CORPORATE GOVERNANCE Building Trust and Credibility

Transcription

1 Institute of Public Administration Australia Queensland Division Annual State Conference 24 August 2001 CORPORATE GOVERNANCE Building Trust and Credibility CORPORATE GOVERNANCE DREAMING THE ABORIGINAL PERSPECTIVE BY ROBERT BLACKLEY Manager, Partnerships & Alliances, Tropic North Institute of TAFE, Cairns IPAA Qld Conference 2001 Page 1

2 Thanks everybody for coming along to listen, and thanks to the traditional owners for allowing me to speak. Actually I ve just changed my whole speech after listening to Peter and from that last question Who s allowed to stand for elections? In this so-called democracy anybody can stand and anybody can be elected. And you have to be aboriginal over the age of 18 and not have committed a fraud offence. This allows a whole range of people to be elected as community councillors who are totally inappropriate. And we have, sadly, convicted rapists chairing councils. Those kinds of people do not inspire trust and have no integrity or credibility. So I ll just start off with a little discussion, a little story, about how I was elected. I was elected as a councillor at 21 with a quarter of the community s support. That support dropped down a little the second time around when I was elected. And because anybody can stand and because it s the first past the post type process, I was elected mayor with one-third of the council s support. So you ve got a quarter of the community s support and one-third of the council s support and you end up the supreme leader and the whole of the bureaucracy and the government wants everything to go through you. So who in the community trusts you? Not many. So there s just one to start with. So that s a problem. And there s obviously glaring inconsistencies with the Community Services Act and the notions of corporate governance. If we are to assume that the Act overrides these conventions of corporate governance, which they do, then Community Councils being responsible for the good governance of the community in accordance with the traditions, customs and practices of that area should override. So what happens when it s become a custom that nepotism is rife? What if it s the practice of the area to not allow, as in one case I won t name the council but you cannot get a house in a particular DOGIT council if you do not have sex with the councillor who gives out houses? This is pathetic. It is disgusting behaviour. And it s out there. A lot of people don t want to talk about the truth in indigenous communities. I think you ve got to look at statistics and then read anything into it you like. Yes, Peter s correct that our financial accountability has gotten better over the years. But go to a community and ask any individual whether they think life is getting better. The answer will be no. The answer on Palm Island has always been Yeah, there s a few more houses. They look a little bit better. We ve got a new hospital. But life is crap. Life is not fulfilling. People have no power. So I worry about democracy and I believe there should be more participation. And there s no process for that at the moment. And I worry about the structure that exists the community councils. How, as Peter puts it, they are responsible from the womb to the tomb. How untrained people have to grapple with sometimes twenty pieces of legislation. Just before we even come into the office and walk down the corridor we are tripping over the red tape associated with 40 different Acts. People aren t trained and there s no real focus on training. I think as a community councillor, in six years I received seven days of training. None of that had anything to do with our nature of government. I had to go to university to learn about senates and IPAA Qld Conference 2001 Page 2

3 statutory bodies and high courts and how the whole system relates and interrelates. So there is no training. So you start off with a whole range of people being elected to councils with various skills and baggage. Most of the councils were missions in the past and people were sent there from all over the place. And those people don t trust each other. Noel Pearson talks about trust all the time. And recently when we were working with him in Cairns and he sat down and I spoke about this, he said to make the point, when you are speaking, about trust. So it s interesting that building trust and credibility is the topic. I wasn t aware of that. So trust, he says, back in the 60s, in the 50s, even up into the 70s, trust was that much. Today it s this much. Why is that? There are various reasons for that. But when people don t trust each other they spend all of their energies trying to back-stab each other. As you ve seen and all of you would have read the Australian in recent days, the Courier Mail makes mention of Mr Clark and Mr Robertson standing down because of the way their in-fighting is just totally ruining ATSIC. That s a pretty fair assessment. So some community councillors spend all of their time just back-stabbing each other and trying to put a stop. They are the gate-keepers. Like Peter says, they hold the keys to success in communities because of this notion of democracy that an elected body is there to represent their constituents and that all government services will go through that body. And clearly with the most popular councillor on any DOGIT community having 25% of their community s support, they do not represent their community. They represent a small faction of the community. Lots of councillors unfortunately buy their votes. A man has been on the Palm Island council for over 20 years because he supplies alcohol and food to the voters just prior to the election time. And these kinds of buying of popularity within a community goes on at a daily basis. We ve got a massively corrupt situation on Palm Island. The government refuses to do anything about it. It s retrospective action. Who knows what s really happening? It s like you ll wait until a problem exists and is glaringly obvious that you do something about it. And that has disastrous effects on young people. My opinion on the leadership of today is that leaders don t inspire any credibility at all. There are good leaders out there but there are some who should just walk away. They should be removed. I was having lunch with a friend of mine two days ago and she said to make the point about compulsive gambling. I was going to anyway. We ve got a lot of high roller fat cats out in the aboriginal world who are compulsive gamblers. And if you allow a compulsive gambler into any organisation where there are public monies, it s like inviting a heroin user into your house. You know, you go to the toilet and your DVD will be gone by the time you turn around. It s obvious. So what do we do about this kind of thing and where do we go? In all of this, there is no focus on corporate governance. The transparency is that it is glaringly obvious that problems exist. There is no transparency of decision making and there s no accountability. The only accountability is through Mr Scanlan s audit process and that s basically financial. It did make mention in the last report about community council leaders having borrowed money from IPAA Qld Conference 2001 Page 3

