Wellbeing Report seminar series: Wellbeing and public policy: Sharing insights from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspective

Kara Nepe-Apatu (00:02:45):

[speaking in te reo Māori] Tēnā koutou katoa. E rere ana ngā mihi ki a koutou, kua hui mai nei i tēnei rā. Ka huri taku tītiro ki a koe e te rangatira e Romlie, mē te hunga taketake o te whenua moemoea. Tēnā koe, otirā tēnā koutou.

Me timata tō tatou nei hui, mai i te karakia, nō reira…Ko te Tai Whakarunga. Ko te Tai Whakararo. Ko te Tai Tokerau. Ko te Tai Tonga. Ko te Tai Hauāuru. Ko te Tai Rāwhiti. Tēnei ko Te Tai Ōhanga. Hui e, Tāiki e! Tēnā tātou.

Kia mōhio mai koutou, nō Te Tairāwhiti tēnei manu. Nō Ngāti Porou, Ngāi Tai me Te Arawa. Nō te whānau Houia. Ko Kara Nepe-Apatu tōku ingoa. He kaimahi ki Te Tai Ōhanga

Welcome, everyone. It's wonderful to see so many of you join us here for today's speaker in our wellbeing seminar series. To provide background, let me explain that back in April, our Treasury Secretary, Caralee McLiesh publicly launched the work programme for the Treasury's first Wellbeing Report, which will be published towards the end of this year.

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Te Tai Waiora will be a report on the state of wellbeing in Aotearoa New Zealand, how it has changed over the years, risk to and the sustainability of wellbeing. This seminar series is part of our broarder wellbeing work programme on improving public policy to support wellbeing in Aotearoa New Zealand. Our aim is to bring in new ideas, research evidence, and expert advice as a source of challenge and intellectual inspiration. We have had some fantastic speakers so far in this series and have a number of other seminars planned over the rest of this year and early 2023 with participation of international and domestic wellbeing experts.

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Today we are delighted to have Romlie Mokak with us. Romlie works as a commissioner at the Australian Productivity Commission. He was heavily involved in the creation of the Indigenous Evaluation Strategy, published in October 2020, a whole-of-government framework for Australian government agencies to use when selecting, planning, conducting and using evaluations of policies and programmes affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

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Romlie is a Djugun man and a member of the Yawuru people. Before the Commission, he was the Chief Executive Officer of the Lowitja Institute, Australia's National Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research. Prior to that, Romlie was the CEO of the Australian Indigenous Doctors Association for almost a decade.

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Today, Romlie will share his insights and experience in public policy development in relation to the wellbeing of Australian indigenous population. This is very relevant to Treasury’s work as we strive to better reflect Māori perspectives in our analysis and advice. As many of you'll be aware, we are increasingly seeking to use He Ara Waiora, which provides a Māori perspective on wellbeing alongside our Living Standards Framework.

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This includes using both frameworks in our first Wellbeing Report. But we recognise that we are at the start of the journey and are keen to learn from Romlie's experiences in the Australian context. To provide you with an overview of today's session, Romlie will present for around 45 minutes and then we will have the remainder of the time for questions.

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As Romlie presents, please feel free to enter your questions you might have in the chat, and I'll ask them when we turn to questions. You can also vote on the questions and I can see some of you already starting with the little thumbs ups. And that will help ensure that I pick the right questions first. With that said, let me hand it over to you. [speaking in te reo Māori] E te rangatira, Romlie. Welcome.

Romlie Mokak (00:06:22):

Kia ora Kara. Thank you for that introduction and kia ora to all who have joined us today online. I guess just in thinking about how the conversation, and we might hear in Aboriginal Australia, we might call it a yarn. In Māori, is that kōrero? And I'm very grateful for so many yarns that I've had with Māori brothers and sisters over the years. And I'm happy to speak to some of that throughout the presentation as I go through my previous experience, for example, with the Indigenous Doctors Association.

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This will not be a yarn about measurement or indicators or technical aspects or contested necessarily aspects of indigenous wellbeing as distinct from other ways to think about the world. Really, my intent is just to offer some insights, share some stories, and to engage in a conversation. In doing that, I think it's always important for those in the yarn or those who will consolidate yarns into the future to never just solely be in the present because the history is very important. And the history of first peoples globally is one of dispossession, erasure, invisibility. I think for us to all be disciplined in our disciplines, we actually do need to take stock of where we came to be in this point in time. And what does that look like then for the future? For all of our children, not just First Nations kids, but all kids in Aotearoa New Zealand and here in Australia.

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I'll speak a little bit to some of that historical context. And some of you may know it already, but it'll just be a very quick skim through within the Australian context. As I mentioned, areas of my work and some of the work that I've done, but also the insights and experiences along the way.

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I was interested to also say a bit about the Australian Productivity Commission. And not that I have necessarily a metric or a comparator around this because I don't know what the conversations, the yarns were prior to me joining about three and a half years ago. But those who've been in the Commission for a long, long time have said the yarns have changed, the conversations have changed. And some of that comes with having a commissioner.

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And you'll hear me refer to, we talk about black Australia. And so, you'll hear some of those references to black Australia or black institutions. In the context of the Productivity Commission, not ever having a black commissioner at the table is an interesting question in and of itself. I thought I'd share some of the challenges and our learning within the Commission that goes beyond the delivery of certain products, i.e. reports for inquiries, for example.

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This is where I thought we might go over the next 40 minutes or so. I'm sorry to disappoint those who might have been interested in numbers and metrics. And I've got a whole team to help me be cogent around some of that stuff because I'm not an economist or a mathematician or a statistician. And the team will be helping Anna just to run the slides for me. We might move to the second slide. This is, we call it country here. And I mean country is more than the physical landscape. Country is the embodiment of our culture, our ancestry, our law, our relationality. And A, these photographs of my country, my ancestral home, my ancestral lands. And I'm joining today from what we call as Djugun, Yawuru people, Rubibi. Some of you might be more familiar with the township of Broome. This is in the West Kimberley of the Kimberley region in Northwestern Australia. It's just after 10 o'clock here in WA.

