Social Justice Report 2003: SUMMARY SHEET THREE: COAG TRIALS

Media Pack:

SUMMARY SHEET THREE: COAG TRIALS

In its communique of 5 April 2002, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) agreed to trial a whole-of-government cooperative approach in up to 10 communities or regions of Australia. Appendix 2 of the report provides a detailed overview of the structure of the trials, and progress in each trial site.

'While the trials remain in the preliminary stages of development, rapid progress has been made during 2003 ... Government departments are embracing the challenge to re-learn how to interact with and deliver services to Indigenous peoples ... Through the active involvement of Ministers and secretaries of federal departments in the trials, a clear message is being sent through mainstream federal departments that these trials matter and that government is serious about improving outcomes for Indigenous peoples ... ATSIC have stated that to date 'there has been clear success through improved relationships across governments at trial sites' (p42).

It is too early to determine whether the trials will have a positive impact in improving government service delivery to communities in each trial region in the longer term or whether transferable lessons will be learnt which are able to more broadly benefit other Indigenous communities.

'The lack of a clear evaluation strategy is of great concern. It may be that the uncertainty in this regard is largely the product of the evolving nature of the trials and that there will be much greater clarity during 2004. I have previously, however, expressed concern at reliance by COAG on internal monitoring and evaluation strategies. In particular, I have expressed concerns about the lack of information that is publicly reported about such evaluations (thus limiting government accountability), the lack of appropriate consultation with Indigenous peoples and lack of independence in the monitoring process.'

'A related issue is the existence of adequate data to contribute to the monitoring and evaluation process. The concern is that the trials have set objectives for data analysis and performance monitoring that will not be able to be achieved because of the existing limitations in data quality and collection (p47).

It is not clear how the lessons learnt from the trials will be transferable and contribute to broader reform of program design and service delivery for Indigenous peoples. Ultimately, the transferability of outcomes from the trials in the longer term will depend on whether the trials are able to more broadly change the status quo of service delivery and program guidelines. A significant challenge will be ensuring that the adoption of more holistic, whole-of-government approaches is not a transient feature and that departments do not simply slip back into their usual ways of doing things once the trials have ended.

Factors that will need to be addressed to ensure that this is not the case include: continued engagement of mainstream departments and programs, coordinating funding of proposals in non-trial sites, resource constraints, and capacity development of Indigenous communities.

There are also a number of processes available to ATSIC and Indigenous peoples to build on the achievements of the trials and more broadly inform policies and programs. There are three significant processes which ATSIC currently utilises which provide ATSIC with some leverage for advancing inter-governmental coordination and improved service delivery:

• ATSIC has entered into a number of partnership agreements with states and territories, as well as agreements and compacts with federal government departments.
• through the operation of ATSIC's Regional Councils and the development of their regional plans. Regional plans offer a significant opportunity for coordinating government activity within regions.
• ATSIC leads the Community Participation Agreements (CPA) initiative under the Australians Working Together package.

A further tool which is available to Indigenous communities to build on the advances of the COAG trials are the Indigenous Land Use Agreement provisions of the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth).

'Overall, the COAG whole-of-government community trials have advanced significantly during 2003 and offer much potential for reforming inter-government and whole-of-government approaches to service delivery to Indigenous peoples. There have already been a number of achievements from the process. There remain a number of challenges and some structural issues (particularly relating to monitoring and evaluation) that remain to be addressed. The long term success of the process will, however, depend on how the trials promote structural change in the way that governments go about delivering services to Indigenous peoples' (p54).

<<Return to the Media Pack