Executive Summary

• Qualities common to social crisis are systemic and / or organisational failure, instability, urgency, and variability in degrees of predictability and response. Even though there is no singular definition of social crisis, the failure to accurately define a particular crisis and its causes will hinder the pursuit of an effective response.
• The CIC policy’s identification of crisis as a policy issue was superficial. It was insufficient for the policy to merely recognise widespread dysfunction and disadvantage as an expression of crisis, without establishing objective intelligence and guidance about the range of possible causes of crisis across the context.
• The ultimate effect of this oversight on policy design was a focus on what was, in effect, a narrow set of short term and primarily administrative responses. The policy failed to expressly identify how crisis fundamentally relates to broad scale Indigenous disadvantage.

• Crisis in Indigenous communities is caused by the combined effects of demography and across the board disadvantage in governance, physical infrastructure, health, education and economic security / development.
• Social dysfunction - observed in the form of high rates of alcohol and substance abuse, petrol sniffing, suicide, family violence, sexual assault and child abuse - is the effect or expression of social crisis. It becomes a compounding cause of crisis when the underlying causes of social crisis are not addressed.
• The CIC policy partly understood crisis and some of its causes, focussing as it did on the issues of governance & administration, restoring essential municipal services, and ongoing capacity building – all of which are important.
• However, it is also reasonable to conclude that if the design of the CIC policy was both supported by and communicated a deeper understanding of crisis and its causes, the policy may have been more comprehensive, broadly focussed, collaborative and better resourced.

• There are six uncertainties that call into question the sufficiency of the considerations made when choosing the CIC policy as the preferred policy response. These are:
  • Whether the content of the National Framework of Principles for Delivering Services to Indigenous Australians and the associated bilateral agreements was sufficient the purposes of designing a crisis intervention policy;
  • A lack of effective performance measures for measuring progress made at the community level towards the resolution of crisis on communities;
  • A strong bias towards governance and administration at the expense of other areas such as physical infrastructure, health services, education services and economic security / development;
  • A lack of genuine force behind the principles, agreements and other mechanisms that were chosen as the basis for CIC policy;
  • The risk of ineffectiveness that is apparent in some of the chosen implementation mechanisms such as SRAs, RPAs and COAG trials; and
  • No apparent consideration of the relative merits of alternative approaches

• Removal of the cause of mismanagement at YCI and the stabilisation of administration and governance.
• Re-establishment of essential and municipal services provision.
• Re-opening of the Yalata Store.
• Re-opening of the Women’s Centre.

• Greater economic participation.
• Some housing and infrastructure needs upgrading.
• Persistent social dysfunction relating to families and youth.

• Explicit reference to economic development as a priority theme.
• Good integration of State and Australian Government objectives in the early phases of the intervention.
• Use of on-site consultants to oversee local implementation and facilitate community engagement.
• Conscious attempt for to make intervention plans broad based and comprehensive.

• Lack of authority to implement all aspects of the Comprehensive SRA.
• Lack of authority to ensure the co-ordination of critical State and Australian Government investments.
• Successes often dependent on personal relationship and individuals, rather than the quality of an agreed plan.

• Catalysts to the Yalata crisis have been addressed, but nevertheless many of the underlying causes of disadvantage at Yalata remain. Education, health and economic participation outcomes remain poor and the influence of CIC policy in these areas is limited.
• Furthermore, although in the short term governance arrangements at Yalata appear to have been stabilised, the organisation remains vulnerable to a repeat of past events given the persistent influence on the board of certain personalities. Governance at Yalata also continues to be fragmented across multiple local boards.

• De facto closure of BBCI and the mitigation of immediate causes of the breakdown in governance.
• Re-establishment of essential and municipal services.
• Guarantee of funding for Human Services Directorate position.

• The Human Services Directorate is not yet in place.
• The factionalism underlying the break down in governance at Beagle Bay remains.
• No SRAs have been signed.

• Consideration of options for long term local and regional governance arrangements.
• Clear conceptual separation of community from government service delivery responsibilities.
• Good integration of State and Australian Government objectives in the early phases of the intervention.

• Lack of accountability with respect to the delivery of essential and municipal services.
• Inability to sustain the confidence of community residents.
• Lack of authority to implement all aspects of the CIC action plan as interpreted by the ICC.
• Lack of authority to ensure the consistency of State priorities throughout the intervention.

• The Beagle Bay crisis intervention made early and substantial progress, and is the only CIC intervention to consider more suitable local governance and service delivery options for the long term.
• That said, the lack of authority afforded to the ICC to implement its plans has hampered progress and local confidence in the intervention has been put at risk.
• Threats to the sustainability of the intervention are compounded by a lack of accountability mechanisms with regards to the delivery of essential and municipal services.

• Stabilisation of finances at WAC.
• Re-establishment of essential services.
• Re-opening of the Balgo Store.

• Housing maintenance and municipal services remain unstable.
• The WAC advisory council has not been engaged.

• None

• Lack of a comprehensive plan to address the needs and priorities of the community.
• Lack of local democratic input into implementation design and monitoring of implementation delivery.
• Uncertainty regarding arrangements for the long term governance of the community.
• Uncertainty surrounding plans for the COAG intervention, around which the CIC intervention has been implemented (in a subsequently reactive and piecemeal manner).

• Despite the level of attention participation in the COAG trial and CIC intervention has brought, the weight of evidence suggests that Balgo remains a community in crisis.
• Governance and service delivery on the community is highly fragmented, no comprehensive planning takes place at the level where resources lie, and Indigenous residents have little input into the planning and monitoring process for physical services. The future role of WAC is uncertain and a failure to ensure that future arrangements provide for democratic input into planning and service monitoring functions, risks further alienating residents.