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And forgive me if I'm generalising, because we have many, many nations, many, many First Nations. But a lot of our mob, and I'll refer to mob, so our people, we'll take the view that nothing happens for coincidence. It's just not coincidental that things transpire. You're here in a place and time for a reason. And so today, I am here on my ancestral lands in Rubibi, and what you see here is what we call the pindan. And the pindan is the red dirt. And the beauty of this place beyond the spiritual and so much more is just the absolute glory and the beauty of where the pindan meets the ocean.

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And in that relationship, that interrelationship as saltwater people. I'm a saltwater man, the interrelationship between land, country, sea country, and sky country. I wanted to give you a bit of a picture of that. And this is typical sunset in Broome. And if you've never been here, jump onto the cheap airfares, the Air New Zealand site and make your way across because it's well worth coming.

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I'm a Djugun man, as I said, here on country today. And as is customary, I acknowledge this country, my ancestors' country, my country. But I also acknowledge the many lands and country nations that people are joining from today. The iwi, the hapū. Absolutely acknowledge your elders and those who have come before. I want to pay my respect to the Tangata whenua of your lands.

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I have spent some time in Aotearoa New Zealand and through my connection. And the connection couldn't be much closer because my wife is actually from Auckland. And her ancestry is largely, she's Pākehā, largely English, Scottish, Swedish, but also has a Polynesian ancestry as well. There's a direct connection. I've had a professional connection to Te ORA Māori Doctors Association and researchers, but also a personal connection through my wife.

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We have three children, two girls and a boy. My girls really don't care too much about sport, but sadly, my son from day one has been an ardent All Black supporter. And that's just a tragedy every time Australia or the Wallabies plays. He had greater insight than others in backing his mother's rugby team.

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I'm here on Djugun, Yawuru country, but I do acknowledge as well where I was born, where I came into this world, and that was at Garramilla. Garramilla, most people would understand as the city of Darwin in the Northern Territory. And I grew up for the first eight or nine years in a little two-roomed school, about an hour south of Garramilla on Ngangkarin country. All of this, I'm painting a picture of this because it's all a part of the story. The fact that I'm a commissioner at the Productivity Commission now is a role that I have, but I would not be here without the nurturance and the support and the embrace of all of those nations that I grew up on. I'm seeing some chats come up, but I'll have to run through them later. But I think that was about an All Black, something about All Blacks. I'll hear enough about All Blacks when the All Blacks play and my son will send me a text or such. If we could go to the next slide, Anna.

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This is just to give you a bit of a picture of our world, First Nations here in Australia. There are two first peoples of this land. There are Aboriginal people broadly. And recognising that the word Aboriginal is a colonial term in any case, but mostly accepted by Aboriginal people. To make the distinction between Aboriginal people who are on the mainland and Tasmania, the island to the south. And Torres Strait Islander people who are Melanesian origins and are closely related to our neighbours in Papua New Guinea.

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We say that we've been here forever. This country, this land birthed us. We came from here, and our creation story here, where I am today is the Bugarragarra. This is where things were laid down, the physical manifestation, these creative beings laid all of this down for us, including law, including the physical landscape, et cetera, and the rules of being. That's the way that we think about our world, or at least I think about our world.

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Those who will use the science will say that we've been here for at least 40,000 years, or 65,000 years, more recently, 80,000 years. What we have here is a civilisation society that goes back over 2,000 plus generations. That might be another way to conceptualise it. Prior to European arrival, there were estimated to be around 250 distinct nations, languages, 500 plus dialects. And within each of these, there were complex kinship structures, rules around how you engage.

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Where I am here today, we have four, we call them skin. We have four skin groups. And knowing your skin defines who you are and your relationships and responsibilities, your obligations to other. Anyway, I won't go too much into that, but it's just making the point that there are knowledge systems that have come from this country that where governments throughout time have done their level best to eliminate. And I have no hesitation in saying that the history of this country saw cultural genocide. And I know that might jar people, but there was an intentionality around eliminating the culture of Aboriginal people on these lands. And I'm happy to talk a little bit more about that.

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Back to where we were before colonisation, we had law, we had education, spiritual development, resource management at a level of complexity that one might not even be able to imagine or contemplate. We had all of these languages, we had ceremonies, we had customs, we had ways of being. We had a humanity that was sophisticated, respected, understood, but rapidly sought to be eliminated with colonisation.

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The names up here are some of those nations, Wiradjuri, Gunditjmara, Arrernte. For us, it's just empowering to speak the words of those nations. And we've got a long way to go. I've often looked to Māori and your language, Māori languages of I think it was maybe the '70s and how that was a Māori driven movement. And it didn't come from government, it came from your communities. Lots of things that over here, we're having to, we're well behind with given these 250 nations and languages, many of them now not spoken. But a fluency and an ability to speak your language when it was denied from you or of you is our languages are being re-awoken.

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We talk about our languages being sleeping. They've been sleeping for their own safety and now they're coming back. Here in Djugun, Yawuru country yesterday, I attended a book launch. A little hard copy book for maybe from day one really, when you're reading to kids. And that was in English and Djugun, Yawuru. And that was really empowering. That was wonderful. But I recognise that we've got a long way to go because these languages, they're not lost, they're sleeping and they're coming back.

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It just reminds me of a friend of mine, a Māori doctor called Lilly Fraser. Some of you may or may not know Lilly. She's a GP in Aotearoa. Lilly, as I recall, was the first Māori doctor to have moved from a Māori school, year 12. I think the year 12 equivalent, I could be wrong there. But completed, graduated Māori school into Medicine at a time when that was just deemed to be such an impossible thing to achieve. We have some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander schools, but very few. And we've got a school system that is not necessarily the safest place for our kids, to be quite frank. There's a lot of work that needs to be done-

Romlie Mokak (00:23:03):

To be quite frank. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done is being done. But the point that I want to make is that it's our mob who are driving these movements because we're invested. We are absolutely invested in the future of our children and grandchildren to come.

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So this is a bit about what we looked like prior to colonisation. Thank you.

