The current framework for the employment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the APS bears little resemblance to the Royal Commission’s recommendations on Aboriginal recruitment and training. The Commission’s recommendations were grounded in a broader vision for Indigenous development that has not been fully implemented. For example, recommendation 136 (d) provided that ‘appropriately designed programs … equip different categories of trainees to enter, at various levels, Commonwealth government employment and Aboriginal incorporated organisations’. It was the Commission’s vision that the APS would support the growth of Aboriginal organisations and external representative structures, and that these would wrap around internal Indigenous representation in the APS.
The Commission’s vision included internal and external elements. Internally, the Commission envisaged passive and active representation, ie representation in numbers as well as contributions, across departments and not just in Indigenous-specific areas. Externally, the Commission envisaged that the APS would support and be supported by Indigenous organisations bringing grounded policy advice from outside. This was a vision for ongoing learning and support and career mobility between the APS and Indigenous organisations.
In the current APS framework, Indigenous public sector employment strategies are only internally focussed and do not articulate a vision for learning, support or career mobility with external Indigenous structures. This has consequences for the level and quality of Indigenous participation in the APS. The lack of vision and support for external representation places pressure on Indigenous public servants to act as substitutes for absent constituencies, for example. As a consequence, many leave to take up roles in organisations where their knowledge and connections with those constituencies and communities is lost to the policy process. The limited vision for Indigenous representation articulated by the APS not only limits Indigenous participation in the APS but limits APS capability and Australia’s prospects of achieving more socially representative bureaucracies more generally.
Attached in support of my submission is a recent paper, The limits of representation through Indigenous public sector employment: no substitute for constituency (presented at IPSA 2018 World Congress, Brisbane 21-25 July 2018). The paper observes that government often expects Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employees to substitute for, rather than guide consultation with, absent constituents, a problem heightened by the absence of strong mechanisms for external Indigenous representation. The paper refers to the Commission’s expectation in the original vision for Indigenous public sector employment that representative bureaucracy for Indigenous Australians would sit alongside external political representation. The paper argues that government employment places Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander public servants in three distinct relationships – an employment relationship, a representative relationship and the constituency relationship they are in as Indigenous Australians – and concludes that the potential cost to government of conflating these relationships is a full constituency relationship with its First People.
Two forthcoming articles may also be of interest and can be provided on request.
- Ganter, E. Arguing about Indigenous administrative participation in the Whitlam era: a representation theory analysis (forthcoming in the Australian Journal of Public Administration). This article discusses the views of HC Coombs (Commission Chair), CD Rowley (advisor on Aboriginal issues), Barrie Dexter (Secretary of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs) and Charles Perkins (Assistant Secretary of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Arrernte man from Central Australia). The paper shows that despite having different views on representation, all four doubted the capacity of the bureaucracy to provide a meaningful channel for Indigenous representation internally. The paper suggests that understanding their doubts sheds light on tensions still present in the APS today.
- Lahn, J. and Ganter, E. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in public service roles: representation, recognition and relationships in Australian government bureaucracies (forthcoming in the Journal of Australian Political Economy Special Issue on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Employment). This article compares my study with Lahn’s more recent findings that Indigenous public servants have ‘unmet expectations’ and feel ‘under-valued and underutilised’ within the APS. The article suggests the need for more ‘conversation, dialogue and relationship-building’ between Australian bureaucracies and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander public servants.
Thank you for the opportunity to make a submission to the APS Review.
Dr Elizabeth Ganter
Visiting Scholar, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research
Research School of Social Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences
The Australian National University
elizabeth.ganter@anu.edu.au, elizabeth.ganter@alumni.anu.edu.au
REDACTED

Elizabeth Ganter - Paper presented at IPSA 2018 World Congress, Brisbane 21-25 July 2018
The limits of representation through Indigenous public sector
employment: no substitute for constituency
Elizabeth Ganter
Visiting Scholar, ANU Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research
Paper presented at International Political Science Association (IPSA) 2018 World Congress,
Brisbane 21-25 July 2018
Abstract
“How can you make decisions about Aboriginal people when you can’t even talk to the
people you’ve got here that are blackfellas?” This question to government from a senior
Aboriginal public servant in the Northern Territory raises an important issue in the
relationship between government and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander public servants.
In seeking to build representative bureaucracies through Indigenous public sector
employment, government often expects Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employees
to substitute for, rather than guide consultation with, absent communities. I argue that this
expectation conflates three distinct relationships for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
public servants: (1) the employment relationship with government, (2) the representative
relationship in which this places Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander public servants with
their people, and (3) the constituency relationship between government and all Indigenous
Australians. Understanding the distinct character of each relationship shows the limits of
the representation government should expect through Indigenous public sector
employment.