4 community councils and highlighted those people that were named in Parliament. That didn t embarrass them. They still borrowed money. They re still standing over their workers, their CEOs, their accountants, their senior officers. This is why there is such a high turnover of staff. Because how can a CEO be expected to work in a community when somebody comes and literally holds a gun to their head and says You bastard, why did you sack me? What are they going to do? They re going to leave straight away. When senior officers are asked to sign off for monies to be taken out of government grants and given to people for dubious reasons, then they do come under pressure. CEOs by law are expected to take to this Criminal Justice Commission, another law enforcement agency s information they hold. They have to live in that community. Their families live in that community. They know that if they make one of these decisions, they ll never, ever get a house. Their family won t get a house. Their family won t get a job. Then they re not going to, and they cave in under the pressure. They flip out. They spin out. They leave. So in order for corporate governance to be a reality there needs to be stability. My own opinion is that processes should be cemented whereby individuals aren t needed. We can t have things based on personalities because personalities always leave. Someone could get hit by a bus. It s one of the things in the bureaucracy, as you all know. Someone has the corporate memory and they are not expendable and therefore they never leave. And knowledge is power. So how do we empower people through knowledge? Peter makes the point of training people in schools. Now obviously Australia will not in this two party preferred system ever teach politics in the primary school because of continual arguments over what brand of politics we are going to be teaching. Whether it s left or right, or left right out. It s obvious it s not going to happen. Maybe in a vocational sense through TAFE s. I ve been trying for a long time to develop curriculum through the TAFE Institutes on community council training that covers a broad range of things from basically the constitution down. And it s problematic. We haven t managed to do it as yet but I think there needs to be a concerted drive to develop training courses. And more so, I ve been accused of being a fascist in the past when I ve said that there should be a prerequisite for standing. You shouldn t just be allowed to be black. There s got to be more to it than that. You ve got to have some understanding of the nature of the reality that we live in. A 100-hour course might suffice. You have to be required to pass that course before you can be eligible to stand. But then people will say how can those in power determine what it takes to be in power. And we can argue all we want forever about this and the problem will still occur. Basically there needs to be training and there needs to be strong leaders out there who are mentors for the new up and coming leadership. Now I ve been talking to young and by young I mean 30, 35 down, between 20s and up to 30s and young aboriginal people are just chaffing at the bit to take over, to be allowed to step forward and take over from the old guard who are just reinforcing the status quo. Unfortunately I don t see much future for ATSIC when we ve got female ATSIC councillors defending convicted rapists. How can a woman ever defend a rapist? I find that disgusting. There s no IPAA Qld Conference 2001 Page 4

5 credibility and there s no trust. So they say mentorship, education, but who s going to do it? I just wanted to bounce off some of Peter s ideas. He mentions the charter, the people and the quality of the information. Obviously the charter, the Act and associated pieces of legislation are crap. They don t work. Just ask any lawyer to look at it and they just laugh and say that to allow people to operate under this charter is to set them up for failure. That was talked about by conspiracy theorists in our community that Jo Bjelke-Petersen basically put this in there so that community councils would destroy themselves. Most of them are in pristine areas. Palm Island for instance is worth billions of dollars. There are no trained people. There are very few senior officers who have finished Year 12, let alone done any form of additional training. Actually those that finish year 12 and do get training are accused of trying to be a white man and dragged down by their community. The information is limited. It s slow in coming. The people aren t up-to-date with the information age and that information is not understood. How can you understand when you don t comprehend the reality in which you live - about the political reasons why things are done, legislation, process. And when you live in a world of conflict within yourself about your own cultural identity, about appropriate ways that decisions are to be made. So I think the communities have come to a point where there is no more need for debate. That it s time for action. My own personal view is that DOGIT community councils are a dead-end street. And I ve said for a while that we need to open up these communities. We need to change the form of legislation that governs the land. We need to allow for - I don t care what colour skin they ve got - but people with new ideas to live in and share those ideas with our people. We need to foster a new generation of community leaders who are multicultural in their understanding. Not forgetting who they are, but not losing their way in this global world that we live in. That s not going to happen while you restrict community councils with the legislation that exists. It s not going to happen while community councils prevent outsiders from coming in, from investing. I had a long talk just two nights ago with Mark McKinter, who s the JCU student president of the union. And he went to Palm Island to discuss self-determination through economic development. And at every turn of his argument he was hit with racism and xenophobia - now we can t allow that white man in, we can t allow that Japanese man in, we can t allow that Greek in. What s going on? Those councillors children are going to fail. They are going to be unable to leave the shores of Palm Island to step on a plane and to live in a mainstream world. I had this discussion last night over dinner and just a bit of self-reflection. It took years for me to leave Palm Island. It took being stabbed in the back by community councillors and resigning from the council. It took all of that for me to finally leave because the social structure and the community prevents anybody from living in the mainstream. Now how do we expect our community members to be doctors, to be information technology experts, when they can t even leave? They can t even jump on a bus to go to Uni. They can t budget their money to live in a share house. They ve got no IPAA Qld Conference 2001 Page 5