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The next slide. So I won't go into this too much, but just to say that the Australia, unlike New Zealand, has a federated system. My wife's solutions to the buck-passing and the pushing and shoving that happens sometimes, maybe occasionally between levels of government here in Australia, is that we should just follow the New Zealand example. You've got one parliament and what local governments or regional governments, regional councils. I don't know that that's necessarily the solution, but this is what we've got.

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We've got a federated system with three tiers of government, federal government, states and territories, and local government as well. So you can kind of see the kind of complexity that emerges in that ecosystem and how constitutionally derived certain roles are.

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So if in a policy sense, the federal government, for example, have a role to play in the funding of the health system, but the state governments run the hospitals and a whole range of other things. So there are interactions between both levels of government.

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The federal government has the ability to raise revenue at a scale that state governments can't. So there are negotiations and transfers that happen between levels of government that often bound up in intergovernmental agreements. And I can talk a little bit to the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, of which I'm one of the reviewers at the present.

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The '67 referendum. I might just highlight, and this was a referendum. So referendum in this country for constitutional change requires a majority of people in the majority of states in order to get across the line. So they're very hard to achieve. I think we've had eight referendum go forward out of something like 40, 44, 45.

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This was the most one-sided referendum in the history of the country, which was essentially two things. One was to give the Commonwealth powers to legislate to make laws for Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander people, where previously that was held within states, but the other, which was at times people think is hard to believe, but the second element was for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to be counted in the national census.

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So we were counted for the first time, I think it was... So the referendum was '67, it was a couple of years after that the Australian Bureau of Statistics who run the census count, run the census, had an additional item in there around Aboriginality. So that's not so long ago. I turned 60 next month. I know I don't look at people tell me that, but I was five years old when this came into play. In fact, I would've been about seven or eight when that first census happened after the '67 referendum.

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So it's within our lifetime that Aboriginal people are not in the national count. And so what does that kind of mean in the psyche of a nation, for example? And what are the residual impacts around that? And we know that we've still got challenges with under-counting, for example, in many areas and particularly in remote areas.

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Next slide, thanks.

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So just quickly through... Just a very quick run-through in relation to our, "our" meaning, Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander, people's relationships with relationship to the state. That ‘terra nullius’, you might be aware of, it's a term that essentially means nobody's land. And while Cook was under instruction from the Crown to negotiate with natives, and in terms of negotiating possession of these lands that were obviously there for the taking.

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Nonetheless, even though there was a presence of Aboriginal people, when we think about European or Western notions of property, I think the generous assumption is that there was a view that people didn't own the land. It was Terra nullius, it was nobody's land because there wasn't necessarily recognisable property as there was in a Western, in an English sense.

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So this doctrine, terra nullius, nobody's land led to a whole range of things. The dispossession of our people from our own country, moving to... that doctrine of land, we call it a legal fiction, essentially.

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But that doctrine of terra nullius laid down what was to be into the future, and wasn't overturned until 1992 with the high court, the Australian High Court decision on Mabo, which recognised that that ownership was held by Meriam people in the Torres Strait, one of the Eastern islands in the Torres Strait.

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So that decision rejected the doctrine of terra nullius at the time of European settlement. And out of that came a native title regime, a new legislation where Aboriginal people, if they could prove their continuing cultural practice in connection to country... And a lot of that was extinguished because of the dispossession. But if they could prove that they could be granted native title over certain lands, crown lands typically. Freehold land was completely out of the picture.

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So we're pleased to say here on my country here, Djugun Yawuru country, we had a determination on native title. And that places us now in a very different bargaining position with government. But the sadness is that many, many nations do not have native title where because they could not prove that continuing cultural connection to that country, their own country.

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So I thought that was important to understand that. So the legal fiction in our view terra nullius that then laid down the relationship between the state and Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander people. Just skimming through some of these other elements here on the slide. From 1860 onwards, the protection era. So this was the notion that... I mean, initially the idea was that it was a case of smoothing the dying pillow. So Aboriginal people would inevitably die out, largely through disease.

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But also, part of the history of this nation is the silencing of the truth. And we need a whole lot of work around truth telling that's happening in a range of areas.

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But the truth about the wars that happen in this nation that we now call Australia. So the truth about the massacres, for example... So while Aboriginal people might have this magnificent notion that we would not survive as a people and we would over time, it was just about smoothing that dying pillow gently, gently.

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But then this policy of protection came into being. So we needed to be protected. And there were authorities, the protector of Aborigines. There was such a statutory role within state governments. And the protector essentially was like an overlord, had all powers over Aboriginal people. And in the protection era, it was a case of pushing people onto what are called reserves.

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And those reserves were essentially to dispossess people of their lands, corral people into these places. I talked about the different clan, the skin groups where you might have relationships and they might be poisoned relationships. These are relationships that you don't have intimate relationships.

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So you can imagine a whole bunch of people being forcibly removed from their lands onto these reserves and they might have come from many, many different nations, many different clans and the kinds of challenges that were faced and continue to be faced in terms of having harmonious relationships when you're forced into other people's country.

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So that's one thing to say about the protection era. The brutality is still being felt today. The assimilation era was when fair-skinned Aboriginal children and we had the segmentation of Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander people in terms of blood quantums. So we'd have half-cast, quarter-cast, octoroons.

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We had the scientific metric around the dilution of Aboriginality over time. So fairer-skinned Aboriginal kids were forcibly removed from their families, literally ripped out of their mother's arms, and taken to what were largely missions run by churches, for these kids to be raised, to be assimilated into white Australia. Don't forget that during this time Australia had a White Australia policy. The idea was never that Australia was going to be a country populated by people of colour, whatever they were, whether they're First Nations or other people. White Australia policy was the policy of the day.

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So this was another form of cultural genocide. If you have a look at the Bringing Them Home report, this is about forbidding Aboriginal children to speak their language, to practice their culture, to think as Aboriginal and the impacts of this are vast.

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And as we've got a bunch of work that the Institute of Health and Welfare, for example, where I sit as a board member on the Institute of Health and Welfare. But there's some terrific work that the Institute's done with our national Healing Foundation, on looking at the impacts on stolen generations to this day. And I mean, you can imagine a whole range of impacts, particularly around social and emotional wellbeing as we call it, or mental ill health, for example.

