Patrick Sullivan

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Politics and Policy Visions of Indigenous
Progress
Patrick Sullivan
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What is policy for ?

• Policy mobilises political support and
  legitimates current practices
• While development programmes respond more
  pragmatically to local conditions and
  relationships
• Successful development workers maintain the
  system of representation required by current
  policy
• Policy fails projects, not the reverse.
• Measuring success and failure against current
  policy denies progress with real projects
• David Mosse Cultivating Development an
  Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice, Pluto
  Press, Ann Arbor, 2005

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• New policy paradigm set against policy failure
  of 1980s
• The failure of past policies is exaggerated
  some important gains, new problems
• Useful to compare present conditions against
• pre-67 conditions on missions, pastoral
  stations, rural reserves and town camps
• late 70s/early 80s conditions on fringes of
  remote towns

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• Basis of disillusion/disagreement with 1980s
  policy
• Too much land too little benefit
• Fear of political separatism
• Fundamental disagreement with separate policies
  for development
• Anger and resentment at racist tag
• Indigenous leadership identified with Labor
  party, political enemies
• Sense that physically and morally Aboriginal
  communities spiralling downwards

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• No word is uttered on grief about an
  attachment to the nation that senses its object
  is dying by the week. In a very deep sense
  old-identity Australians have been forbidden to
  mourn on this issue.Much has been said, and
  rightly, sometimes with the tenderness it
  warrants, about the anguish of migration. But the
  process of building our diverse new cultural
  synthesis demands recognition of a complementary
  anguish felt by many in the old-identity
  Australia. In its own way, the host culture is
  experiencing a counterpoising sense of
  uprootedness, a powerful if obviously less
  poignant grief.
• (Dixson, M. 1999 The Imaginary Australian, UNSW
  Press, Sydney43)

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Discerning a policy philosophy

• Some landmarks of the Howard years 1996-2007
• Changing the Native Title Act, 10 point plan,
  bucket loads of extinguishment
• Reversal of support for Article 3 of draft
  Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
  (self-determination)
• Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation not renewed
  at end of term
• Review of Northern Territory land rights
  legislation
• Splitting ATSIC functions. Introduction of
  Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Services
  (ATSIS)
• Abolition of ATSIC ATSIS
• Introduction of mainstreaming, whole of
  government policy and Shared Responsibility
  Agreements
• Northern Territory Intervention

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• all Australians working together under one set
  of laws to which all are accountable and from
  which all are entitled to an equal dispensation
  of justice (Cited in Gale, 200562)
• living in Australia is the greatest privilege
  that any person can have in the worldthere is no
  country that is freer or stronger and more
  tolerant and more open in the way it treats all
  its citizensit doesnt matter what a persons
  racial background is, it doesnt matter what
  their religion is thats a matter for them
  (cited by Gale, 2006370.

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• Practical delivery of programmes less consistent
  than policy pronouncements
• Takes place in three modes
• Liberal democratic, individual citizen
• Disdvantaged group
• Self-organising polity

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• Needs based approach, adaptive to local
  circumstances, not based in rights but aimed at
  encouraging capabilities
• Nussbaum, M. 2000 Women and Human Development
  the Capabilities Approach, Cambridge University
  Press, Cambridge (UK).

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• Potential for new local government arrangements
• Commonwealth government should directly fund
  local governments, in which Indigenous people
  have a controlling interest where they are the
  majority, and a significant voice where they are
  not. The Commonwealth should simply set the
  desired outcomes, leaving local and regional
  arrangements to deliver this. Accountability for
  assessing achievement should also remain at the
  local and regional level, with the local people
  themselves able to attest whether or not targets
  are being met.