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Sustainable options for Australia’s new national Indigenous representative body


Speech by Tom Calma, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, HREOC


Native Title Conference 2008


4 June 2008, Perth


I begin by paying my respects to the Noongar peoples, the traditional owners of the land where we gather today. I pay my respects to your elders, to the ancestors and to those who have come before us.

To the Noongar peoples, I acknowledge your continuing obligations to these lands and the continued exercise of your culture. I join with many others in expressing my disappointment at the limitations of the native title system and its failure to support the reality of your continued exercise and enjoyment of culture.

Can I thank AIATSIS for the invitation to address this conference on issues relating to the establishment of a national Indigenous representative body. I look forward to engaging with you over the next two days on the role of traditional owners and their representatives in such a body.

Discussions about a national Indigenous representative body are not a theoretical debate. Nor is it something that is disconnected from the critical issues facing our communities, as some people would have you believe. A national Indigenous representative body has to be a fundamental component of the Indigenous policy landscape if we are to make lasting progress in improving the conditions of Indigenous people and our communities.

Today I want to call for us to be ambitious and to be focused on achieving the goal of a national Indigenous representative body.

As Indigenous peoples, we should have the following firm expectation of the federal government as well as of ourselves:

That by the time of the next national native title conference (in June 2009), we will have an agreed model for a new national Indigenous representative body. Such a body should be funded and should begin operating by July next year.

There is a lot of work to be done if we are to achieve this, and to do so in a manner that ensures a deep engagement with the Indigenous population to ensure that a representative body is truly representative and is therefore capable of meeting the needs and aspirations of our communities.

As I am sure you are aware, the new federal government is committed to supporting a national Indigenous representative body. In the budget portfolio statement for Indigenous Affairs released as part of the federal budget in May, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs has stated that:

The Government went to the election with a commitment to set up a national representative body to provide an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice within government. We will soon begin formal discussions with Indigenous people about the role, status and composition of this body.

So this is a significant discussion that we – as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples – need to be engaged in over the coming twelve months.

This debate will become much more intensive over the next month – for reasons that I will outline later on. But today I want to set out some of the challenges that I see in the establishment of a new national representative body.

So let me start by discussing why we need a national Indigenous representative body in the first place and the policy environment in which such a body will operate.

We have clearly reached a crossroads in Indigenous policy and service delivery.

Issues of Indigenous disadvantage and dysfunction are before our eyes more frequently and more prominently than ever before.

Barely a day goes by without another chilling and heartbreaking story of abuse, violence or neglect; or of demonstrations of the impact of entrenched poverty and despair among our communities. This creates a momentum for change and for action.

The new Australian government has stated the challenge facing us as follows:

The Australian Government’s reform agenda... in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs... is to address the structural and systemic problems that are producing appalling outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

A generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children — Australian children — is at stake. Time is fast running out. This fact is acknowledged by Indigenous elders and leaders, as well as by government. [1]

For some time now there has been a growing despair and a growing sense of urgency for governments to get it right when it comes to Indigenous affairs. This is particularly in relation to dealing with the hardest and most damaging issues in our communities - child abuse and family violence.

This has led to a clear clarion call for change and a determination to do things differently. As Prime Minister Rudd stated in his apology speech: ‘a business as usual approach towards Indigenous Australians is not working. We need a new beginning’.

When you combine the sense of despair, the growing sense of urgency with a determination to do things differently, you can see how something as radical, as intensive and as divisive as the NT intervention can emerge as a new policy approach.

Regardless of your views on the appropriateness of the approach adopted in the Northern Territory, it has blown out of the water once and for all the status quo in Indigenous policy making.

This status quo is the fallacy that if governments continue on their existing path, eventually the substantial issues facing our Indigenous communities will be resolved.

It is the fallacy that governments have been doing everything within their power and resources to address the gross disparities experienced by Indigenous peoples across all areas of life.

And it is the fallacy that government efforts are sufficiently targeted to achieve their desired outcomes – namely, addressing these life disparities experienced by Indigenous peoples.

Through their actions in introducing the NT intervention, the former government admitted three key things.

First, that governments were not providing Indigenous peoples with basic services that other Australians take for granted – such as policing and law and order; health and education services; and adequate infrastructure to name but three areas.

Second, it admitted to the fact that the scale of investment in our Indigenous communities to date has not been sufficient to enable real change – sustainable, long term gains that can turn communities and peoples lives around.

And third, it admitted that the change needed is not going to be achieved quickly and will require long term investments.