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'60s onward, there were attempts at self-management, self-determination. None of those have been fully realised by Aboriginal people and by the state actually giving up power essentially.

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And in the current context, and I'll speak a little bit more to the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, there's a commitment by all governments to share in decision making and work in genuine partnership with Aboriginal people. And it's early days with the review that we're conducting. The Productivity Commission has a mandated role under the new agreement to review the agreement. So it's fairly early days, but this is one of the really key areas that I'd like to highlight further down the track.

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Kara, just remind me if I've... We've got about 40, 45 minutes because I am keen for participants to have an opportunity to have a yarn, as I mentioned earlier.

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So we might move to the next slide. And I know I'm conscious that there's a lot of information coming your way, but all of this material is accessible online. The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, that was a truth-telling commission. Came up with 330, 340-odd recommendations and largely around improving the interaction between Aboriginal people's contact with justice, and police and corrections, and the impacts of stolen generations, et cetera, and how that played into the outcomes that we see today.

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But also addressing policies right across the board, health, education and recognising that these policies pretty much will amount to not a whole lot if Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aren't in there, developing those policies together with government.

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Were those 339 recommendations implemented? Well, have a guess at that. Largely no.

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And so this is the taste that Aboriginal people have in their mouth constantly, that we have these incredible pieces of work. People are sharing their stories, but sharing their stories don't just come at zero cost. People are re-traumatised through that process. And yet Aboriginal people will say, "Well, we see very little action or result as a result of those big inquiries."

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The Bringing Them Home report, I've mentioned already. The Little Children are Sacred Report's a really important one. One of the co-authors is one of our senior people in Australia, a woman called Pat Anderson. Pat Anderson has been one of the leading people on the advocacy to have a voice. And I'll talk a little bit about that towards the end. Have a voice to Parliament.

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So, have a constitutionally embedded, enabled voice to Parliament. So Aboriginal people have a voice into the decision-making chambers of this country. That was a co-author. The report, the reason for the report was to try to have a look at claims that there were Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, Aboriginal kids being abused, including sexual abuse.

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Now you read the report and it comes to very different conclusion. And it speaks about the things that I've been speaking about, the historical impacts of... and experiences of Aboriginal people and where we land today, and the need to have a more holistic response.

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I think it was 15 days after the report was released... The federal government of the day declared a national emergency. So the federal government has powers to declare emergencies. They declared a national emergency and called it the Northern Territory Emergency Response, ostensibly in response to report.

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And that response or the suspension of (audio trails off) discriminatory, in order for that action to take place with a racially-based underpinning. So if you can contemplate that, the Racial Discrimination Act, which is here to offer to give protections, was suspended in order for the intervention to occur.

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The military, the army was deployed into Aboriginal communities, essentially on the notion that they would be there to support capability and using military capability to deal with infrastructure and other issues. So if you can just contemplate the brutality that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people face throughout time, for the army to be coming into Aboriginal communities. That's the other aspect of this. There are Aboriginal communities, 73 Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. They then needed to... Okay Kara.

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Those communities were open to the government to come in. So this was seen as an invasion into Aboriginal communities. Anyway, I won't go too much further into that, but it's this re-traumatising process that I'm talking about. There was a National Apology to the stolen generations by the then Prime Minister Rudd in 2008, after a decade or more of a refusal to apologise.

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So again, these things happen slowly, but there's this process of re-traumatisation, and it absolutely does have policy relevance. So it's about how do we think as policy thinkers and makers around these issues.

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Sorry, and I really got to speed this up now. So this is the next slide. Just quickly on deficit discourse.

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So a colleague of mine, a professor in Palawa, Tasmanian woman in Hobart, Maggie Walter, has coined this notion of five Ds. So this is the way that the rest of the world sees us, sees Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander people and those five Ds...

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Sorry, I'll just pull my notes up.

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But the five Ds relate to disparity. So if you think about what we measure, disparity, dysfunction, deprivation, disadvantage and difference. The fourth is difference. So we're thinking about that this is what we're often measured by, not by the strengths of indigenous people, indigenous knowledges, the things that make us strong, but by these metrics that place us in that particular light.

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And closing the gap itself is about that disparity, is about that differential. The norm is non-indigenous Australians. So that's where we are. And we can really lose sight of the fact that these sorts of measures are invisible to the things that mean something for First Nations, that for the wellbeing of First Nations people.

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So it requires a nuanced narrative and more data for and by Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander people. I think that would be the same issue I'm imagining in Māori aspirations in New Zealand.

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Just quickly through the next one. So just to make the point that there are numbers that can easily be seen as numbers, but we've got to understand the context for this data.

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So, often we will go to the deficit proportion of Aboriginal people who don't do this, or aren't, or are incarcerated or haven't been successful, or whatever it might be. But what about the majority? What about the other? Where's that narrative coming through? Really looking at the structural and systemic factors that land us in these places.

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So if we tackled out of home care, for example, the over-representation of Aboriginal kids in native home care, through having stronger responses around kinship and culture, we would be seeing less kids on that trajectory, directly through removals into non-kin placements, while absolutely needing those protections, and then into the juvenile justice system and elsewhere.

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So these are some of the things that... And cultural ways of dealing with these issues using eldership and knowledge...

Romlie Mokak (00:46:02):

And the power of that to mitigate some of these risks. I'll jump through to the next slide now, thanks Anna. So my background in policy, Kara you've given a bit of an indication of where I've been in my work. And if I've got time, I'll come back to this, but I guess through heading up black organisations for 15 years and being an advocate, and really having to, at times, to hold the tongue and think about the long game, but also at other times, really have to lean in and muscle into things that not just don't make sense, but are really unjust. And so I've come from being an advocate in our community control sector into this role at the Commission. And when I took on this role at the Commission, what I said was, clearly, the Commission has to worry for the wellbeing of all Australians.

