27/10/2025
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There is a gap in Australian political attention, media coverage and academic scholarly literature about Indigenous policy and integrity matters.
The Uluru Dialogue team at UNSW Sydney has been working post-referendum to understand the reasons the voice referendum failed.
And we have been working especially on the accountability and integrity aspects of Australia’s political system, which the voice to parliament was intended to address.
This is an edited extract from the Centre for Public Integrity Oration, Integrity at the Margins: Accountability in Aboriginal Policy, delivered by Scientia Professor Megan Davis AC on Wednesday.
It is incontrovertible that political lies and disinformation derailed the advocacy for a voice and, therefore, we never really arrived at a point where the voice was debated or discussed seriously in the context of Australian democracy and accountability, because of the avalanche of fabrications and exaggerations about the Constitution and race. However, we did garner some important insights through research about the campaign.
One was that few Australians knew that the voice proposal was driven by integrity issues that plague Indigenous communities. And by that, I mean the integrity issues relating to government and bureaucracy and accountability.
And I say that because we know there tends to be a focus on Indigenous accountability to the state, but less about the state’s accountability to Indigenous communities as Australian citizens.
This is partly explained by the civics education gap in Australia. The diminishing bank of popular knowledge about Aboriginal disadvantage and closing the gap meant the exigency and the purpose of the voice to parliament were not fully ventilated.
The deliberative dialogue process that was rolled out over 2016 and 2017 by the Referendum Council was to ascertain from First Nations people whether they were interested in taking up the opportunity of constitutional recognition that was being provided to them by the state and, if so, what would meaningful recognition look like in their regions.
In each of those dialogues we heard two things: that people felt they had no agency or voice when it came to decisions made about their specific communities. Then they explained the tremendously laboured and disconnected ways decision-making is undertaken by bureaucrats and the often farcical consequences of communities being subjugated to bureaucrats when making decisions about resource allocation and community needs.
How did integrity matters dominate the deliberative dialogues? The dialogues came barely two years after the introduction of the Indigenous Advancement Strategy in 2014. When the Abbott government was elected, Indigenous programs, grants and activities were moved to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. And in May 2014, the new flagship policy, the IAS, was announced. This policy saw $534m stripped from the Indigenous affairs budget.
What we heard across Australia was that Indigenous communities, remote, regional and urban, said there was no consultation. The implementation of the IAS was brutal and cruel, and arbitrary. The Australian National Audit Office confirmed later that there was a “lack of consultation with Indigenous communities before the implementation of the strategy”.
There was no review of programs and activities to determine what worked and what did not work. Overnight, communities were disrupted by a razor gang that abolished programs that had been run for decades, award-winning women’s night patrols that protect women and children from violence.
The ANAO would later validate everything the community was saying in the dialogues about lack of consultation, no evaluation of efficacy of programs, sudden withdrawal of funding and arbitrary decision-making on future funding. Its report made for shocking reading.
The idea behind the voice was that it would provide First Nations people with the opportunity to provide advice to the executive and to the parliament on matters that impact their communities.
The environment post-referendum is one of the worst policy settings we’ve seen in decades. The circle this government consults with is minuscule. Mike Dillon, a former bureaucrat who worked for three federal Indigenous affairs ministers, has raised this point from his perspective inside the system. Dillon says: “Engaging in private discussions is a favoured tactic of governments as it precludes critical commentary and the exploration of more wide-ranging options. Secrecy is the preferred modus operandi of governments and powerful interest groups as it allows deals to be done without scrutiny and accompanying pressure.”
The Albanese government has adopted an economic empowerment policy that, according to Dillon, blurs policy and profit, “uniting corporate actors who both shape and benefit from economic empowerment policy”. Dillon raises several integrity issues with this policy. First, he says it creates “the preconditions for the systemic co-option of the Indigenous leadership” and he says negotiations in private, combined with the increasingly parsimonious approach to transparency by the commonwealth, could result in “buying” support from the Indigenous leadership for sub-optimal policies.
The “commercial” confidentiality involved in some aspects of the First Nations Economic Alliance Charter and the deep-seated reluctance of the commonwealth to engage the wider public in policy issues, and the ultimate power imbalance between the commonwealth and the First Nations partners, mean there will inevitably be a heightened risk of inappropriate influence being applied to individuals or to the partners as a whole.
The only effective protection against this, Dillon argues, is a much greater commitment to transparency. He says all funding to the First Nations partners under the economic empowerment arrangements should be automatically made public, and the responsible ministers should be required to make an annual statement to parliament detailing all significant communications with, and funding decisions taken relating to, the First Nations Economic Empowerment Partnership.
In the wake of the post-referendum loss, the new US administration and the landslide federal election, a smugness has emerged about Australia’s electoral system and Australian democracy.
And in the post-election smug, where the elite opinion-makers are crowing about the pioneering history of the secret ballot, compulsory voting and the Australian Electoral Commission, and lamenting why ordinary Australians do not revere and champion these pioneers, there are the Australians at the margins, whose everyday struggles with bureaucracy and government mean they are not inclined to celebrate the things elites have the luxury to indulge in. Because for them the rule of law and accountability are abstract.
Much of the celebratory focus of this nascent discourse on how extraordinary Australia’s institutions and the rule of law is on the process of elections and less on the integrity of the functioning of our democracy.
Since the referendum, consultation has narrowed for Indigenous peoples, even as the government claims partnership. Closing the Gap is expert-driven but not meaningfully democratic.
In recent years, more Australians are learning that they are not alone in their concerns and anxiety about integrity, about the shared experiences many have in dealing with government and the insurmountable challenges many encounter in the face of administrative decision-making and government wrongdoing.
Integrity and accountability are not bureaucratic burdens; they are how citizens belong to the state. Without it, Australia governs its First Peoples through discretion and often arbitrary decision-making. First Nations peoples remain the canaries in the mine of democracy, and when our voices fall silent, the air has already gone bad.
Integrity at the margins is the measure of the nation’s democracy, and it should be as important as the AEC and the pioneers of the secret ballot and preferential voting and Australia’s grand electoral system.
This is an edited extract from the Centre for Public Integrity Oration, Integrity at the Margins: Accountability in Aboriginal Policy, delivered by Scientia Professor Megan Davis AC on Wednesday.
Professor Davis is the Balnaves Chair in Constitutional Law and pro vice chancellor society, UNSW Sydney.
