Land rights and a national representative body: Institutionalisation as a criterion for Indigenous policy success and failure

Abstract

In a half-century perspective on Australian Indigenous policy, land rights are compared with national Indigenous representative bodies. Adopting ‘institutionalisation’ as the criterion for assessing policy success and failure, land rights are seen as gradually progressed through the iterative actions of State and Commonwealth parliaments and their associated courts. By contrast, national Indigenous representative bodies, established solely by Commonwealth administrative or legislative processes, have proven vulnerable to later abolition by those same processes. Although land rights for Indigenous Australians have become legally embedded in Australian public policy over six decades, a national Indigenous representative body has not.

Points for practitioners

• In timeframes covering multiple parties of government, assessments of policy can be less polarised between success and failure.
• Policies that become institutionalised can shift understandings and address problems acknowledged by all political parties, leading to elements of both success and failure.
• Land rights and native title policies have become legally entrenched in Australia in the last half-century through the iterative actions of State and Commonwealth parliaments and associated courts. This has achieved significant restitution of land to Indigenous people but with substantial limitations.
• National Indigenous representative bodies have not achieved such institutionalisation, with four having come and gone over the half-century. However, even these discarded failures had achievements in their time, particularly the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission 1990–2005.
• Part of public service stewardship is to view policies in both longer and more nuanced terms than the adversary parties of government and opposition.