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This is our mandate, but I'm at the Commission for the benefit of my people. And these two things, they're not binary. They come together. But if I'm not there, I'm not here at the Commission as a Commissioner with a focus on indigenous issues rather than the indigenous Commissioner, then my mob are not going to gain the benefit of me being here. So I centre myself in these discussions within the Commission and our Commission's work continuously. It's an everyday job. So that's just one thing that I thought I'd mentioned, but I'm very happy to come back to speak a bit more about my work, for instance, around petrol sniffing when I was a public servant.

(00:48:05):

The next slide. So this is the Productivity Commission. You can jump online and have a look at what the Commission's role is. But just to say that we, I think the New Zealand Productivity Commission, I should know this, but we have our own statute. We have a statutory basis for our work. So while we get commissions from governments, the way we go about responding to those questions that the government is seeking answers on is entirely up to us to determine. So, we're at an arm's length to government and that's a very good place to be to, but also there's a huge responsibility around that and even a greater responsibility to tackle the issues for indigenous people within that context. So just to the next one. Some of the work that we've been undertaking within the Commission, there's obviously indigenous specific work. You mentioned the indigenous evaluation strategy that I led a couple of years ago. We have a couple of reporting roles that we've had previously and we're still working out where governments want to go with the Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage Report and the Expenditure Report.

(00:49:29):

I'm currently Commissioner leading or co-commissioning the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Visual Arts and Crafts Study. This goes to the question of what does the market look like and who are the players in the market and where, is it a level playing field, for example, in really crude terms and the National Agreement on Closing the Gap that I'll speak to briefly. And of course I'm inputting into all of those other pieces of work that are about the whole of population. But Aboriginal people absolutely need to be more than thought about. We need to be intentional in our approach around policy analysis and policy development and policy advice. And there are a couple of pieces of work there.

(00:50:19):

Next one please. Again, you can jump online, but this is the Indigenous Evaluation Strategy. This strategy's being picked up by a number of agencies and non-government agencies, et cetera, in the absence of the Australian government giving a formal response to it. So I just need to make that clear. The Australian government has not responded formally to the strategy that they sought from the Productivity Commission. We delivered it to the Australian government in 2020. But the agencies themselves are adopting the work. And that's what I'm keen to see. And it's being referenced and people are thinking differently about it. And particularly to that overarching principle of centering Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people perspective, priorities and knowledges.

(00:51:13):

If we have evaluations that are asking the completely wrong questions and Aboriginal people have got no say in it, we may as well not even embark on that. It's just a waste of time and money in my view. So this is a challenge for government agencies and particularly mainstream programmes who will maybe contemplate Aboriginal people as an afterthought. What we're saying is that this needs to be thought about well before in this moment. Sorry, Kara, give me two minutes. I think this is the cleaner.

Kara Nepe-Apatu (00:51:57):

Their timing is just uncanny.

Kara Nepe-Apatu (00:52:02):

Keep the questions coming guys. It's great to see there's a few in there already. Back over to you Romlie.

Romlie Mokak (00:52:09):

Oh, sorry about that. I've had to get an extension. They were going to boot me out of this place at 11 o'clock my time, which would've meant that the seminar's over. So I've managed to get an extension. All right, so let's go to the next one. And I actually won't go into this. This might be something that we can come into in our yarn. The National Agreement I've referred to the shared decision making. Have a look at the agreement when you get a chance. It was agreed in 2020 between all governments and representatives from peak organisations. So it's the first time at a governmental, ministerial level that Aboriginal organisations from outside of government have negotiated an agreement. And what we're looking at, what we're focusing in as reviewers to that agreement are those priority reforms in that top tier. So this is about making an assessment of progress against governments sharing decision making, working in proper partnership.

(00:53:15):

What are the tools that are at play? What's the evidence of change? Governments having necessarily to give up power it's as simple as that. Hard to achieve. So this is a part of the review. The second one is about building the community control sector, as we call it here in Australia. But also being very clear about not just saying, "Well, here's the funding, go off and do it." Being clear about capability and development and sustainability. Transforming government organisations is going to be a particularly difficult one I think for governments.

(00:53:56):

Two issues. One is the agreement specifies and calls out the identification and elimination of racism, simple as that. It's named. But how governments go about that will be very interesting. And what I'm particularly interested in is how do we measure transformation when we don't have those tools necessarily now. We can tick a whole lot of boxes, but how do we measure that? And of course the coming to the table with data at the same time in a shared space so that Aboriginal people aren't kind of scratching their heads playing catch up when government have a whole lot of other data and information and tools even before they got to the negotiating table. So equalising that setting.

(00:54:50):

Okay, next one. I'm just drawing on a couple of frameworks. I'm completely biased here. You're not supposed to be biased when you're a Commissioner at the Productivity Commission. Everything's objective. That was a joke. I can see Kara's having a good laugh there. But these are two friends and colleagues, Graham Gee's an Aboriginal man, a clinical psychologist, Helen Milroy is our first ever Aboriginal doctor trained through the Western system in the history of this country. 100 years after the first Māori doctor. That's how far we were behind. And Helen is the first Aboriginal doctor, first Aboriginal psychiatrist. She sat on the Royal Commission, looking at institutional responses to child sexual abuse.

(00:55:42):

So simply here, I just want to share that our idea of wellbeing is not just measuring the measurements that might typically within Living Standards Framework, or economic frameworks. This is the challenge - is how do we have a holistic recognition of, the holistic definitions of wellbeing in a First Nations context? And what do those measurements look like? And I'd be really keen to have further discussions with Treasury, with New Zealand Treasury and organisations, agencies attempting to implement the Māori framework alongside the Living Standards Framework. I'd really love to have that conversation. So that last bit of from Helen was, we've got these anchors, these chains that are dragging us back and how can we possibly dance through life and be our full selves while we've still got this going on? So I think there's a lot of work that we need to do into the future. And we're a long way off in Australia, I can tell you that much.

