It’s Close the Gap time again.
On Wednesday federal parliament will respond to the eighth annual Closing the Gap report on this country’s attempt to narrow the appalling disparities between the quality and duration of Indigenous lives and those of other Australians.
An algorithm could already write the story about what is likely to happen on Wednesday.
Some “gaps” - in education and housing, for example - may narrow marginally. But others, on employment, life expectancy and infant mortality, for example, will remain shamefully off-target.
Major party politicians will greet the report with predictable platitudes and laments. You hear it every year: Oh yes, there have been some minor improvements (hear, hear!) but we must not rest until we have done much, much better or we will not reach our set targets by 2018.
The cosy bipartisanship surrounding most aspects of the top-down federal policy-making for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, including the annual response to Closing the Gap, conceals Australia’s endemic failure to its first peoples. It is a failure that in some parts of Australia now warrants nothing less than an international aid delivery-style response.
As the then self-declared prime minister “for Indigenous affairs” Tony Abbott said in 2014: “Closing the Gap has always been a bipartisan goal and, as such, our successes and failures are always shared.”
Quite.
You can rely on one thing in adversarial democratic politics: it will always bring the blackout cloak of bipartisanship to the policies (Indigenous affairs, asylum seekers, national security) that demand the most intensive scrutiny and debate.
Malcolm Turnbull, who has shown no sign that the shameful crisis in Indigenous wellbeing is a priority for his government (tick tax reform, tick border control and immigration, but what about the blackfellas?) has, however, done two things right during his brief tenure.
The first was that he did not succumb to pressure to reappoint Mal - Mr Intervention - Brough to the Indigenous Affairs portfolio. Brough, possessed of the paternalism of the old mission manager and the unquestioning strong arm of the bullying drill sergeant, was loathed during the Howard government era by all but a few select Indigenous leaders as an arrogant and destructive blow-hard who used the portfolio for little but furtherance of his deluded leadership ambitions.
Turnbull stuck with journeyman Nigel Scullion instead.
Turnbull’s second, small positive initiative, was to make his first low-key formal contact with an Aboriginal community at La Perouse in Sydney, rather than through a PR-driven Abbott era carnival-style sweep through a “real” remote community in northern Australia trailed by a largely unquestioning, ill-informed, media pack. This reflected the (encouraging) realisation of Turnbull - or that of someone in his office - that three-quarters of first Australians do not live in the bush, and that the developing world-poverty, appalling life expectancies and other associated Closing the Gap indicators of Indigenous Australians that can be linked back to invasion in 1788 and dispossession, are right under the noses of non-Indigenous city people.
That’s it for Turnbull so far. So let’s watch his response to the latest appalling indicators on Wednesday to see if he offers a response beyond the algorithmic, beyond the bipartisan smokescreen that might assuage non-Indigenous guilt and reassure a horrified global community that the Australian commonwealth is at least vigilant when it comes to the appalling plight of its indigenes.
A worthwhile response would acknowledge the obvious generational failure in Indigenous policymaking and the need to start again, beginning with a new advice base drawn from the many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who want to engage but struggle to be heard above a select, handpicked few whose views largely reinforce those of whitefella politicians.
The imperative of self-determination has been marred by the dramatic failures of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, scrapped by the Howard government 12 years ago and replaced by a top-down policy making approach that is imbued with assimilation-ist ideology.
Self-determination for Indigenous Australians, based on genuine representation, should be an unquestioned given.
As Jon Altman, an economist and anthropologist who has been engaged with Indigenous Australia since the 1970s, says: “Close the Gap is doing nothing except maybe placating non-Indigenous Australians and international audiences that we are still watching the Indigenous socioeconomic disaster space - some gaps are widening. I suspect the gaps that matter - of livelihood and subjective assessments of wellbeing - are actually widening. This is just an annual highly performative event.
“He [Turnbull] is one of the first to say the problem is everywhere not just remote. He needs an elected representative body - again, like ATSIC, that had regional elected representation - people who actually knew something.”
