My argument was in four parts:
- First, that people’s cultural influences really do matter for the choices they take in life – and in turn these are particularly driven by the influence of our family, peers, community, as well as the organisations we spend our time in.
- Second, that the attitudes, values and norms we derive from these affect our behaviour in often quite unpredictable ways along with other factors like the legislation, information or rewards we face. So we might have a value of a university education being important because the people around us have reinforced this, but it’s only when we are provided with the information and financial support to actually go that it becomes a ‘behaviour’.
- Third, that government policy needs to get more sophisticated at understanding the different influences acting on different people. Sticking with the example, providing simple information about university options may be enough for some but others might not even value it in the first place. In which case policy needs to consider much more about how to promote different courses of action ‘upstream’, for example through thinking about the nature of relationships and relationship support.
- Fourth, following this approach seriously has some quite big implications for government: being able to develop the case to target different people with different types of support; using a range of disciplines and approaches to get better insight into how people make decisions (and not just economics); and being ready to invest in securing big change for the long term and not just looking for the quick wins (which the more punitive legislative approaches tend to provide). And all the while treading the ‘elastic band of public opinion’ carefully to avoid crossing the boundary into paternalism and the nanny state.
Whether any of this is relevant for communities and indigenous policy here is I think part yes and part no. Yes in that current policy like the Northern Territory intervention applies a very limited set of levers in a very intensive and indiscriminate manner. So it places the entire community under income management whereby an adviser decides how to spend your money (unlike the welfare reform pilots in Queensland which will use income management in a limited and targeted way). My view is that the Northern Territory intervention will only serve to reinforce negative signals about community development and personal responsibility. The culture change work is also relevant because of the broader messages about promoting strong families and positive role models, as well as provision of support and advisory services.
Yet the real missing piece is on the supply-side: namely that most indigenous communities are so remote and so lacking in real jobs that there’s little to practically aspire to. There are jobs in the mines, but these merely replace one form of passivity with another and don’t offer a diverse set of life courses.
To a certain extent it reminded me of a visit to Salford I made in writing the original longer discussion paper. What Salford has been doing quite effectively is integrating their community redevelopment policy with the local economy and businesses (not least helped by the BBC’s move up there) along with adopting some cultural and behavioural support policies. What this could mean in community policy speak would be shifting away from the intense place-based initiatives of the past to integrating policy on community assets and opportunities with policies on skills, capabilities, and with cultural capital and personal and mutual responsibility. All of which returns me to my conclusion from the Aurukun blog: that welfare reform and community development is only going to work once someone’s got a sustainable economic vision for these remote communities - which would let loose a whole virtuous circle of cultures, behaviours, and outcomes.
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