(00:56:52):

The next slide. Again, centering our mob, Mayi Kuwayu, is a longitudinal study looking at wellbeing, cultural determinants of health and wellbeing. The Yawuru wellbeing study, all of these are online. This is our mob here on Djugun Yawuru country, defining what wellbeing means themselves. And so I just thought this was a nice quote to share from that study. And it goes to relationality and reciprocity. So we are saltwater people. We're in the bay and we're on the ocean fishing, crabbing, doing a whole range of things. So the questions like ‘if you are successful in your catch, then you share it’ or statements, ‘then you share it with your family and friends’. That's not just about notions of collectivity, that's about obligation, reciprocity, nurturance, harmony, all of those.

(00:57:57):

How would we pick that up in the national collections for example? These are very hard questions to contemplate. And it's not only sharing your catch, but it's also what proportion of your catch did you share? So if you caught 100 fish and you gave auntie one, does that stack up? So these are things that I wanted to highlight and you can go online and see those just where our mob defining these in coming up with measurements themselves.

(00:58:38):

Next one please. I think I probably said enough here, I've got a Sen quote in there about how do we measure wellbeing reflecting collectives and relational aspects, et cetera? How do we define what a good life looks like? A meaningful life, what does that look like? I remember medical students going to med school, our young people going to med school where at the med school they would say, "You can forget about your Aboriginal culture now because you are now in med school and you need to concentrate on the culture of medicine." I mean, if you can believe that these are conversations that I've had with indigenous doctors. So there's a lot of work to be done.

(00:59:25):

And just finishing up on the last slide. I signalled that there's a big discussion in this country around a voice to Parliament being constitutionally enshrined. This is a big conversation, a big yarn at the moment. The Uluru Statement from the Heart was, we think of it and others think of it as a gift to the nation. And I do recommend you go on and have a look at the Uluru Statement from the Heart. It speaks to connecting up all of those things that I've tried to share with you today about history and impact and the vision for the future. So here I've just taken some elements of it. The First Nation's voice enshrined in the Constitution and a Makarrata Commission, so a commission by statute borrowing from the Yolngu word from eastern Arnhem Land, Makarrata is sort of coming together after a dispute, after a difference. So it's like working out what peace looks like after a disagreement, that's a Makarrata. And that is done in different ways across the country. And no doubt in Māori culture as well.

(01:00:48):

So this Commission would oversee a national truth telling process and an agreement making process around treaties and agreements because we don't have a Waitangi Treaty in this country. Remember Cook didn't see Aboriginal people on country. So it's a very complex and congested space at the moment. The current government, the Labour government has committed to going to referendum within this term on the voice to Parliament. So there's a great deal of worry about a referendum going forward that fails and what would that look like for the nation? What would that mean to the nation? The big questions here. I should declare that I was a participant at the convention. And so in that sense, I'm speaking to this more as an Aboriginal person, someone who is supportive of the voice, a part of that delegation of 250 or so leaders who met at Uluru and gifted this statement to the nation. And so this is not the Productivity Commission speaking if I can just make that clear. Thanks Kara. Sorry I've gone a bit over.

Kara Nepe-Apatu (01:02:15):

No, ka pai. Thank you Romlie. Very relevant and interesting presentation. The similarities between Indigenous Aboriginal Australia and Māori resonated so much with me. I could see many of the connections around history, what happened, what we are trying to do to kind of lift, elevate, and excel our people to be who they are through identity, language, and culture. It just resonated so much. And I'm definitely going to take you up on their offer to come and have a talk because I think we could go on for a long time.

Romlie Mokak (01:02:58):

Absolutely.

Kara Nepe-Apatu (01:03:00):

I see we have a few questions here and I think we'll have about 20 minutes to answer it, but I have to say the chat was a bit lively at the beginning there. You hit some heartstrings around sport because there was a bit of a comment there around every time the New Zealand cricket team put their feet on Australian soil, they forget how to bowl, bat and bowl. Bit of a comment there about netball tonight, but I think we'll go by a means of how many likes. Because there were some really good questions, which I think might take a bit of time to answer. So we'll go with the one from Phil. He said, "The Five D's are also very familiar in Aotearoa New Zealand. What do you see as some of the key things that Indigenous Australians would like to measure? We are grappling with some of the same questions here.

Romlie Mokak (01:03:52):

Yeah, thanks Phil for that. I think these are universal questions when we speak to Indigenous peoples of the world. So whether Canada or Aotearoa, or the US. I think a good part of it is just thinking about what deficit this course looks like. So for many non-Indigenous people and some of our own mob, it becomes internalised. And that's the real heartache of it all, is that our kids see themselves in this deficit train. And so I think some of those conversations happen around our mob and we've got cultural ways and language, cultural practice, just having the conversations amongst ourselves, being a part of our communities, growing our organisations, leaning into to pushing the movement along. All of that's important because it speaks to strength. My kids, each of them had to go through a whole lot as a lot of our kids have to in just simply being who they are.

(01:05:17):

So I think there's stuff that we can do. In terms of our policy making and our reporting. So the Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage Report, terrible title, that was the title given to it by government. And the title itself, my view is, it places proprietorship, ownership of the disadvantage with Indigenous peoples. So already it's like, "You got to sort yourself out and pull your socks up and lift your game in order to get further along that aspiration to being equal to white people," to put it really crudely. So I think there's something in that, the reports that we write, as a Commissioner at the Commission, there's a whole raft of work that I do, but there are things that I pick up just simply around that, around language, what language means beyond the intention on the impact. And always having an Indigenous lens. Where my non-Indigenous colleagues would not even see that. And it's no judgement around that for them, but that's the lifting of the capability within institutions and doing that in a way that empowers everyone. It isn't about blame or finger pointing.

(01:06:49):

On the metrics themselves, these are big conversations that need to be had. And I pointed towards Mayi Kuwayu, even though they're surveys, they start to give us an understanding of what it is that has meaning for Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander people. And then how can we start to translate that into other data sets and surveys that might be existing or might there be gaps that we just need to start really focusing in on. I don't know if I answered that at a technical or a data level for you, Phil, but I guess there are a bunch of things in that, our mob, how institutions see and understand their own work. And then what do we need to do in terms of building more relevant ways of measuring wellbeing, in terms of Aboriginal terms of reference.

