Indigenous Public Policy Futures: A Manifesto for Relationalist Public Administration

Abstract

By taking a long view of public administration on the Australian continent, this chapter places the recently imposed British-European political system alongside ancient Indigenous governance. We argue that imposed settler administration struggles to gain foundational legitimacy in ways that require turning to a relational orientation, as conceptualised by Aboriginal Australian peoples, to support Australian nation building and the accompanying provision of public goods. This relational orientation supports a threefold agenda: the development of a viable political settlement to address the colonial wound that haunts the Australian polity; supporting the development of effective forms of public administration in relationship with this land, and; responding to questions of identity and belonging by developing forms of governance that begin by engaging with first peoples’ political ordering and forms of governance of this place rather than with their recently arrived and relatively ungrounded European counterparts. We argue that this relational orientation, borne of original ‘civilizational culture’, can inform the provision of public services by Australian governments and hence the development of an Australian ‘civilisational state’.