6 capacity whatsoever. The picture I paint is bleak but it s a reality and I see children on Palm Island and in other communities who just have no future. The culture of acceptance for some of the most obscene and abhorrent acts that any human can commit on another is to the point in indigenous communities where we need to bring in Justices like Mr Fitzgerald to examine the nature of the problem. I think we all understand the nature of the problem within communities, but very few people want to talk about it outside. And I ll tell you why. It s because you ve all heard the saying people in glass houses shouldn t throw stones. And I admire Noel Pearson - the way he speaks and the truth that he speaks. And there s virtually nothing that can be brought in his past that can be held against him. And that s one of the reasons why community leaders are reluctant to be out there discussing the problems in the communities. Because everybody has their skeleton in the closet. And then they still have to face the community when they get back. Fear of some repercussion. I m prepared as a young indigenous man to stand up and profess to know that there is a right and a wrong way. And I can safely say that there is nothing in my background that people can hold against me. So this is just the first step in a larger cause to change the leadership, to remove the drug-takers, alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, rapists, pedophiles and thieves from community councils, from aboriginal organisations, from anywhere basically in the public spectrum. Because I don t believe these people have any credibility and have no role. Back in the days when we used to - I grew up in the Territory - back before while fellas came, we had a system of dealing with people which was worse than death to be ostracised, to be highlighted as a bad person. And I think we ve got to do a little bit of that. Make a bit of an example and bring in the clean, intelligent, culturally aware, strong leaders who encourage participation from their community members and command respect through their actions. At the moment there s very little participation - only that you go to a ballot box. And this is the nature of our governance across the board. And nobody really has a say in anything. So we need to totally educate communities. For a start we need to change these Acts. We need to open up communities. It may not work for all communities as there are places that are very traditionally strong and they can maintain that way of life and still thrive in a mainstream world, in a global world. But places like Palm Island are fantasy communities, fantasy lands, created in the mission days. And nobody is prepared to grapple with what they ve created. Everybody should take some responsibility for what s occurred. There are people in the public service today who have been there for years and they are to some extent responsible for the denigration of the community. The community members have to take responsibility for their lives. We have to stop running each other down. We have to start promoting the people within the community who are successes, who are potential successes. And it s sad when you see someone like David Peachey score a try and you ll hear a Murri say He s no good, he s useless. What s he doing there playing rugby league? Noel Pearson will stand up and talk. He s no good. Look at him. He s fat. What s that got to do with anything. It s not in our nature. It was never a part of our traditional society. IPAA Qld Conference 2001 Page 6

7 The politics of division and hate were not a part of our society. The law of man wasn t part of our society. The law was the law. And if ever there was a fair and just law it was the traditional way of doing things. So in terms of community councils, we need to legislate for alternative governance. We need to allow our elders and our women to be a part of the process of decision-making and this conflicts to a large extent with democracy. Obviously we can t go back, and there still needs to be some elected body by their constituents to govern certain aspects of communities. I think the roads, rates and rubbish are last on the priority. That s why we ve got such dirty communities, and roads with potholes that you could fall into. I m six foot tall and I just about can t climb out of some of those potholes. And nobody collects any rates. All of the communities are in debt. I think Mr Scanlan can say that and back me up there. We need to really focus on who we are and allow for our traditional decisionmaking processes to be a part of this modern day. So whilst the Aboriginal Co-ordinating Council has been taking a review of the Community Services Act for a number of years, there s really been no emphasis by the government to take those recommendations up and put them into practice. How difficult would it be to ask somebody to put together some drafting instructions to incorporate traditional decision-making processes into a modern-day democracy? Now who are you going to ask to do that? Is anybody out here in this room brave enough to put their hand up and say I ll have a shot at it? It requires a lot of debate. But debate shouldn t be open. It should be set within a specific time frame. So corporate governance dreaming. When Peter and I first discussed this we just laughed for five minutes or more. And I still smile. And I thought I might come up here and just go to sleep and just dream. Because we re living in a dream if we think that the way that we re moving now is to a point in the future that is a point of success. We require some very drastic action and there needs to be some reciprocity. And community councillors should stop looking into the past. Community members need to take responsibility for their future. But governments and bureaucracies need to arm them with the knowledge to create that future for themselves. Because the future is bleak at the moment. We cannot expect people to create a vibrant, long-lasting, successful lifestyle for their people when they have little understanding of the processes by which they get there. Everybody in the community has an idea about where they d like to go, but I think all of us need to work together to get there. IPAA Qld Conference 2001 Page 7