The Indigenous Law Centre’s Megan Davis nails the crisis in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policymaking in her essay, Listening but not hearing, for the latest Griffith Review. Davis, a member of the panel that is consulting Indigenous Australians on the proposal to “recognise” them in the constitution, also gives valuable insight into the dramatic failings of the recognition process.
She writes: “Aboriginal affairs - once the subject of Australian innovation in policy and law reform attended to by the routine scrutiny of an informed and inquisitive Fourth Estate - are no more ... Contemporary policies, erroneously characterised as ‘nudge’ politics, are by and large brutally and unapologetically straitjackets: choking communities to death, removing autonomy and choice from the individual and collective lives of a profoundly unhappy policy.
“Public policy no longer requires the imprimatur of the Aboriginal people; Aboriginal participation in the decisions taken about their lives is negligible. It is a distraction, an indulgence even.”
So instead, the commonwealth offers us “Recognise”, a mega-million dollar public relations campaign to promote a nebulous, ill-defined proposal to somehow acknowledge First Australians in the Constitution. Aside from deep ambivalence - or understandable hostility - towards being recognised by what Davis correctly terms the “settler state”, opponents, Indigenous or otherwise, see it as a distraction from attending to the real issues (treaties, acknowledgment of sovereignty, the appalling economic and lifestyle indicators that pepper Close the Gap) that might contribute to genuine outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
The significant proportion of Indigenous people opposed to “Recognise” receive no such government funding to argue their cause.
Noel Pearson, who - along with Warren Mundine - has had the ear of a generation of Australian prime ministers, recently lamented not having gone into federal politics to make more of a difference. Then he bagged the federal government for having ignored the report of Empowered Communities, an unelected body comprising some leaders of Indigenous organisations.
Empowered Communities, an opt-in framework that requires participating communities to swear to five principles (similar to those in Pearson’s Cape York trials), is underpinned by a broad philosophy of self-determination, albeit at organisation level.
But it is intrinsically flawed, as illustrated by the research of Elise Klein at the Australian National University’s centre for Aboriginal economic policy research. It centralises decision-making in the hands of a few; Indigenous people whose lives are affected by their decisions, may initially have no choice in terms of representation.
Klein writes: “... it is only organisations that are given the choice to opt in. Individuals in the targeted regions do not have a choice - instead, local organisations are assumed to be representative of them. This means that Indigenous people residing in targeted areas are implicated in the Empowered Communities approach even if they may not know about or support the program.
“While the (Empowered Communities) report uses participatory rhetoric about ... being flexible to the needs of regions, the authors nonetheless establish five none negotiable ‘first-priority agreements’ or conditions ... the hegemonic discourse around Indigenous people and families taking responsibility is so strong in government, business and wider policy circles that those who are not opting in are stigmatised as irresponsible for not obeying these new social norms, when they may just not agree with the type of development advocated by Empowered Communities.
“The ‘development’ set out within the report is largely based on the Cape York Institute model (of Pearson) of development. However, this model while being granted more than A$124m since 2008, has shown questionable results for Indigenous people... .”
The other Sage of Abbott (an Indigenous affairs prime minister who declared Australia “unsettled or, um, scarcely settled” at British invasion) Warren Mundine, chair of the prime minsiter’s Indigenous Advisory Council, has, meanwhile, challenged Turnbull to get more Indigenous people involved in the “real economy”. Unless that happens, he said, the gaps around other indicators would never close.
Economic engagement and achievement is important. It is, however, but one measure of developmental success. Chief among others are social cohesion, and cultural enrichment and preservation.
That’s a difficult concept for many politicians and policymakers - who think Indigenous culture is already sufficiently preserved in museums - to grapple with.
Once again, mind the gap.
Then press “play” on the algorithm.
It’s time to start again from the beginning.'
This excellent article appeared in the Guardian.