Robodebt for Indigenous programs? Beyond No, Coalition prepares to slash spending

In a further sign that the Coalition and right-wing groups are looking beyond a No victory on Saturday week to roll back Indigenous policy in other areas, the Coalition now wants an “audit” of Indigenous spending — or “wasteful Indigenous spending” as one right-wing newspaper called it.

In the words of Peter Dutton yesterday, which are worth quoting at length:

The huge amount of money that goes into the funnel out of Canberra becomes a trickle when it gets to many of the regional and remote areas, and that’s why we don’t see the housing, we don’t see the jobs, we don’t see the educational outcomes, we don’t see life expectancy like we would expect to see in capital cities.

So, of course, I mean, it would be a travesty to see money taken away from those who are most deserving of it and for it to be diverted into the hands of those who are misappropriating that money. That’s a no-brainer. When you’re dealing with taxpayers’ money, the money needs to be spent wisely because Australians have worked hard and paid their taxes, expecting that the taxes to be spent in accordance with the law and to the benefit of the people it’s supposed to help.

That’s quite an indictment of the Coalition’s nine years in power, that (with Dutton in a senior position) it presided over misappropriation and misdirection of so much money — the opposition leader says “both sides of Parliament, both sides of politics” are responsible for this.

In fact, the only person in the Coalition interested in auditing Indigenous programs when it was in power was then-minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt, who had a commitment to evidence-based policymaking and believed in trying to identify what worked on the ground in First Peoples’ communities.

What limited audits were conducted showed time and again that programs co-designed and co-implemented with First Peoples’ communities were most effective, whereas top-down programs designed by capital city bureaucrats performed poorly.

So compelling was that evidence that the Morrison government made a commitment as part of its “refresh” of Closing the Gap to dramatically expanding co-design and co-implementation by engaging in partnership with First Peoples’ communities and representative groups — including funding capacity-building for the latter.

The most fundamental co-design and co-implementation body, of course, is a Voice to Parliament, to provide those benefits at the level of legislation and regulation.

A political figure with a genuine interest in improving the efficiency of Indigenous programs would recognise this. But that’s not Dutton, and that’s not his Indigenous Australians spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who rejects the need for any Indigenous-specific programs or even an Indigenous affairs portfolio.

The No campaign has already peddled long-debunked lies massively overstating the value of Indigenous programs. That paves the way for the argument that it must be cut back, with an “audit” as the pretext. Notice Dutton’s language: “a travesty to see money taken away from those who are most deserving of it”, compared with those “misappropriating” it; “Australians have worked hard and paid their taxes, expecting that the taxes to be spent in accordance with the law”. That is, this isn’t merely poor policy on the part of governments acting with good intentions, but deliberate criminality — a fraud being perpetrated on taxpayers by malicious actors siphoning money away from “deserving” communities.

While one might wonder why the Coalition allowed this fraud to continue while it was in government, it acts as a rejoinder to the Yes camp’s argument that a Voice to Parliament would enable money to be spent more effectively, by identifying the real problem as deliberate fraud.

We’ve heard this rhetoric from the Coalition before. Next will be the promise to be a “tough cop on the beat” when it comes to Indigenous spending, and the promise of a commission of audit of Indigenous programs upon the election of a Dutton government — perhaps with Warren Mundine charged with playing the Tony Shepherd role.

Better yet, robodebt for Indigenous programs anyone?

Ultimately if the argument is that Australians shouldn’t be divided by race, then there should be no Indigenous spending that non-Indigenous Australians can’t also have access to.

And there’ll be more plans to roll back Indigenous policies, especially with an Indigenous spokeswoman on Indigenous Australians with an assimilationist mindset. Indeed, the whole premise of “Closing the Gap” comes into question once one rejects the idea of specific policy frameworks addressing disadvantage for First Peoples.

Much hinges on the referendum result: if a victory for No confirms that the majority of voters are indifferent or even hostile to First Nations peoples, it will embolden assimilationists to engage in a systemic effort to reverse what few gains there have been in Indigenous policy in recent decades — including, presumably, the Coalition’s commitment to capacity-building and partnership with Indigenous communities under Scott Morrison.