In the Name of Failure: The Howard Government's Generational Revolution in Indigenous Affairs

Abstract

Since 2004, the Howard government has used the idea of past policy failure to argue for major organizational and policy change in Australian Indigenous affairs. This paper documents that style of argument, from 2004 to 2007, and then goes on to ask: what sort of change is it that we are currently observing in Australian Indigenous affairs? In answering this question, the paper focuses first on the moral dimension of Australian Indigenous affairs; the way in which Indigenous affairs is used by different groupings in Australian society to demonstrate their moral superiority to each other and to the world. It argues that this moral dimension has both temporal and ideological aspects; with different generations, as well as different left/ right groupings, characteristically believing themselves to be better at dealing with Indigenous issues than others. The paper also focuses on the cross-cultural dimension of Indigenous affairs and the way in which this leads government intervention programs to have significant unintended consequences. Together these two dimensions are argued to produce alternating periods in Australian Indigenous affairs policy processes; between periods of confidently pursuing a supposedly 'new' policy approach and periods of greater self-doubt, characterised by failure and change analysis. These latter periods produce generational revolutions in Australian Indigenous affairs, in which the work of a previous generation, as well as an opposing ideological grouping, is summarily dismissed and discarded. The paper argues that such a generational revolution was building in Australian Indigenous affairs from the year 2000, and came to its logical conclusion in 2007. The current change in Australian Indigenous affairs is a generational revolution which combines a significant ideological swing to the right with a disowning of the work of the generation involved in Indigenous affairs over the last 30 or 40 years. The paper also argues that there was a similar generational revolution in Australian Indigenous affairs from 1967 to 1976, though moving in the opposite ideological direction. On the basis of this observation the paper concludes by asking: are generational revolutions the best we can hope for in Australian Indigenous affairs policy making? Or can governments, by being aware of the moral and cross-cultural dimensions of Indigenous affairs and the way in which they tend to produce generational revolutions, move beyond such revolutions? Show more