Kara Nepe-Apatu (01:07:44):

And there's a couple of questions that Kate asked that kind of lead off on a couple of the points that you made there. She was asking, "In your view, what is the capability of the Australian public sector to respond to the persistent disadvantage at the same time as the aspirations of Aboriginal people?" And then she just quickly put in there, "Do you think our systems have to learn to read and understand other ways of representing wellbeing beyond our standard base of measuring?"

Romlie Mokak (01:08:16):

Second one's an easy one. Yes, we have to, but how will be, it's about finding that space in between. But often finding the space in between actually means First Peoples really, we have to assert ourselves in ways that often are a heavy load to carry. So some of that is kind of, yes, we do have to measure things differently, but what's the negotiation table look like? And how do non-Indigenous people, policy makers, people who are thinking about these matters come to that space themselves in an educated way, not expecting all of the answers to come from the other side.

Romlie Mokak (01:09:03):

And so these are the conversations that we have at the Productivity Commission all the time. What's the capability need within the Commission and how do we move this capability to be embedded institution-wide and not just on Aboriginal projects? And where does the discussion need to take place? In the kitchen, at the executive tables, amongst the peers, et cetera. There's a lot of... Economists might call a lot of this stuff intangible, really hard to measure. But there's a lot of stuff there that you can actually see and feel and start to see that institutional change. Is the Australian public service sufficiently capable? I think it's variable. Was that Kate, was it? Yeah. I think it's variable, Kate.

(01:10:08):

And we saw that in the Indigenous Evaluation Strategy. So there's some work in there that we did. And what we tried to do was to recognise that rather than just saying you've got to do this in a top down way, we recognise that different agencies are at different points of understanding, commitment, intentionality, having the tools available to them. So we had a, it's like a maturity matrix or a progression pathway. I think we called it a progression pathway to assist agencies with that. What I would say is that the national agreement is very clear about accountabilities. That their accountabilities on the part of signatories to the agreement. So that's the Aboriginal Torres Strait on one side as well as the government side, all three tiers of government. It'll be our job to assess what that looks like, what does progress look like against those accountabilities. But I think it is variable, Kate. But we've got a policy setting now, which will require governments to actually not operate under business as usual, as an ongoing thing.

Kara Nepe-Apatu (01:11:32):

Ka pai. Lynley just asked the question around ‘for oral and storytelling people, how do you think wellbeing frameworks can be responsive to other ways of knowing how people may be being well’?

Romlie Mokak (01:11:46):

Yeah, that's down to the tools, isn't it? Developing kind of sophisticated enough tools that are able to bring those two together and that's the sweet spot. And so I think it's a real challenge, Lynley, about how to bring those, how to literally close that gap. And often what I hear from people who are concerned about that is the validity of the metric. So that if it's not statistically kind of measurable, then what are we measuring? What is it worth it? So I think they're the conversations that need to be had. And I've got to say, I've had a quick look at the work in the Treasury and I need to do more, but you're probably doing all of this already. I'm not sure. Certainly it's a discussion that's happening globally.

(01:12:56):

I'm not sure if Tim is online, but I think the great pleasure of meeting Tim back in 2018, about 30 of us were invited to look at that question of measuring wellbeing sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation from the US. About 30 of us, including Tim, a lot of case studies, but the OECD were there, other institutions, and they're all trying to grapple with this. And so there's a richness from the place based stuff coming forward from Boston and the US and the UK and elsewhere. The presentation on New Zealand's efforts around wellbeing, Bhutan with the... What is it? Global not... It's the happiness measurement, isn't it?

(01:13:59):

And I've made chain contact with our contacts in Bhutan, Julia Kim at the Happiness Institute or the Happiness Programme. They're grappling with the same things. They come from a very different cultural base, but they've also got a young population who are hungry for Western technologies. And what does that look like? And what does that mean in a cultural context? Look, I think I'm just... I'm rambling a bit here, Lynley, because it's a job ahead of us, but it's a job, it's a concern that's shared globally and it's about how do those two intersect? And we are way behind in Australia, I've got to say.

Kara Nepe-Apatu (01:14:43):

Nadia asks a good question around small organisations. She said that there are a number of small targeted and multilayered Indigenously run organisations resolving issues that CTG aims for. And these organisations often face threats to their continuation, typical of most NFP organisations, yet they deliver vital services to the communities they support. From the perspective of the Australian Productivity Commission, what can government, public policy, do to help measure the success of these small organisations or support them better?

Romlie Mokak (01:15:24):

Yeah, yeah, terrific question Nadia. And there's a lot in that. If I just go back to the current policy setting, which is the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, one of the priorities there, that second priority is about building the community control sector. And my background has largely been in health policy and indigenous doctors and then heading up the National Health Research Institute. The health network, we've got 150, I'm sorry Nadia, if you're from Australia, this will all be familiar to you. But we've got over 150 indigenous Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander health services in the country.

(01:16:16):

We celebrated the first service opening 50 years ago this year that that service was in Redfern in inner city Sydney. And it emerged from the community itself with medical students and some doctors, people like Fred Hollows who saw that the racism was so rife that our people were not getting access to services that were universally accessible. So there came the genesis of this network now, and the chair, the CEO of that network at the peak body level is the convener of the peak bodies sitting at the table with governments, a woman called Pat Turner.

(01:17:08):

So it's just to say that we've been around for a long time, and I should declare again another bias. I'm a patron of one of the Aboriginal Health Service in Canberra, Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal Health Service. I think you're right about how do services, health services, legal services, women's family violence prevention services, childcare services, all of these are community control. How do we get better at understanding the power of measurement and communicating that? And I get these sorts of questions all the time from CEOs of multiple sectors on that very question, how do we share our stories, but in a way that isn't just a narrative, it's actually backed up by robust data, robust measurement. And some sectors are doing that and doing it really well. Others like housing, we don't have many Aboriginal housing organisations, for example, some more work to be done there. In terms of the NGOs, the non-indigenous NGOs, many of them doing good work, but many of them, frankly, competing with black services to deliver those services to our communities. And so this isn't being didactic about it, but it's just the question for policy makers ought to be how, in terms of that priority reform too, how do we build on the aspiration of building, strengthening community control? And what does that look like for the service ecosystem across multiple sectors? So does it mean non-indigenous services who may be doing great work but playing in a particular space, entering into some agreement that over time their service will transition to community control? And that's been done across many, many instances across the country. So I think it's about bringing that conversation further into the fore.

