Policy Paper: Service Development, Cultural Respect and Service Access Policy

Preamble 

The development of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community based organisations has been an important part of the response of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to colonisation. Through these organisations Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been able to express their collective will, advocate for their rights and needs, develop services and programs for their families and maintain their cultural traditions. Organisations have been developed at the local community, regional, state, territory and national level. Often local level organisations have formed out of the energy of extensive family, clan and kinship networks with some alignment to cultural and language groups reflecting ongoing connections to country, land and sea.

Since the earliest days of colonisation the wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and the right of parents and communities to keep their children with them has been of primary concern to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community based organisations. These issues remain central to the relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community based organisations, governments and others with an interest in children’s policy.

With the development of the Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act (1976) providing a legal framework for the establishment of Aboriginal Corporations the number and breadth of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community based organisations accelerated rapidly. As part of a philosophical Commonwealth government commitment to self-determination these organisations were utilised to provide the local infrastructure through which government funded primary health, child and family welfare, childcare, early childhood, education, housing and legal services could be delivered.

It can be reasonably argued however that this developing service infrastructure, in part due to the bottom up nature of its development, was largely unplanned and poorly coordinated. Arising from this has been a fractured Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community based service system.

Taking child and family welfare services as just one example after some rapid expansion of these services in the early 1980’s for the past two decades the number of services and the scope of these services has largely stagnated. In other sectors, such as housing, some regions have produced large numbers of relatively small Aboriginal housing organisations each competing for government investment and seeking to service the same region. This competition for scarce resources has often exacerbated local community tensions.

SNAICC has criticised child welfare policies of the 1970’s and 80’s that, after the establishment of Aboriginal and Islander Child Care Agencies, (AICCA’s), assumed the problem of child welfare was largely resolved.