Table of Contents
The first few years of the new century saw major change in the Australian Government’s approach to Indigenous affairs. These developments combined with simultaneous policy shifts in State and Territory jurisdictions to create a period of enormous flux and uncertainty in Indigenous communities and organisations. This chapter aims to help readers understand these changes and the resulting challenges facing the Indigenous community governance bodies involved in our research. Subsequent chapters will indicate that Indigenous people and their organisations actively engaged through this period, trying to manoeuvre their way through these new arrangements towards their own goals. The changes presented opportunities as well as constraints, but this chapter will argue that there is an underlying contradiction that the organisations confront. They are, in a sense, between a rock and a hard place: the assumptions and principles of self-determination underlying the policy environment in which many of them were created have changed. Some new ideas like ‘mainstreaming’ have been introduced and organisations are finding themselves caught at an uncomfortable intersection between communities operating with one set of assumptions, and governments another. They are also squeezed in the shifting policy space between jurisdictions as different interests exert their influence around them. These organisations are the intercultural space where different ‘framings’ of the governance challenge (cf. Leach et al. 2007) meet or, at times, collide. At the end of 2007, as this research concluded, a change of government at the national level signalled the potential for a more productive engagement with Indigenous people to address the challenges this paper outlines.
Between the early 1970s and the mid 1990s, under both Labor and Coalition Governments, many of the organisational arrangements for Indigenous community governance developed under policies favourable to the principle of Indigenous self-determination. Although this principle was enormously circumscribed in practice, and self-management might better describe what actually occurred (Moreton-Robinson 2007), the period saw the creation of an ‘Indigenous sector’ across the country and diverse land rights regimes in a number of jurisdictions. The sector comprised statutory bodies such as land councils, native title bodies, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) Regional Councils, community government councils acting as local governments, and several thousand Indigenous associations and corporations providing legal, employment, health, housing, education and many other services, which burgeoned across the country (Rowse 2005). This diverse expression of Indigenous agency and collective effort to take greater control over Indigenous lives was encouraged by key pieces of legislation[1] and by governments’ program arrangements. The idea that Indigenous peoples’ organisations may be best placed to address Indigenous problems was well-supported through special Indigenous programs, which funded Indigenous-controlled services. The mosaic of organisations also reflected the desire of Aboriginal people for a very local level of organisation and representation. Nevertheless, the establishment of ATSIC in 1990 provided an important form of Indigenous representation at the national level, albeit government-designed and under Ministerial control (Morrisey 2006). Though severely constrained by the complex federal legislative and policy context, the lack of Indigenous economic independence, the poor educational levels of many Indigenous people, and the limited national efforts towards Indigenous capacity building, self-determination as a principle was well accepted, if implemented without adequate support and in quite different ways from the Torres Strait to remote communities and urban settings (House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs (HRSCAA) 1990). As a result, it did not deliver quickly enough on the aspirations of those who championed and supported it. The statistics on Indigenous disadvantage seemed hard to budge, and the rapid growth of a youthful population with poor education and health, few employment prospects, and many associated social problems seemed, to many, to demand a new response.
[1] For example: Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (Cth); Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983 (NSW); Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act 1976 (Cth); Native Title Act 1993 (Cth).