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Minister for Indigenous Affairs Jenny Macklin. |
THE POINTED VIEW: Spin over substance in intervention report
ISSUE 190 - 12 Nov 2009
ISSUE 190, November 12, 2009: The Minister for Indigenous Affair's take on "evidence-based" policy is concerning, writes LARISSA BEHRENDT*.
There is no doubt that this Minister of Indigenous Affairs is good at spin. She has deflected all range of policy failures with the trite phrase, "I just care about women and children".
In fact, it is a phrase that has been used to avoid a hard discussion about what policies work and don't work to protect women and children (and, I often wonder, when the Minister harps on about Aboriginal women and children, does she think Aboriginal men are unimportant, does she not think they are part of the solution?).
The Minister has a tendency to spin what she claims are positive outcomes from the Northern Territory intervention.
This was shown most graphically in the way one of the first claims of the Minister - that there was evidence more fresh food was being consumed as part of the intervention - was revealed.
It was only through questioning by Greens Senator Rachel Siewert at a Senate Estimates hearing that the claim was revealed to be based on a survey conducted by the department in which only ten community stores were called and asked if they were selling more fresh food. Six said yes, three said no and one said that they didn't know.
There was no quantification of who was buying the food (was it people on quarantined welfare or the flood of non-Indigenous people coming in as part of the intervention?), there was no benchmark against which to compare the figures and no provision made for the fact that the community stores were beneficiaries of the welfare quarantining policy, so perhaps were not independently placed to assess it.
I have thought this was appallingly thin evidence on which a minister could make a claim for evidence of anything.
And when I have used this example to make the point that her comments about improvements as part of the intervention need to be carefully scrutinised, I have received a sharp rebuke from the Minister's office pointing out that, since that time, other surveys have been done.
That may well be but it doesn't change the fact that the original survey was all that Macklin relied on when she first made the claim.
The latest Whole of Government Monitoring Report, Closing the Gap in the Northern Territory, that tracks data from January 2009 to June 2009, has just been released and will no doubt contain the usual spin about how the policy designed by the Howard government in a 48-hour period is working really well.
But not even the die-in-a-ditch-for-failing-policy Minister will be able to spin some of the educational and health outcomes in the report that signal the approach taken to date is simply not delivering on these key areas.
Most concerning is that school attendance rates have not increased.
In fact, it has decreased.
While there was an improvement from June 2008 of a 2.1 percent rise for primary students and a 3.5 percent rise for secondary students, the overall rate has decreased fractionally from where it was in June 2007 (63.1 to 63 percent).
On this measure, there has been no improvement in school attendance over the period of the intervention.
The School Nutrition Program has been spread into 68 schools by June 2009, an increase from 55 schools in June 2008.
This might seem like an achievement for the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR), but since the money to support the program is taken from the quarantined income of parents, it is an achievement of the Aboriginal parents who are financially supporting it.
A key method in benchmarking the health statistics is achieved by counting how many Child Health Checks have been undertaken.
There have been 14,610 since the intervention and 80 percent have resulted in referrals of some kind.
What is not included here is that while the intervention health checks in the Katherine region have reached 74 percent of children in the area, the community health service screens 96 percent of children.
Children that are not caught by the intervention health checks are being caught by the work of community health organisations like the Sunrise Health Service.
There is a concern that the kids who are slipping through the intervention health checks are more likely to be at risk, which means the health statistics gathered from the intervention health checks doesn't report the full extent of medical problems.
The other statistical benchmark relied on in the report to monitor health is the rate of hospital admissions.
These are useful but have some limitations. For example, the report shows that there were 413 admissions for nutritional anaemia and malnutrition in the 2006/2007 period, 327 in the 2007/2008 period and 293 for 2008/2009 period.
While this would indicate a decrease, hospital admission is not the only way to measure prevalence of anaemia.
The Sunrise Health Service has tracked this in the 96 percent of children it screens and the rates are of concern.
From a low in the six months to December 2006 of 20 percent - an unacceptably high level, but one which had been reducing from levels of 33 per cent in October 2003 - the figure had gone up to 36 percent by December 2007.
By June 2008 this level had reached 55 percent, a level that was maintained in the six months to December 2008. In two years, 18 months of which has been under the intervention, the anaemia rate has nearly trebled.
The other piece of information in the report indicating the government's lack of rigour in policy analysis is the section on welfare quarantining.
Success benchmarks are measured by how much money has been quarantined ($197.7 million), how many BasicsCards have been handed out (95.9 percent of income managed customers had the cards [how are the 4.1 percent who don't have the card accessing their quarantined money?]) and how many people are signed up (73 communities and 10 town camp regions). There is no mention of how it is assessed in terms of improving people's lives.
These statistics overlook the continual complaints of Aboriginal people about how the system leaves them without dignity and takes away their capacity to adequately budget for things.
Statements in the report like "It (income management) ensures that Commonwealth Income Support and Family Assistance payments are used for the benefit of children and to increase the financial security of people raising children" are not substantiated.
That might be what the government hopes will happen. It might be what they have intended. But there is no proof that this is what is happening just because more people are on the scheme.
The issue of fresh food consumption gets a mention in the report. It refers to another survey of store operators about their "perceptions" of the effect on community residents.
The best way to ask about the impact of quarantining on people is to question the people who were affected, not the storeowners who have a quasi-monopoly on the quarantined money.
Even with the potential bias of the storeowner's survey, the results are not overwhelming.
While 68.2 percent reported an increase in fruit and vegetables, that means that 31.8 percent didn't (19.7 percent reported that there had been a decrease); 68.2 percent reported an increase in healthy food purchase in general, which means that 31.8 percent didn't (and again, 19.7 percent reported a actual decrease). This means that one in five stores are saying that they are selling less fresh and healthy food, which should be a matter of deep concern.
Forty-seven percent of store operators reported an increase in clothing sales revealing that more than half - 53 percent - didn't. And 25.8 percent reported an actual decrease.
The statistics missing from the report are the benchmarks about housing.
This may be fobbed off as part of the responsibility of the Northern Territory government but the buck stops with the Minister and the $700 million housing program that has not delivered a single house.
Instead, the report focuses on the number of leases that have been signed by communities as part of the intervention's changes to land tenure.
These leases are required by Minister Macklin before she will release money for housing repairs or new housing.
These communities include Ampilatwatja who, though signing a lease, did not receive any assistance.
Their town became overrun with sewerage as a result of the neglect and was an extreme health risk - especially to children. The community have decamped and resettled elsewhere. No doubt, aspects of this report will be used to show that the intervention is working.
But these claims will need to be viewed critically giving consideration to the material in there that challenges the current policy approach and continues to provide hard evidence that there needs to be shifts around welfare, land tenure and housing policy.
It also must be remembered that this report focuses on statistics. It does not include the stories of the people who are living under the intervention.
These experiences have been captured in places such as the Australian Indigenous Doctors Association's submission to the Northern Territory Emergency Response Review, the work done by organisations like the Sunrise Health Service and in the advocacy work of Northern Territory leaders like Barbara Shaw, Bob Randall, Valerie Martin and Richard Downs.
pointedview@nit.com.au
*Larissa Behrendt is a Professor of Law at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is an award-winning author and a fortnightly columnist with NIT. She is this year's NAIDOC Person of the Year.
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