So what do we learn from these admissions? Down what path do they lead us?

Ultimately, they tell us that Indigenous affairs has for too long been treated as if it is immune from good policy development processes. Lofty aspirations, repeated often, without a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being realised because of the stubborn refusal (or possibly even the convenient blind eye being turned) to the fact that there is a clear lack of capacity to deliver - both in human terms and in terms of the financial inputs.

These admissions also reveal how simplistic it is to draw a line under all past efforts as failed and to strive for newness. In many ways, past approaches didn’t work because they never had a chance to work.

Ultimately, the commitment of the previous government to make a real difference cannot be questioned. But in the context of this discussion, I think that they got it wrong – seriously wrong - on two fronts.

First, they didn’t seek to learn from the past, and even from their very recent efforts. The NT intervention bares little resemblance to the so-called ‘bold experiment’ of the post-ATSIC new arrangements – such as the COAG trials, SRAs and whole of government coordination.

These were largely implemented from 2004, so they were hardly the distant past.

The system for administering Indigenous affairs that was created in the ashes of ATSIC is simply not working and has serious shortcomings that will limit the ability to implement any new agenda.

That is the lesson of successive Social Justice Reports to the federal Parliament, and that is the lesson of the Australian National Audit Office’s audit, released in late 2007, of the whole of government arrangements for delivering services to Indigenous people.

There remains a pressing need to ensure that the federal government has the ability to work on a whole of government basis, where the life circumstances of Indigenous people are not divided into smaller bureaucratic responsibilities that inevitably do not fit together or cover the whole.

This has not been grappled with by the Rudd government and remains a pressing structural problem as we move forward.

There is also a clear challenge to ensure that this system has the ability to respond to the circumstances of Indigenous people wherever they live – be it in an urban or a rural or remote setting – and to do so through both Indigenous specific initiatives and through unlocking mainstream programs so that they are accessible to Indigenous peoples.

Second, and related to this, the previous government didn’t appreciate the importance of undertaking action in partnership with Indigenous communities. In fact, since the abolition of ATSIC they had moved further and further away from the systemic involvement of Indigenous peoples in policy making processes.

The previous government had moved further to processes that treat Indigenous peoples as passive recipients of policy rather than active agents for change.

Now these issues are inter-connected.

The absence of a grounded, rigorous process that assures the participation of Indigenous peoples in determining the policy settings and ensuring that they are being implemented, and where government’s are held accountable for their performance, contributes to the lack of achievement and lack of focus of the whole of government system. It leads to an imbalanced system that does not recognise the necessity for partnership and mutual respect in order to achieve the end goal.

Already the new government has made some bold announcements for reforming Indigenous affairs, including through the establishment of a Working Group on Indigenous Reform at the level of the Council of Australian Governments; and explicit commitments to a new partnership to close the gap in life expectancy, maternal and child health, and literacy and numeracy.

As part of the apology speech on 13 February 2008, the Prime Minister stated:


Our challenge for the future is to embrace a new partnership between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The core of this partnership for the future is closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians on life expectancy, educational achievement and employment opportunities. This new partnership on closing the gap will set concrete targets for the future: within a decade to halve the widening gap in literacy, numeracy and employment outcomes and opportunities for Indigenous children, within a decade to halve the appalling gap in infant mortality rates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children and, within a generation, to close the equally appalling 17-year life gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous when it comes to overall life expectancy.


In furtherance of this commitment, the government signed a Statement of Intent to work in partnership with Indigenous people and their representative organisations to achieve equality in health status and life expectancy between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and non-Indigenous Australians by the year 2030. This statement was signed at the National Indigenous Health Equality Summit that my office convened in partnership with a series of non-government and indigenous organisations in March this year.

That Statement sets out the challenge as follows.
It commits the federal government:


The intention should be clear – genuine partnership with Indigenous people. These are welcome commitments and ‘first steps’ to a new approach for Indigenous affairs.

It is now time for us to flesh out these commitments to ensure the full participation of Indigenous peoples in policy making processes.

We need to address the existing disconnect between policy making at the national level and its implementation at the local and regional level.

Much of the failure of service delivery to Indigenous people and communities, and the lack of sustainable outcomes, is a direct result of the failure to engage appropriately with Indigenous people and of the failure to support and build the capacity of indigenous communities. It is the result of a failure to develop priorities and programs in full participation with Indigenous communities.

