and media are potent drivers of Indigenous affairs policy. There was a string of shocking media reports of child neglect and abuse in remote Indigenous communities through 2006 and 2007. The Howard Government’s response was to launch the Northern Territory Emergency Response (the Intervention) in the lead-up to the 2007 federal election. At a time when his government was trailing in the polls, was a legitimate concern for citizen welfare weighed against the political gains of ‘sending in the troops’? Academic economist Boyd Hunter questioned the timing—as the reports of child abuse had long been known—and the military framing of the response.²⁴ He also questioned why the Intervention was limited to the Northern Territory, as the then known cases of child abuse and neglect among Indigenous children was lower compared to other jurisdictions.²⁵

Australian Research Council research through the University of Canberra explored the extent that politicians and policymakers respond to media. They found ‘that once an issue became the subject of sharp media focus in times of intense political contest, political leaders would shift policy’. Policymakers were found to closely monitor media outlets, anticipating media coverage on their policy areas, practising media messaging, and adapting policy decisions to account for the positive or negative news stories to come.²⁶ The research revealed a bureaucracy that was strongly reactive to the daily media cycle, ‘capable of responding with alarming speed to new media imperatives’. Few journalists were interested in the intricacies and complexities of policy responses and their implementation in practice; the ‘story’ is usually in the human crisis and government failure.²⁷

With the exception of some parts of the Northern Territory, Indigenous people are not in sufficient number or political alignment to constitute a significant political force at the federal or state ballot boxes. It is surprising then how much influence these few voters hold over public sentiment. A political reality of Indigenous affairs is that public opinion in coastal and regional Australia is as important in policy formation as the voice of remote Indigenous citizens. The clients of Indigenous affairs policy thus strongly include non-Indigenous Australians.²⁸

The counterpoint to this is that a crucial role of Indigenous leaders and organisations becomes one of political advocacy—often escalating the human crisis and government failure—to garner the attention of the public and politicians. National Indigenous leaders pragmatically accept that if they are to be effective change agents, they must have a public profile and be effective in media management. Faced with the threat of damning media coverage, the bureaucracy in turn becomes risk averse, producing ‘bureaucratic involution in which inner-directed activities such as planning and reporting take precedence over outer-directed program delivery’.²⁹

Given this high profile in public attention, is it a coincidence then that certain welfare reforms first appear in Indigenous communities, before they are mainstreamed? Income management is a policy where a portion of welfare payment is managed so as to restrict the ways that it can be spent, rather than being paid directly in cash. The Commonwealth Government first introduced income management to seventy-three remote Indigenous communities as part of the Northern Territory Intervention in 2007. In 2010, they extended it to non-Indigenous welfare recipients in the Northern Territory. In 2012, they began rolling out trials in a number of depressed regional centres across Australia, including major urban centres.³⁰ In Bankstown, Shepparton, Logan, Playford and Rockhampton, more than 80 per cent of participants were non-Indigenous.³¹

If the recommendations of the Abbott/Turnbull Government’s Forrest Review into Indigenous Disadvantage are implemented, the same trajectory may be proposed for a cashless smartcard called the Healthy Welfare Card. Although the review explicitly focused on Indigenous disadvantage, Andrew Forrest was uninhibited in making his recommendations to all ‘vulnerable’ Australians. Based on how the BasicsCard was first introduced with income management to Northern Territory Aboriginal communities, Forrest recommended that Healthy Welfare Cards be mandatory for all unemployed persons, carers, single parents and people with a disability, everyone except veterans and those on the aged pension.³² Alert to the implications for the rest of Australia, the move was immediately opposed by the mainstream Australian Council of Social Service.³³ It seems that the government is prepared to use the tragic circumstance of Indigenous disadvantage to politically legitimise reforms not otherwise palatable to the Australian public.³⁴

Policy powerfully determines what happens on the ground in remote Aboriginal communities, often in unintended and surprising ways. No matter how well policy is conceived, delivery on the ground is where it counts, and where it consistently fails. It helps to understand that many of the drivers of Indigenous affairs policy do not derive from the place where it is intended to serve. Some do, but many do not. And the opinions that the public hold matter more than they think.

