Indigenous higher education: A policy game-changer?

In the cities, the rate of Indigenous home-ownership has risen from almost zero to half the national rate in barely thirty years: again, following the usual pattern of migrant fortunes. As for university graduate numbers, these have risen from one in a thousand Indigenous adults thirty years ago, to one in nine now, mostly in the cities. In the towns and cities, most Indigenous people are getting on with business.

Most of Indigenous policy is oriented towards the needs, or demands, of a minority population, mired in lifelong welfare and totally dependent on government services and public transfers. After forty years, the faint hope is that somehow, self-determination and community and remote living are still the keys to Indigenous destinies. Most Indigenous people in urban centres are working, relatively free of involvement with Indigenous-program bureaucrats. While many in the welfare-oriented population have a detailed knowledge of benefits and allowances and programs, many urban working people have little interest or knowledge in such matters, but are seeking out information about career opportunities, about the best schools, public and private, and about which universities offer the most appropriate range of programs for their children.

So, for a rapidly growing proportion of the Indigenous population, most policy measures that may be in place do not affect them greatly, do not concern them, and do not involve them. In a sense, for this population, they have fortuitously striven to go beyond policy, to live and work and love as any other Australians do, free of direct government interference. They have liberated themselves from policy. They live and work and love, as Indigenous people in an open society, an un-enclosed or encapsulated society, in an uncertain world full of promise.

But it is still a world that can impose constraints on Indigenous people. Policies may come and go but attitudes and expectations linger. Indigenous professionals may be subtly shunted into segregated units, or expected to focus on the needs of Indigenous clients, pupils or patients. The combination of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘professional’ is still too much for many people to get their heads around, in some views an Indigenous person cannot be simultaneously a proper professional, with standard qualifications, and ‘really’ Indigenous. Thankfully, this old-fashioned view is fading slowly, on both the left and the right.