indigenous policy
14 Dec 2011
Another Intervention Is Not The Answer
The Government is talking up the same old policies to tackle Indigenous disadvantage but its own evaluations show they're not working. It's time to listen closer to communities, writes Greens Senator Rachel Siewert
As it introduces new Intervention measures in the Northern Territory, the Government is keen to talk about the effectiveness of existing policies in tackling Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander disadvantage.
Reports with glossy pages and matching colour schemes cannot hide the reality that the programs they discuss are both costly and ineffective — and that they are not based on sound evidence.
Contrary to selectively published statistics, the collective measures of the Intervention are not delivering better overall outcomes for Aboriginal people living in the Northern Territory. The Closing the Gap in the Northern Territory Monitoring Report shows how much work there is still to do.
The report details how school attendance has declined since 2009. It shows that child hospitalisation rates have increased and that confirmed incidences of personal harm and suicide have more than doubled since 2007. So far, only 44 convictions for child sexual abuse have been recorded, despite this issue being a key justification for rolling out the Intervention back in 2007.
The Government will have to keep spinning to justify poor policies until their approach in the NT changes.
The Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Report on Consultations and Northern Territory Emergency Response Evaluation Report have been released and subsequently used to justify and expand what are essentially "old" policies. This expansion adheres to the long-held and ultimately flawed principle that punishing people will lead to changes in behaviour.
These old approaches are typified by negative measures such as income management and the suspension of welfare payments, justified on the basis of reports that are too often derived from perfunctory consultations and framed to meet a predetermined outcome. They generally lack the quantitative rigour which is necessary.
The consultations that informed the Stronger Futures report, for example, have come under fire for poor process and reporting. Analysis based on independent recordings of the consultations reveals striking discrepancy between opinions expressed by communities and the view of opinions present in the report.
The Government is now in the process of legislating the next wave of the Intervention, with the likely support of the Coalition. They point to some areas they say have improved — things such as personal and community safety — to justify the continuation of the Intervention.
An increased feeling of safety is hardly surprising given that some policies associated with the NT Intervention have seen more money spent on more safe houses, police and Aboriginal liaison officers.
These investments obviously produce results, they improve services and addresses wider community disadvantage.
The key point here is that an emergency Intervention — with its discrimination and punitive approach — is not needed in order to make these investments a reality.
The $1.5 billion spent so far would have delivered significantly better results had it been directed to service investments and programs, rather than signs, bureaucracy and income management.
The School Enrolment and Attendance through Welfare Reform Measure (SEAM) program is another example of an expensive and unnecessarily punitive policy.
SEAM is now being extended, despite the fact that the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations has admitted the trials could not be directly linked to educational outcomes.
It was made clear in Senate Estimates that the positive and more consistent results from SEAM are delivered through case management and personalised involvement with families, rather than any measures that punish parents.
The positive investments contribute to improving school attendance. More teachers, better training, bilingual education, community involvement, better parental engagement with schools, action to address children’s hearing health and more investment in case management — all these policies would deliver better outcomes than SEAM is able to.
It is these suggestions that were most prevalent in the Stronger Futures consultation with communities — not a preference for punitive measures.
These programs are also extremely costly. To this date, the bill for the current income management process in the NT sits at around $450 million and the policy remains one of the most criticised across the NT. The money used to income manage people would produce far better results if it was directed to the services and programs based on collaboration and community involvement and partnership.
Such measures provide communities with the ability and opportunity to control and improve their social and economic conditions — elements that are a key component of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, which Australia has endorsed. Engagement in the Northern Territory must be fundamentally altered if the rights set out in the UN declaration are to be honoured. That will happen when we adopt policies that are considered and that originate from real consultative engagement.
When this occurs, a well chosen set of statistics and a well oiled PR machine will not be needed to justify the approach. The benefits for communities and individuals across the Northern Territory will self evident.
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Posted Friday, 16 December 11 at 1:15PM
I get the impression that Minister Macklin is untouchable, particularly by Gillard. But Gillard is an enthusiastic backer of these failed policies, as they go along with her failed Education policies. She picked a Yankee policy there, one that was killed off a short time later in the USA as a total failure, and has rammed it through the children of Australia, much to their long term detriment. In the case of Indigenous peoples, Gillard and Macklin and a lot of others its seems, picked up on the failed Liberal policies, added a few nasties of their own, and are digging in their heels on any changes, listening only to one or two Indigenous Women with AGENDAS, much as Mal Brough did.
I had been hoping that Macklin would be relegated to the back-bench in the little re-shuffle, along with her failed policies, but she has Right Wing Factional backing, and is safe.
The poor bloody Indigenous people of the NT and now lots of other places, are NOT safe from her. Dazza.
Posted Friday, 16 December 11 at 4:32PM
Bob Durnan
Another example of tragically blinkered, close-minded thinking by the Greens’ Indigenous health issues spokesperson. This type of propaganda – constantly spun by Siewert over four years now - has the very unfortunate effect of diverting the time and energy of Aboriginal people, their organisations and their supporters into the profoundly destructive dead end of avoidance of real issues, unnecessary depression and unwarranted denial in their personal and working lives, and unjustified resentment and dogmatic oppositionism in their political lives.