• Stabilisation of administration and governance at KAC.
• Stabilisation of most aspects of municipal and essential services delivery.
• Re-opening of the Kalumburu store.

• The provision of some social and community services, around the aftermath of the child abuse intervention and the delivery of youth, men’s and women’s services.

• Strong leadership at the community level.

• Lack of a comprehensive community development plan and accordingly reactive and piecemeal interventions.
• Lack of a strategy for the long term governance of the community.
• Lack of authority to influence local agencies.

• The confluence of circumstances at Kalumburu makes the community vulnerable to further crisis. Given the inexperience of the Governing Council, short term stability is highly dependent on the presence of individuals in the KAC administration, and on the quality of continued State and Australian Government responses to the aftermath of the recent child abuse intervention.
• Long term threats to the stability of Kalumburu continue to exert pressure and include the fragmented nature of local governance and the uncertain role of KAC. Failure to ensure future arrangements provide for democratic input into planning and service monitoring functions, combined with a lack of investment in economic development, risks further alienating residents.

• The implementation of the CIC policy at the community level suggests that a strong focus on stabilising governance, administration and service delivery is a necessary but insufficient means of achieving a sustained overcoming of crisis in Indigenous communities.
• The mere stabilisation of community-level Indigenous organisations, such as Aboriginal Corporations, is not sufficient to achieve the end of crisis, because the vast majority of these organisations have never been appropriately constituted, resourced and supported to determine the direction of and deliver local and regional governance and development in line with their self-determined needs and aspirations.
• The complex development task facing communities in crisis requires a strategic reorganisation of governance, service delivery and development that is purpose-built to achieve development outcomes in line with local and regional needs and aspirations. The task is too complex for local-level organisations to achieve.
• The flexible application of untied ‘gap-filler’ or ‘glue’ funding is, in principle, a sound approach to allowing interventions to be contextualised and responsive.
• However, in the absence of comprehensive planning for crisis intervention and the ongoing development of communities, many of the gaps are too wide and the glue not thick enough to hold together the resolution of crisis.
• The achievement of sustained service delivery (and of development generally) needs to be inclusively and comprehensively planned, and then delivered in accordance with a clearly articulated, binding plan that directs and guides the resources and actions of ‘all-comers’ to the Indigenous development task. In this context, disjointed and competing plans, programs and projects are more likely to sustain crisis than to resolve it.

Policy Design

• A ground swell of knowledge and concern about the breakdown of numerous Indigenous communities created an understandable urgency when the CIC policy was being designed.
• Despite the urgency and regardless of how valuable informal consultation and knowledge exchange may have been, the CIC policy is likely to have been stronger, more appropriate and better understood if formal consultation with stakeholders at all levels was undertaken during the design of the policy.

Policy Implementation

• Consultation with communities at the outset of and during implementation has been broadly attempted. However, the effectiveness of consultation has been mixed.
• At Yalata, there has been continuing consultation from the development of intervention plans through to the implementation of them. The benefit of this has been greater community ownership of the intervention.
• At Balgo, Kalumburu and Beagle Bay the effectiveness of consultation has been limited by factors such as inconsistency, incapacity, lack of mechanisms and / or lack of follow through. The cost of this has been a loss of momentum in community engagement, and diminished community understanding of, involvement in and faith in interventions.

Policy Design

• It is difficult to ascertain the amount of coordination that was required and undertaken during the design of the CIC policy. The degree of coordination required during policy design depends upon the amount of research and consultation engaged in at that time, and during the development of the CIC policy, research and consultation was limited.

Policy Implementation

• Coordination between different levels of government and different agencies was attempted through a variety of means, with varying effectiveness.
• Coordination appears to have been most effective when strong, direct relationships between ICC managers and high level officers have been in place. These relationships have more often depended upon the personal efforts of individuals than on formal mechanisms, creating the risk of weak relationships where such efforts are not being made.
• Coordination of delivery has been limited. Even where strong relationships have existed, the changing or competing priorities of individual agencies have been primary; above those of CIC priorities.
• The lack of a sovereign plan (all levels / all agencies) with forward committed resources for addressing crisis has limited genuine coordination.

Policy Design

• It is difficult to determine the extent to which lessons arising from the monitoring and evaluation of previous Indigenous policy and crisis intervention policies from elsewhere were formally incorporated into the CIC policy.
• The CIC policy – and the Australian Government’s crisis intervention policy generally - has changed or evolved a number of times in a relatively short period with little demonstration of how new iterations of policy have captured lessons arising from ongoing monitoring and evaluation. Whilst some lessons may have been captured informally, without clear documentation of lessons and how the policy has captured them, it is not possible to determine the degree to which monitoring and evaluation is informing the ongoing development of the policy.
• Community baseline profiles were not established prior to implementation of the policy. This has made it impossible to objectively track post-implementation changes at the community level, a fundamental failing of the CIC policy’s monitoring and evaluation framework.
• Overall, the role of monitoring and evaluation in the design and ongoing development of the CIC policy has been superficial.

Policy Implementation

• The benefit of setting up a coherent and consistent monitoring and evaluation mechanism at the outset of an intervention has been demonstrated at Yalata, where it is possible to track with precision the objectives and outcomes of the intervention over a number of years. This provides a base for ongoing and future efforts.
• The lack of such mechanisms elsewhere has undermined the linkage between day to day intervention efforts and longer term objectives. This has meant that, where they exist at all, performance measures have been vague and abstract, focussed upon project outputs rather than strategic outcomes.
• Long term measures such as those set out in the Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage framework are not subtle enough to guide and measure short term, discrete efforts. For all interventions, there ought to be a set of practical ‘intermediate’ or transition measures that link to this higher level framework, for monitoring and evaluation to be based upon a meaningful evidence base.