Finding a voice in the quiet revolution

On May 27, 2004 Labor Senator Kerry O'Brien gained a rare acknowledgment from Aboriginal Affairs Minister Amanda Vanstone.

The scene was a Senates Estimates Committee hearing. O'Brien was asking how in the Commonwealth's new arrangements for the administration of Aboriginal Affairs, ATSIC and ATSIS staff would be "mapped" to mainstream agencies, including the new Office of Indigenous Policy Co-ordination.

O'Brien asked if he was correct in his understanding that the Howard Government's criticism of ATSIC "... does not extend to its staff or to ATSIS staff - that there is no criticism of the performance of the staff in this challenging area of public policy and program delivery?" Vanstone was direct.

"The government's view in relation to ATSIC is, as a whole, certainly not directed to the staff," she replied. "It is a question of the structure and whether the structure was ever able to deliver the hopes people had for it."

O'Brien could not recall any "... such acknowledgement before". "I suppose staff can take that as an acknowledgment now," he observed. He then asked: "How has staff morale been affected by these proposed changes?"

The question also drew a glib concession from agency head Wayne Gibbons. "Staff morale has been affected," Gibbons conceded. "Anything that draws a cloud over job security for staff has that impact. As long as that uncertainty remains, morale is low," he added.

Gibbons admitted the agency would still have a problem with morale until "... we have reached the end of the mapping exercise and staff are assigned to their new functions and are in the new organisations". This, he said, was understandable.

Gibbons was less forthcoming when asked a more direct question a few moments later by Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett. The key to staff morale, he said, was to "... clarify where they are going and get them focused on the new activities as quickly as possible".

"Has it been made clear," Bartlett asked, "that when it is said that ATSIC has failed it did not reflect any dissatisfaction with the staff?"

Gibbons replied: "In the many meetings with staff that I have had and that my senior managers have had we have been very careful to draw a distinction between their role as public servants administering programs in accordance with policies and rules determined by the board, or the government or ATSIC."

Gibbons might have changed his rhetoric by May 2004, but I distinctly recall when he came into ATSIC in late 2003 he left no-one in any doubt he considered it a second rate organisation. I don't recall any qualification or distinction. He was there to shake the joint out: and shake it out he would.

The question of staff morale has never again been raised in Senate Estimates, either with him or his disaster-prone Minister. More's the pity. There's a story there ... and it isn't pretty.

One person's story has just emerged.

Kerry Arabena is a descendant of the Meriam people in the Torres Strait. She has lived and worked in rural and remote Australia for a large part of her adult life, developing expertise in social health as a manager and worker in a number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations, including the Pintubi Homeland Health Service, west of the Alice, and the Cairns-based Apunimipa Cape York Health Council.

She is keenly interested "... in the replication and evolution of societies, particularly Indigenous societies; and the impact of the beliefs, values and attitudes of dominant groups on the capacities and aspirations of people who make up the minority".

Following the abolition of ATSIC and ATSIS in 2004 she accepted a position as Director of the Regional Governance Unit in the newly created OIPC, situated within DIMIA. Her job was to assist communities to develop regional representation strategies before the abolition of ATSIC Regional Councils.

It was a "sad job". During the ensuing months she found herself “... getting physically ill every morning I went into the office in the Lovett Tower, Woden in Canberra”. “This feeling would abate,” she recalls, “when travelling in communities and over the weekends, only to recur with full force upon my return… In the lifts going up to the fifth floor every morning I found this to be the case with many other Aboriginal, Torres Strait and non-Indigenous OIPC staff members.”

Needless to say, Arabena “... did not work long for the Australian Public Service”.

She was given the opportunity to take a short-term Visiting Research Fellowship at the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) reviewing the new arrangements in the administration of Indigenous Affairs, or as she puts it [to] "... read, think, write and reflect [for the] first time in my life".

The result is a thought-provoking, if slightly over-written, 57-page research discussion paper entitled: Not Fit for Modern Australian Society: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and the new arrangements for the administration of Indigenous Affairs.

Arabena found an environment at AIATSIS which "promotes cultural safety" and developed her paper "... primarily to understand my adverse physical reaction to working at OIPC and to provide an analysis about the new arrangements and some strategies for consideration by the new Indigenous leadership".

There is not enough space here to do her paper justice. She skilfully lays bare the denial of Indigeneity inherent in the Howard Government's mainstream mania, accentuated by her own experience in the OIPC workplace over the past year.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, she contends, are being made "... fit for modern Australian society by overcoming our status as 'disadvantaged citizens' to take our rightful place in the social, economic and cultural life of our country. This assertion is framed in a way that simply allows us to 'overcome our disadvantage'. These new arrangements are not about forging relationships with Indigenous peoples, but instead about resisting and minimising the recognition that is provided to our cultures, our history, our capacities to contribute and our ongoing connection with the land".

She worked for a government "... ill equipped to deal with the contemporary political consequences of Indigenous identity (including separate representative structures and inclusive cultural aspirations) and this incapacity significantly influences how the government treats those who are different.

"This is the core of the matter for me: in the new arrangements Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are beholden to government, who determine whether we can control our own affairs. This determination is dependent on society's views of our competence: and this competence is measured only in terms that describe our contributions to the market economy."

On the way through Arabena argues the "new" arrangements are not new. Black Jack McEwen set the precedent for the "new" arrangements with his "New Deal" for Aboriginal People as Minister for the Interior in 1939.She draws interesting parallels between statements at the time from one of the architects of the New Deal, Adolphus Peter Elkin, those from Commonwealth public service head Peter Shergold announcing the "new" arrangements and from Vanstone's speeches.

The paper contains some telling observations on the Howard Government's use of "brand" Pearson, and notes there has been no evaluation of the success of the work developed in Cape York or of whether these approaches can be translated outside of that specific context.

She asks the reason the Government and its bureaucrats have "never adequately explained" why the reform agenda has retained active, representative and executive structures for the Torres Strait and abolished them on the mainland. She notes the new arrangements have provided a public platform to leaders "... who have never been given legitimacy from their community to speak about issues" but are "... legitimised as spokespersons on Indigenous affairs, primarily because their sentiments are consistent with those of government".

Ms Arabena questions how the Council Of Australian Governments trials can be considered a "success" without evidence.

In all she provides an interesting insight into how and why the government has engineered a national debate in the absence of a national Indigenous representative voice, laced with the human dimension of one person struggling to do a "sad job".

She met a lot of Indigenous people around the country "... struggling with the new arrangements and a new disillusionment as people watched 'governments taking over their lives again'". Her paper details the "threat" to the Commonwealth's initial commitment to Indigenous representation from senior officials in OIPC and why she was "... not allowed to use the language of new structures or councils or authorities". The words implied "... a security of representation and legitimacy that was not part of the Government's agenda".

The Regional Governance Unit was eventually disbanded "removing any of the corporate expertise that could have assisted the transition from the Regional Councils to the new regional arrangements".

Ms Arabena clearly left OIPC because of job satisfaction, not job security. One hopes she is happier now. She ought to be. Her paper provides an important Indigenous voice in Vanstone's "quiet revolution".

The full version of Ms Arabena's paper is available for download here.