Put simply, governments risk failure – and will continue to risk to do so - if they develop and implement policies about Indigenous issues without engaging with the intended recipients of those services. Bureaucrats and governments can have the best intentions in the world, but if their ideas have not been subject to the “reality test” of the life experience of the local Indigenous peoples who are intended to benefit from this, then government efforts will fail.

This need for participation exists at the local, regional and national levels. Processes are needed to ensure Indigenous input in a systemic manner at the regional level, and linked up to the state and national levels.

With the recent demise of the National Indigenous Council, the need at the national level is particularly pressing. The NIC was not intended to be a representative organisation, and it did not adopt a consultative approach to its work during its existence.

But now that it is gone there is no systemic structure in place for Indigenous input into government decision making at the national level.

And this, ultimately, is what the discussion about a new national Indigenous representative body is about.

It is about our place at the table in making the decisions that impact on our communities and on our children.

It is about creating a genuine partnership.

With shared ambition, so we are all working towards the same goals and not at cross purposes.

With mutual respect, so we are part of the solutions to the needs of our communities instead of being treated solely as the problem.

With joint responsibility, so that we can proceed with an honesty and an integrity where both governments and Indigenous people accept that we each have a role to play, and where we each accept our responsibilities to achieve the change needed to ensure that our children have an equal life chance to those of other Australians.

To this end, some of you may have heard that my office has initiated research to identify the key considerations that will need to be addressed in establishing a national Indigenous representative body.

This research follows extensive commentary on the need for improved participation of Indigenous peoples in policy processes that was included in Social Justice Reports to the federal Parliament between 2003 and 2006.

The Social Justice Report 2006, for example, made the following recommendation:

That the Ministerial Taskforce on Indigenous Affairs acknowledge that the absence of mechanisms at the regional level for engagement of Indigenous peoples contradicts and undermines the purposes of the federal whole of government service delivery arrangements.

Further, that the Ministerial Taskforce direct the Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination to address this deficiency as an urgent priority, including by:

  • consulting with Indigenous communities and organisations as to suitable structures, including by considering those proposals submitted to the government for regional structures;
  • utilising the Expert Panels and Multi-use List of community facilitators/ coordinators to prioritise consideration of this issue; and
  • funding interim mechanisms to coordinate Indigenous input within regions and with a view to developing culturally appropriate models of engagement.

The Social Justice Report 2006 also identified that I would follow this issue up by undertaking the following action in 2007 - 08:

The Social Justice Commissioner will work with Indigenous organisations and communities to identify sustainable options for establishing a national Indigenous representative body.

The Commissioner will conduct research and consultations with non-government organisations domestically and internationally to establish existing models for representative structures that might be able to be adapted to the cultural situation of Indigenous Australians, as well as methods for expediting the establishment of such a body given the urgent and compelling need for such a representative body.

This is, of course, material that was tabled in the federal Parliament in 2007. It has been on the public record for some time, as have my views about the need for a new representative body and the significant problems that have emerged in its absence.

So it is unfortunate that the reporting of this in the national media in the past month has been wildly inaccurate. It is also unfortunate that some commentators have seen fit to attack the research team and myself without having any factual materials about the nature of the research work.

Nonetheless, very shortly I will release the research in order to inform debate among Indigenous people and communities about the history of national representative bodies in Australia and the types of issues that we will have to grapple with in deciding what type of body will best meet our needs.

The research is being done by the National Centre for Indigenous Studies (NCIS) at the Australian National University, with the project team led by Professor Mick Dodson. The NCIS won the project through a competitive tender process.

The research addresses the following three questions:


The research does not substitute for broad-based consultation with Indigenous communities. Indeed, the research does not state a preference for a particular model for a representative body – it merely identifies the many and varied issues that need to be considered in the formulation of a new representative body.

As the research is in the final stages of completion I will not be talking about it specifically today. I can, however, tell you that it will be publicly released in the coming month and there will be opportunities for you to consider it then.

I anticipate that it will provide useful information for government and Indigenous people to work with when discussing options for a representative body.

In the remaining time though, let me discuss some of the challenges that exist in establishing a new Indigenous representative body.

For government I think there are two main challenges at this point of time.

Something that is very striking about the Indigenous representative bodies that have existed in Australia since the 1970s is that the government of the day has always had an ambivalent relationship with those bodies.

It is fascinating to observe that every major review of national representative bodies has resulted in a series of recommendations for reform of those representative bodies to make them more effective. And the recommendations of every single review has been ignored and not implemented by the government of the day.

