Goodwill is not enough to transform the way governments work with First Nations communities. Public servants need to address cultural and structural impediments and change from a services mode of delivery to a ‘development modality’ that focuses on the agency and capabilities within First Nations communities.
Former senior public servant Geoff Richardson PSM says that building the skills necessary to engage with communities and create partnerships that are able to focus on First Nations’ priorities is a core part of the public servant’s toolkit.
He outlined his views in a session on Transforming Government Organisations, part of ANZSOG’s Working with First Nations: Delivering on the Priority Reforms program.
Mr Richardson, along with Professor Catherine Althaus, is one of the two leads of the program which introduces public servants to the significance of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap and its Priority Reforms, and the new skills, mindsets and capabilities they need to work effectively with First Nations communities.
He is a descendant of the Meriam people of Murray Island (Mer) in the Torres Strait and the Kuku Yalanji/Djabugay peoples of North Queensland. He spent 40 years in the Australian Public Service, including 22 years at SES level, all in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs portfolio. After retiring, he established First Nations Development Services as a vehicle to continue his work connecting Governments with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.
He told participants that: ‘the National Agreement is a framework. It’s up to people like yourselves and those in the hierarchy above you to help flesh out the detail that supports the framework’
Taking down structural barriers to reform
Mr Richardson said that governments and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders needed to focus on addressing both the organisational cultural and structural barriers that prevent the goodwill from translating to concrete improvements in Indigenous life outcomes.
“Reforming a system that has evolved over many, many decades will take time and significant goodwill and effort. There’s been mountains of goodwill from governments at all levels, so it’s not just a case that people don’t care. It’s that reforming the system is complex,” he said.
“Structural impediments are the bane of our existence as public servants. Sectoral silos, reductionist approaches, restrictive and inflexible funding, passive modalities, flawed policies and programs, including policy vacuums where there’s a need for a policy and there isn’t any.”
“Reforming government organisations will be an arduous undertaking. It needs to be done in ways that enable government organisations and their Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander partners to cope with, adjust to and institutionalise the changes.”
Mr Richardson said this reform would involve a mix of big-ticket transformative changes, and smaller adaptive, iterative changes.
“In my opinion, probably more of the adaptive and less of the transformational. It’s easier for an organisation, particularly a big one, to do adaptive changes than massive changes to their structure.
“Reforming Indigenous servicing from a service focused edifice to a development focused one is a significant undertaking. We’re not going to turn this around in five or ten years. We might just start getting on a roll by the end of the ten-year period.”
He said that there was good work being done by governments working with communities but it was often trapped in structural siloes within government.
“An excellent body of work in a silo can still be an opportunity. The challenge is to take the excellent body of work, and try and integrate it with other bodies of work to give it a chance to take root in the community.”
Shifting from a service focus to a development focus
Mr Richardson said that public servants needed to be able to engage with communities and create relationships that allowed First Nations people to influence how resources are spent.
“We’ve talked a fair bit about partnering. That’s a big push in this transformation of government organisations, trying to ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have a say in where funding goes, not just funding to their particular community, but helping governments make more strategic decisions about broader funding allocations,” Mr Richardson said.
“When you’re doing a partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, a substantive partnership like these place-based ones being proposed, people will come to the table with priorities.
“They want to see some action on their priorities as soon as possible. So, dealing with community priorities, you actually have to deliver on those.
“Community engagement is an ongoing relationship built on trust, where parties to the engagement share the outcomes. It focuses on the community and residents, supporting and strengthening capacity and agency at individual, family and collective levels.”
“In the international development domain, working in much larger communities like in Africa or India, often the approach is to work with what are termed ‘people organisations’, because we are trying to strengthen the agency of the very people that need the support from the government,” he said
“In Australia, even though we do work with Aboriginal community-controlled organisations more and more, our focus is on the service.
“Often our communities and individuals are passive recipients of service. They get a service, but they’re only marginally better for that service, because there is no capability building and no knowledge transfer taking place between the government, the provider and the very people targeted by this service or program.”
Drawing from a tabled developed by the Smith Family which he contextualised to an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander setting, Mr Richardson explained that: “with a service delivery modality, the power rests with the service provider and government. In a development modality the power is shared by the community/individual and the government”.
“The process of engagement needs to move as soon as possible to elements of a community development modality, to give it some chance of taking root in terms of contributing to sustained development. Try to work out what you’ve got to do to be able to exit and what skill sets are needed to be able to work more to the right-hand column.”
He said that engaging with communities was difficult work, as public servants needed to be able to work across four domains to build connections.
“It’s work across the communication domain, which is an ability to communicate effectively in a cross-cultural context, which requires language skills, listening skills and non-verbal skills.
“It requires skills across the facilitation domain, such as mediation, dispute resolution, problem solving, how to harness people, how to broker conversations.
“It requires skills across the developmental domain, the skill to impart your skills and knowledge to others and to receive new skills and knowledge from them.
“It requires skills in the systems domain, where you can understand and impart holistic approaches to a place, systems mapping, analytical skills, planning skills, programming skills.
“It’s about taking that helicopter view and supporting the community through all the different elements of what makes a functional community.”
The 2024 delivery of ANZSOG’s Working with First Nations: Delivering on the Priority Reforms is currently in progress, however registrations are now open for 2025. The program consists of six online sessions with Geoff and Catherine, and is designed to create dynamic and engaged online learning. For more information, including how to register, visit the ANZSOG website or contact us at engage@anzsog.edu.au.