Catholic Diocese of Broome

COAG: The Council of Australian Governments is the peak intergovernmental forum in Australia. It is comprised of the Prime Minister, State Premiers and Chief Ministers as well as the President of the Local Government Associations.

The recent meeting of COAG held in Darwin received a report from the Productivity Commission regarding the matter of Aboriginal disadvantage. The report revealed that the gap based on the differences shown in social indicators, as applied to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, had not closed at all since the time of the National Apology last year. In fact, in some instances the gap had widened. There is nothing monumental about this news nor is it at all surprising to anyone involved in developmental work in Indigenous Australia. What is amazing is the evident surprise shown by the politicians and public servants at the findings of the report. It is astounding to think that Governments which are largely responsible for the terrible state of Indigenous standards of education, social well-being, health, employment and housing should be surprised that a situation two centuries in the making should be rectified or even markedly changed within such a brief period of time.

One of the on-going errors in the application of government policy is the notion that change can be accomplished within the life of a parliament or a particular government. Take housing, for instance. The out-station movement that burgeoned in the eighties enabled displaced Aboriginals to leave the outskirts of country towns and return to ’country’. This move back to traditional lands, a strategy assisted with the promise of schools, financial resources and the provision of utilities, eased the burdens on towns, lessened the social disadvantage of those living as fringe-dwellers and, with the assistance of employment programs such as CDEP, diminished the social impact of ‘Sit-down’ money upon those remote communities. The latest policies being implemented by government are poised to cut essential funding to the remote communities, abolish CDEP, reduce remote housing programmes, and thereby encourage a drift of refugees to the fringes of regional centres. This is the new “normalization” at work! We have come full circle without achieving any great advances at all. To add salt to the wounds of Indigenous people in remote Australia, the law enforcement policy of building large police complexes with lock-ups is the only area of massive expenditure increases in recent years, and this has further complicated the lives of those who thought they had moved away from the strictures of town living.

The only way forward is included as a useful criticism in the report of the Productivity Commission to COAG. We have to include Aboriginal people, that is those for whom services are delivered and policies are constructed, in the decision making process. The idea of self-determination practised by Indigenous people does not appeal to bureaucrats and apparently now not to politicians either. But unless Indigenous Australians are consulted, their views canvassed and their cooperation actively sought, we can only expect that the on-going bumbling that has defined the last thirty years in Aboriginal affairs will continue. An effective developmental policy will be that policy which grows out of consultation with Indigenous people, that will be consistently implemented over the long-term by people who are committed to real progress beyond the life of particular parliaments and politicians.