As we embark on a process for a new national Indigenous representative body, this highlights one of the most significant challenges for the federal government: articulate what you are prepared to support and what you are not prepared to support.

I see no point in engaging in extensive consultations with Indigenous peoples about issues on which the government may already have a fixed view, particularly if that view is that they are not prepared to support a representative body undertaking certain functions or roles.

Why, for example, consult with Indigenous people about what type of service delivery functions a new national Indigenous representative body should have if the government has no intention of supporting such a role?

I encourage the Minister for Indigenous Affairs to articulate what the government sees as the major benefits of a national representative body and accordingly, what purposes they hope it will fulfil.

Now I am not suggesting that the government should be prescriptive and close off debates that may need to be had. But ultimately, we need to minimise the differences between what the indigenous community expects of its representative body and what government is prepared to support.

If we don’t ‘close this gap’ between the expectations of government and the indigenous community, then a new body will face enormous credibility difficulties and may lack the influence that it needs to be persuasive and an effective agent for change for the Indigenous community.

There is a second challenge for the federal government.

At present there are a number of regional representative bodies that are in existence. These are receiving variable levels of support. The Torres Strait Regional Authority is legislatively based and secure. But mechanisms such as the Murdi Paaki Regional Assembly are not secure.

At present, the Murdi Paaki Regional Assembly operates under a Regional Partnership Agreement that is due to expire at the end of this month. Very little information has been provided as to whether the RPA or some other partnership agreement will continue to operate just four weeks from now.

The Regional Authority is one of the models that might be considered for regional mechanisms to form part of a new national representative structure.

So the federal government needs to clearly communicate its position on the existence of regional mechanisms such as the Murdi Paaki Regional Assembly and then to act consistently with its position.

In my view, the current uncertain situation faced by the Regional Assembly is regrettable and entirely avoidable. There is no transparency on the government’s position on the existence and level of support that this new government is prepared to provide to such regional mechanisms.

And this is a matter that concerns me greatly – both specifically in terms of the future for the Regional Assembly in the Murdi Paaki region but also for how the government might engage in the debate for establishing a new national Indigenous representative body.

For Indigenous people, the challenge that exists is much broader. Recent media in the wake of the 2020 Summit has shown an antipathy and aggression towards the existence of a national Indigenous representative body by some.

Our challenge as Indigenous people is to stay focused on the challenges facing our people. It is essential that we have a seat at the table and are involved in the big debates that affect our communities. It is not credible to suggest that we should not have such involvement.

So while we may disagree on details from time to time amongst ourselves we need to rise above personality politics and remember that there is a broader purpose. That I speak about the need for a representative body today does not mean that I am not concerned about the challenges that will emerge for our communities through climate change, or the threat to our children through sexual abuse and the prevalence of violence.

As I have articulated here, the issues ultimately are connected. I hope that we will realise a national representative body that engages with different sections of the pan-Aboriginal and/ or Torres Strait Islander community – be it women, our youth and children, communities in different geographical locations, traditional owners or stolen generations members. And I hope that a representative body will operate in such a way as to inspire and support our people, while also holding governments accountable for their efforts, so we may ultimately enjoy equal life chances to all other Australians.

These are big hopes and they are going to be hard to realise – but we will only achieve it if we are prepared to engage seriously with the issues instead of playing petty politics and being pawns of division for the national media to play off each other. We have to be strong and supportive of each other and have faith in our Indigenous brothers and sister, wherever they may come from and irrespective of their background as long as they are working for the betterment of us, as the First Australians.

So let me conclude.

The new government may not yet have fully realised it, but they have been left with a system for delivering on the government’s commitments to Indigenous affairs and reconciliation that is severely limited in its capacity; that has developed and mutated out of an urgent desire to do better, but which has ignored or manipulated the evidence in adopting change; and which has become disconnected from the very people it is meant to service.

This creates serious challenges for the government. Reform is necessary to ensure appropriate standards of accountability are upheld; that a clear, consistent vision is applied; and that the capacity exists to deliver.

Unless this is addressed within a learning framework, with an eye to detail and basic standards of good policy practice being applied, the government may find that it becomes frustrated at the lack of achievement and the intractable nature of the existing disparities in life circumstances experienced by many Indigenous peoples.

The first step on this road is mutual respect and a partnership. A national Indigenous representative body is an essential component of achieving the long overdue commitments to closing the gap.

Please remember, from self respect comes dignity, and from dignity comes hope.

Thank you


[1] Federal Budget 2008-09 – Indigenous Affairs Portfolio Statement by Minister Macklin.