Success and Failure in Australian Indigenous Policy: Moral Dynamics and Rhetorical Registers

Abstract

How are ideas of failure and success used in Australian Indigenous policy? This question came to me in 2007 when I heard a philanthropist, newly involved in Indigenous affairs, tell a simple success story. The ideas of rhetorical registers and moral dynamics helped me think about what was going on. As a more established participant and analyst of Indigenous affairs, I knew that this was a fragile success story at best, and that developments at the time threatened its continuation. But that was the last thing the philanthropist or his audience wanted to hear. They were in a rhetorical register of challenging Indigenous policy, and those of us associated with it, to do better. My reaction to this moral dynamic was to move discussion into a different, more calming rhetorical register, explaining what had been done in the past to arrive at this delicate fragile success story, as I understood it more deeply. I recognised that some other more established participants in Australian Indigenous affairs had made similar rhetorical moves in the policy debates of the previous year or three, since the Howard Government’s abolition of ATSIC as a failure in 2004–2005. Northern Territory Chief Minister, Clare Martin, for example, had produced a very clear instance of the calming rhetorical register in a speech in May 2006. In this paper I will recount in more detail these events and thoughts of 2007 and develop further these ideas of rhetorical registers and moral dynamics. Policy is by nature a future-oriented, aspirational activity, trying to make our social world better. So the presence of moral dynamics and rhetorical registers within policy debates using ideas of both failure and success should be expected and welcomed. But analytic understanding of how these dynamics and registers play out over time also needs to be developed, identifying both strengths and weaknesses of different moral and rhetorical positioning.