White Frameworks, Black Lives: The Cultural Foundations of Policy Failure in Aboriginal Australia

Abstract

This thesis examines why policies designed to improve outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples consistently fail despite decades of reform, substantial investment, and repeated political commitments to change. The central research question asks: How can understanding the cultural foundations of policymaking explain the chronic failure of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policy, and what transformations are necessary to transcend this malaise? Drawing on a unique tripartite positioning as an Aboriginal person, senior policy practitioner, and researcher, I argue that chronic failure stems not from technical deficiencies but from fundamental cultural and epistemological dynamics embedded within the policymaking system itself.

Through critical analysis of the Closing the Gap framework 2008-2018 and its 2018-2020 refresh, the thesis identifies three interconnected syndromes that maintain colonial relationships despite partnership rhetoric: Epistemic Colonisation (the systematic exclusion of Indigenous knowledge), Bureaucratic Control (the administrative domestication of Aboriginal priorities), and Cultural Displacement (the marginalisation of Aboriginal worldviews). These syndromes operate through what I term the Aboriginal Policy Paradigm, which constructs a simplified Policy Aborigine through six dimensions - disadvantage, immaturity, incapacity, maladaptation, passivity, and irregularity - that underwrite policy failure by responding to constructions rather than complex realities.

Applying political scientist James C. Scott's analysis of state simplifications - the administrative tendency to render complex local realities legible through standardised categories and metrics - and French philosopher Michel Foucault's concept of the dispositif - the heterogeneous ensemble of discourses, institutions, and practices through which power operates - I develop the Policy Enterprise Model to demonstrate how policymaking operates as fundamentally cultural practice. Drawing on Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigmatic persistence and Florian Znaniecki's culturalist sociology, the analysis shows how the apparatus resists evidence of its own failure.

The thesis concludes that meaningful transformation requires not technical reforms but paradigmatic shift - recognising Aboriginal knowledge systems as foundational rather than supplementary, dismantling bureaucratic control mechanisms, and centring Aboriginal cultural frameworks in policy development. This cultural transformation of the policymaking apparatus itself offers the only path beyond the current malaise toward genuine partnership between Aboriginal peoples and the Australian state. Show more