Further, apart from hypocritically committing the exact offence of which she proclaims Macklin guilty (“selectively published statistics”) Siewert proceeds to blatantly select a couple of statistics and use them to allege the total failure of Macklin’s policies.
In fact the statistics she selects from The Closing the Gap in the Northern Territory Monitoring Report clearly illustrate the unwillingness or inability of Siewert to read statistics and the report in an intelligent and fair way.
First she baldly claims “The report details how school attendance has declined since 2009.” Siewert fails to acknowledge that, in the great majority of schools, the significant extra investment by government in education, together with the hard work of teachers, parents and community leaders in most communities has collectively produced a growth in absolute numbers for school enrolments and attendance. It is mainly local factors in a few large schools that have brought the average figures down slightly for the whole of the remote system.
Secondly, Siewert claims that the Closing the Gap Monitoring Report “shows that child hospitalisation rates have increased”. In making this claim, she perversely ignores two salient facts: hospitalisation rates for remote Aboriginal patients fluctuate wildly from year to year anyway; and in the period in question, normal fluctuations have been obscured by the beneficial flow-on effects of the NTER’s huge investment in generally enhanced primary health care on remote communities: thousands of formerly neglected young children were treated and/or referred to specialists for follow-up work on eye, ear, dental, cardio-vascular and respiratory conditions. The NTER funded this extra treatment and the recruiting of specialists to come to NT hospitals and conduct these follow-up examinations, tests and – in many cases - procedures. Far from an upsurge in illness, there was an upsurge in treatment of formerly neglected illness. Wake up Siewert! Or are you just indulging in your own cardinal sin of spin?
Thirdly, Siewert claims “that confirmed incidences of personal harm and suicide have more than doubled since 2007”, again without mentioning the context: confirmed incidences of personal harm and suicide in the NT have for two decades shown wildly fluctuating patterns between regions, sub-regions and over time.
Fourthly “ 44 convictions for child sexual abuse” is hardly cause for celebration, particularly when combined with the extra child welfare workers funded since the NTER began having uncovered extraordinary levels of serious child neglect.
It is time that Siewert grew up and started behaving like a responsible adult. Aboriginal health is too important for somebody in her position of media and political influence to be behaving in this grossly misleading and perversely childish, point scoring way.
Posted Friday, 16 December 11 at 6:35PM
Jungarrayi
Spin and counter-spin. Propaganda and counter-propaganda. Lies , lies and statistics.
I and my family have lived on a community targeted by the Intervention (a so called ‘Prescribed Area’) for decades.
I arrived during the ‘Welfare days’ and have witnessed the introduction and evolution of ‘self determination’ and bilingual education, and their subsequent dismantling and destruction by bureaucratic, fiscal and political sabotage.
Bob Durnan can pick Rachel Siewert’s article apart to his heart’s content, I remain in total agreement with her. No political or statistical argument can change my total oposition to the Intervention with its assimilationist imperative and anything associated with it.
I have never seen Aboriginal people out here as disempowered and despondent as at present.
Posted Saturday, 17 December 11 at 8:11PM
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/stories/2011/11/22/3372189.htm
This is a great lecture by Salil Shetty from Amnesty International about Western human rights practices
Posted Saturday, 17 December 11 at 11:20PM
Jungarrayi - I agree with you. This is a classic example of our political leaders’ excellence in lying, mis-use of statistics, wastage of taxpayers’ funds, excuses, abuse of power, self-defense/validation, arrogance and oppressive attitudes.
This is also possibly one of the ordinary Australian’s and indigenous people’s BEST opportunities to call their bluff…to stick their noses in their own cooni like the dirty dog that they are crapping on the nation’s carpet.
We need to unite our nation of all races/cultures who believe that enough is enough for the suffering of your people (our cousins), to publicise even more broadly, to kick up such a stink that these bullshit artists can’t avoid the truth, can’t use their figures, rhetoric and self-righteousness to brush it all under the carpet.
Bob Durnan - take comfort in your figures - fortunately for you you can adjust YOUR reality comfortably to numbers - the people living under this dictatorship live a different reality, you will not explain the issue away with all your fancy arguments, debating, statistics or what real people generally call bullshit (cooni). The people benefiting the most out of the intervention are the service providers the builders and the bureaucrats - and the people living in false, ignorant moral bliss that a difference is being made - that Julia’s ticked that to do list off.
Posted Saturday, 17 December 11 at 11:36PM
Rachel Siewert - you might also want to research case management because it is my understanding that indigenous people would view case management as part of the problem not part of the solution.
Case management is the human services practice approach adopted because it is most compatible with economic/political ideologies of our politicians and funding sources (especially for monitoring/evaluation/reporting purposes)- not for its effectiveness to address issues and enhance people’s lives. There are many theoretical and practice approaches that are more inclusive, participatory, and empowering than case management (So don’t believe THAT spin either!!).
Posted Tuesday, 27 December 11 at 9:52PM
The destruction of Aboriginal opportunities for self determination throughout the Howard years, the stripping of funds to Aboriginal organisations, the abolition of ATSIC without retaining a viable voice for Aboriginal people, the scrapping of grass roots programs set up by Aboriginal people for Aboriginal people - this paved the way for the invasion of the Intervention. The resemblance of this policy to something akin to that of a police state is disturbing. The current government should insist on having no part in the ‘Intervention’ or any of its castoffs.