Three accounts of the emergence of the remote jobs and communities program: changing timeframes and types of actors

Abstract

Using frameworks for the analysis of policy devised by Colebatch and Bacchi, three accounts are developed of the emergence of an Australian government program for Indigenous employment and community participation in remote areas. Timeframes increase and types of actors change moving from an authoritative choice account to structured interaction and then problematisation. Individual agents in authoritative choice are replaced in structured interaction by government departments as distinctive organisational actors. In the problematisation account, concepts become the dominant actors, changing over longer timeframes. In remote Indigenous employment a change in problematisation is discerned in the 1970s, from inclusion in award wages and social security to concerns about welfare dependence. A later problematisation change reframes a 1970s program from employment to welfare