Kara Nepe-Apatu (01:19:26):

I'm going to ask a question Romlie, if it's okay. Because prior to coming into the forum here, we talked about cultural safety. Oh, touched on it briefly, but I think there's, in what we do within the Treasury around He Ara Wiora and the Living Standards Framework and trying to understand wellbeing from multiple cultural perspectives, there's a little bit of nervousness and honesty which has come through, which is fantastic around people wanting to be able to use these indigenous frameworks or understand it, but don't want to do it wrong or cause offence or, yeah, just they want to have a good go at it but don't know how to and where to start. And then on the other side of the coin, Māori are like, some Māori and indigenous people are thinking, please don't water down too much of what we understand these words to mean. And then who's looking after that indigenous knowledge in this space at the same time. So there's this whole lot of nervousness, but good intent, I think. What's cultural safety like in the spaces that you are walking?

Romlie Mokak (01:20:44):

Yeah, thank you Kara. The chair's prerogatives always a good one. Look, I think cultural safety, and again referencing it back to the National Agreement. The National Agreement speaks about a couple of things. One is about identifying and eliminating racism. So that's at the hard edge of things, but it may not be, could just be systemic and institutional and unseen to most. It could just be ways of working, ways of being within an institutional culture or a framework. So that's one thing that I thought I'd highlight. And then there's the agreement that speaks to cultural safety as well. And I think, so a couple of things. One is that cultural safety is very familiar with those of us who've worked in the health space. And we acknowledge that the genesis of these ideas came from one of your elders. And we owe that to her for elevating these ideas. And there's any number of other nomenclature, cultural awareness, cultural responsiveness, cultural sensitivity, all of that. So I guess it's finding a shared understanding within institutions around what cultural safety is and what it means.

(01:22:18):

I experience often and always in multiple non-indigenous institutions that I've worked in this kind of nervousness about offending. And I think that's a legitimate concern for people to have. But it doesn't take us very far on either side or in terms of the work that we must do. And I'm always conscious of the gap between, at times, intentionality and impact. I don't think it's enough for a defensive, I didn't intend it in that way, when the impact is a negative impact on those who might be the recipients of that. And it's not just in our space, it's not just non-indigenous people speaking to indigenous people. It's actually at times non-indigenous people speaking to non-indigenous people who might know or have a proximity or a relationality to Aboriginal people who are seeing things from through a different lens. I know this intercultural space is a very tricky one to navigate. And it requires, I think it requires leadership from the top.

(01:23:46):

It requires action. Not enough to speak the words. Again, that intentionality impact gap. Look, I'm just trying to think of, might be a bit too close to home for me to reference Productivity Commission conversations, but previously not... That's not in a bad way. I'm just trying to think of other jobs that I've had. And when I was at the Health Department, for example, 20 years ago, I chaired a network of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff nationally. So I had my day job as a junior executive and then I chaired the network. And so we were encountering these things throughout the Federal Health Department, Aboriginal people being at times a bit bruised and battered, but there was also a lot of times for kind of misunderstandings and what did all that mean?

(01:24:52):

And it's not the panacea, but I had a direct relationship with the head of the department on a one- on-one basis. And we would measure progress around institutional change, the drivers or the barriers to institutional change. And what was interesting, was he brought... That's right, it's Irihapeti Ramsden. Yeah, that's right. Her name just escaped me there for a moment, so thank you. So it was actually about the secretary saying to the head of corporate services, big division, responsible for all sorts of things, that he was invited into that space. But the primary relationship was between Aboriginal staff channelled through me as their representative and the secretary. That changes the dynamic. It changes the way that certain people come into a space and the lenses through which they need to look. And it becomes an institutional requirement and obligation rather than just a Māori/ Pākehā interaction or an Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal interaction.

(01:26:10):

I don't think I've answered that at all well. But I think it's about leadership and action essentially. And proximity. For people to value the proximity of each other in those intersectional spaces. And learning from that. But I know I don't want to lose that point that you made though about when we bring our knowledges into white systems, how much compromise do we have to make? And is dilution inevitable or is it not? What does that look like? How economists might talk about trade-offs, but what are we willing to give and what are others willing to give as well? Framed around a question of value.

Kara Nepe-Apatu (01:27:11):

Kia ora, Romlie, and unfortunately we've run out of time, but we do have other questions and there was a great question that came through from Tim for you, but we might work on bringing those back to you to answer if that's okay, and circle back. I just want to say again, thank you Romlie, and I think we might have a little cohort of Treasury come your way for another discussion in the future.

Romlie Mokak (01:27:38):

Well, reciprocity means that I would have to come to the other side of the ditch as well and have one of those paua we talked about. You can't get those over here.

Kara Nepe-Apatu (01:27:55):

We will definitely have to plan that out. Yes, thank you so much for taking the time to share your work, your experience, and the public policy. It resonated so much and I think we can definitely continue on the korero. I want to mihi to everyone that's on the line and joined us today. Please look out for upcoming events in the Wellbeing Seminar Series. In November we have two fantastic international speakers as well. We will see presentations from the Nobel laureate, Economic Professor Joseph Stiglitz and from Stephen Jenkins. I would like to finish with the whakatauki, a proverb, which acknowledges the importance of discussion and learning to the wellbeing of the people.

So [speaking in te reo Māori 01:28:54].  

Mā te korero, ka mōhio. Mā te mōhio, ka mārama. Mā te mārama, ka mātau. Mā te mātau, ka ora te iwi.

Through discussion comes knowledge, through knowledge comes understanding, through understanding comes wisdom, through wisdom comes wellbeing. Thank everyone for attending, [speaking in te reo Māori 01:29:10] Mā te wā.

Romlie Mokak (01:29:10):

Thank you [speaking in te reo Māori 01:29:16] Kia ora!

Kara Nepe-Apatu (01:29:10):

[speaking in te reo Māori 01:29:17] Kia ora!