Failure of the NT intervention reveals why we need an Indigenous voice to parliament

Then-minister for Aboriginal Affairs Mal Brough launched the NT intervention.

In June 2007 the federal government put in place perhaps the most radical piece of rushed and poorly thought-through public policy ever seen in Australia, the so-called Northern Territory intervention.

The provisions of the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act were suspended to restrict behaviours of Indigenous peoples in the Territory, welfare payments were altered, employment programs were planned to be terminated, and the army and hundreds of other government personnel were relocated to enforce the new rules.

As is now well known, the intervention cost a very large sum of taxpayer money, at least $1bn in today’s terms. We also know, as revealed in a number of university program evaluation reports through the years, with respect to its stated objectives including assisting to reach more quickly some of the goals of Closing the Gap, the intervention failed spectacularly.

What makes this of great interest to the voice referendum is that the intervention was designed to improve social outcomes without any consultation with, or advice from, members of Indigenous communities. Would there have been such a waste of scarce budget resources if there had been a voice in place to inform the government that it was bound to fail and that there had to be more effective ways of going about improving Indigenous welfare? It is pretty obvious what the answer is to that question.

Dr Sue Gordon, then chair of the federal government NT emergency intervention task force, on a visit to Yuendumu 270km north west of Alice Springs in 2007.

In the broad context of the referendum there seem to us to be two reasons for having the voice:

● It is a matter of social justice (and good manners) to provide representatives of Indigenous peoples with an institutionalised (and permanent) body motivated by the importance of having a more informed advisory process.

● Governments have tried many different processes in attempts to “close the gap” and they just haven’t worked.

It is the second reason that we are concerned with, and the example of the intervention provides a powerful message about how not to go about policy reform.

Consultation with informed people is intelligent public policy and, with the complexity of the issues related to Indigenous disadvantage, seems to be a necessary aspect to help ensure the success of government action.

In Australia there is a formidable counter-example to the intervention that illustrates the importance of consultation and advice-taking in the formulation of policy responses to a crisis. This happened in 1983 when Australia was confronted with the emergence of the HIV-AIDS pandemic.

Dealing with the potential devastation of rapidly rising HIV cases and deaths from AIDS, federal health minister Neal Blewett adopted a bold strategy to contain and manage AIDS in Australia.

The government determined that affected communities would be at the heart of policymaking about all aspects of the HIV-AIDS response including care, treatment, research and prevention.

Australian health ministers were quickly persuaded that those closest to the many complex challenges of HIV-AIDS were best able to create and implement policies that would be most effective in controlling the spread of infection.

Affected communities were not only consulted, they also were given responsibility for implementing policies agreed with governments and funded to do whatever was needed. This built trust and shared responsibility and accountability between governments, clinicians, researchers and the most affected and at-risk communities, including First Nations.

Governments gave responsibility, funding and control to the people who knew what would work best to prevent the uncontrolled spread of HIV. This policy response is a consummate example of the value of highly consultative processes with those most likely to be affected by the problem. In a very short period after the adoption of a suite of prevention policies, Australia’s rate of new HIV infection rates began to diverge from those in comparable countries. Tens of thousands of lives were saved, highlighting the authority of listening to and acting on the advice of affected communities. And it was not only the saving of lives that mattered; hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollar outlays were averted in health expenditure alone.

Our broad point is that voice-type policy processes have the capacity to avoid the ineffective use of hundreds of millions of dollars across many decades that otherwise likely would be spent in misdirected attempts to redress Indigenous disadvantage. In other words, if the voice is a more informed route to successful interventions aimed at closing the gap, then the entire population benefits through a more effective use of government expenditures: more “bang per buck”, and/or additional public resources available for other pursuits (such as, for example, childcare subsidies, welfare outlays and hospital and educational services), and/or lower taxes.

An important aspect of what we are arguing with respect to a Yes vote is directly relevant to the likely many millions of voters who do not understand or do not identify with the case motivated by the social justice of constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It concerns instead the value to all of us of the more proficient, knowledgeable and thoughtful use of government resources.

Put differently, policy in the Indigenous space can be improved, likely very substantially, if it means less “top-down” and insufficiently consultative and therefore uninformed approaches to what is essentially a national crisis.

A proper functioning voice effectively lowers taxpayer costs and thus benefits us all.

Bill Bowtell is an adjunct professor at the University of NSW and was an architect of Australia’s response to HIV-AIDS. Bruce Chapman is an emeritus professor of economics at the College of Business and Economics at the Australian National University and helped design the HECS policy.