EVERY MORNING across the Australian outback, people rise to the daily business of running Indigenous communities. As these community leaders and frontline workers attend to their daily activities and each other—what we call the practice of Indigenous affairs—they operate in a highly complex and politicised field. They are widely positioned as community leaders, employees and volunteers working for Indigenous and other local organisations. They include locally stationed or visiting staff from an array of government departments, private corporations and non-government organisations.

Locally, Indigenous people commonly refer to this ‘busyness’ as ‘whitefella stuff’. Although Indigenous people remain closely intertwined—as leaders of Indigenous organisations, employees of service providers, and recipients of government-funded services and benefits—they generally see this busyness as not theirs, separate from their private domain of community life and culture. People living in one remote community described this whitefella stuff by making a simple abstraction to the weather: impossible to control, but not entirely unpredictable. You ‘make hay while the sun shines’, ‘bunker down’ for the storms, take spoils when you can, minimise your losses, and be ever alert for the next policy wind to blow.³⁵

The stories that follow describe how Indigenous leaders and frontline workers respond to a range of policies and programs. New policies emerge, aspiring to make a substantial difference to the circumstances of Indigenous people. Often, in the short term, things do change. But then with time this change fades, often back towards what was there before, or to some new version of old circumstances. Before long, different policies arrive, as election cycles loom, or as policymakers lose interest or patience with the speed of reforms. Through these changes, Indigenous leaders and some frontline workers remain and their local practice has a way of slowly reasserting itself.³⁶ The current circumstances that Indigenous people face are not just a function of this ebb and flow of policies. There is also a great deal of human interpretation and adaptation occurring on the ground. What emerges from their practice is surprisingly unpredictable, idiosyncratic and ad hoc, and often unexpectedly innovative.

The stories are based in five remote Indigenous communities located across Queensland and the Northern Territory: Kowanyama, Doomadgee, Mornington Island, Ali Curung and Mapoon. Each story covers policy and practice over a numbers of years, based on each author’s extended personal experience and study. All of the characters are real. Every effort was made to contact the characters (if still alive) to verify the facts and for them to read or listen to the paragraphs that related to them. They were given the option to have their names changed, but few chose to.

Practice is inescapably tied to the intricacies of interpersonal relationships, and the dynamics and drivers of different individuals. No attempt is made to filter based on whether these individuals are Indigenous or non-Indigenous. Too often the activities of frontline workers are either underplayed or overplayed based on their ethnicity. Despite an increasing number of local recruitments, outsiders still fill many frontline positions, due to the lack of local professional capabilities and the quantum of accounting and reporting against the public funding involved. These outsiders are typically non-Indigenous people or Indigenous people from an urban background. We describe them simply because they are there, including at times ourselves.

The stories reveal a world closed to most Australians’ eyes. We write in a personalised style aimed at a broad audience, beyond our academic and professional colleagues, because we know from experience how deeply Indigenous affairs policy is influenced by public opinion. Race, culture and circumstance aside, the people at the coalface of Indigenous affairs behave in surprisingly familiar ways.

2

Prohibiting Alcohol in Kowanyama

Mark Moran

KOWANYAMA’S FIRST CANTEEN OPENED in 1973. It was little more than a window, with a noisy throng of men outside, all flashing cans and elbows. Officers from the Queensland Aboriginal Affairs Department rationed out the daily limit, which began at two cans per person, increasing over time to four, then settling on six. If there was any misbehaviour in the community, the ration was decreased for all. All six cans were opened and passed to you in one go, to be consumed before you left. You sat with your cargo, guarding them until they were gone.

Through the 1980s, the Bjelke-Petersen Queensland Government actively promoted community canteens, as a means for Aboriginal community councils to use profits to pay for local services. Leading the way was the ubiquitous Russ Hinze, the ‘Minister for Everything’, with his diverse portfolio of local government, roads, racing and police. When Kowanyama’s new canteen opened in 1986, it included a lounge bar. There was a major incident on New Year’s Eve 1992, involving riotous behaviour and a break-in and looting of beer from the