The Inconsistent State: Managerialism, Accountability and Engagement with Australian Indigenous Peoples
Patrick Sullivan Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
Paul du Gay tells us that the motto of the original Society of British Civil Servants was ‘We Serve the State’ (Du Gay 2007:109). The Australian Public Service Commission, on the other hand, advises its civil servants that “the elected Government alone has the authority to determine the public interest … while public servants assist Governments to deliver [the] policy agenda and [the] priorities.”(APSC 2006:11).
Something important has happened with the rise of managerialism in the public service and tight control of policy by ministers, their advisers and their supporting intellectuals. The state has been erased, to be replaced by the ministers of the government. This paper argues against the legitimacy of this view of the state as a commercial enterprise with cabinet as its board of directors only intermittently accountable to its citizen shareholders. It renews the idea of the state as an aggregation of institutions and practices which has multiple instances which are not necessarily consistent, and which frequently come into play against each other to produce something larger and more closely integrated with society in general than mere government. This is particularly important when we consider the relationship between the state and embedded indigenous peoples. This paper argues that the managerialism introduced into Australian public administration in the last 25 years has led to a democratic deficit which disadvantages Australian indigenous people more than most. It reduces the accountability of government while demanding oppressive accountability from its Indigenous population. The paper also suggests that the Australian state deals inconsistently with indigenous people treating them in some instances as individuals and families, in others as disadvantaged groups requiring remedial services, and in others still as foreigners within the nation. These foreigners are then susceptible to development programmes based on aid models or interventions appropriate to ‘failed societies’. In each of these approaches the state constructs Aboriginal people differently both for surveillance and control as well as for their enabling and support. The paper also asks how indigenous peoples can speak back to the government and hold it to account. While government insists on unilinear accountability, the government is not the state. Democratic states are the medium in which the general need of a society’s members to render account to each other can be recognized and fulfilled. Democratic state institutions and processes encourage an environment of reciprocal accountability, which this paper will explore.