Author note
Research School of Social Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences
The Australian National University
Mobile: 0400 124639
1
Elizabeth Ganter - Paper presented at IPSA 2018 World Congress, Brisbane 21-25 July 2018
The limits of representation through Indigenous public sector employment:
no substitute for constituency
Interviewing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander public servants in the Northern Territory
in 2007, one senior level officer asked in an imaginary conversation with government:
“How can you make decisions about Aboriginal people when you can’t even talk to the
people you’ve got here that are blackfellas?” As a long-time observer of the relationship
between government and Indigenous Australians, both as a public servant and an
academic, I found this question profound. So much so that I used it as the starting point of
my book about the experiences of the individuals behind the Indigenous public sector
employment statistics, whom I characterised as ‘reluctant representatives’ (Ganter 2016).
In asking how the government could make decisions about her people when it couldn’t talk
to her, this officer was speaking neither as an ordinary employee nor as a representative
of her people. She was of course both. She was a public servant and she was also a local
self-identifying Aboriginal person whose advice helped the bureaucracy be more
representative of the people it served. But she was portraying herself as more than this.
She was asking to be recognised and spoken to as an Indigenous Australian, a member of
a political constituency of long standing.
In seeking to build representative bureaucracies through Indigenous public sector
employment, government often expects Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employees
to substitute for, rather than guide its interaction with, absent constituencies. My research
drew out this tension for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander public servants in the
Northern Territory (Ganter 2016; see also 2011). I argue here that the problem occurs
when three distinct relationships are conflated - (1) the employment relationship, (2) the
representative relationship and (3) the constituency relationship. Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander public servants are in all three. Understanding these as distinct relationships
could lead to a more sophisticated engagement between government and Indigenous
Australians.
To explain my argument, I’ll take each relationship in turn.
- The employment relationship
The first is the employment relationship. Through public sector employment, Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander people participate in Australian efforts to create more
representative bureaucracies. Those who self-identify help build the Indigenous public
sector employment statistics and in so doing help the Commonwealth, State and Territory
public sectors demonstrate social diversity (see Smith 2013; Lahn and Ganter in press).
Having a socially diverse public sector should make government more responsive to the
needs of the community. Representative bureaucracy is premised on that the idea that the
presence of individuals from particular groups in sufficient numbers in the right locations
will inject their views and perspectives into institutional products. This idea acknowledges
subjectivity and discretionary judgement on the part of public servants. For bureaucracies
to become more representative of diversity, public servants from identified groups must
2
Elizabeth Ganter - Paper presented at IPSA 2018 World Congress, Brisbane 21-25 July 2018
be able to add their voices to the framing of advice and the design and implementation of
relevant policies and programs. That is, based on the rules that guide all public servants –
the merit principle, the code of conduct, the job description – the members of Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander communities who work in government departments that claim
to be representative of those communities must do some on-the-job representing.
We’re not discussing principal–agent representation or improper accountabilities but the
opportunities for informal representation that come up in the daily work of all public
servants who bring their background, knowledge and experience to their work. All public
servants have some discretion in the way they work. It’s the job of departments to exercise
discretion in the implementation of decisions, or government would get nothing done (see
Richardson 2002). Yet Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander public servants can be seen as
partial and over-involved when they bring their ideas and interests, their discretion, into
Indigenous policies and programs.
The problem with the work on representative bureaucracy is that the link between passive
representation, which focusses on numbers, and active representation, which focusses on
substantive contributions, is unclear and under-theorized. I argue that understanding how
the members of diverse social groups do any actual representing takes us out of the
employment relationship and into another one. This is the representative relationship that
exists between those present in bureaucracies and their people outside.
- The representative relationship
Being employed in government departments and working in Indigenous policies and
programs, as many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander public servants do, places them in
a relationship with their people that involves representation. In Hanna Pitkin’s iconic work
on the concept of representation, the representative brings forth the absent (Pitkin 1967).
The mere presence of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander public servant reminds a
workplace of the absence of the rest of their population. And as soon as this person makes
a more active contribution, they informally bring forth the views and interests of this
absent population, at least in the eyes of others.
The representative relationship is an exclusive relationship between Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander public servants and their communities. The government has no place in this
relationship, but should understand and respect it. This relationship, if properly nurtured,
can help build trust between the government and communities.
To understand the representative relationship better, we need theories of descriptive
representation or the representation of historically disadvantaged groups by group
members.1 Although developed originally for electoral representatives, this work has
application in non-electoral contexts. Descriptive representatives bring benefits. They can
be effective role models. They can make good trustees, because their judgement is
generally more likely to reflect grounded knowledge of their community than the
judgement of others. Descriptive representatives may remind the public service of
1 See political theorist Suzanne Dovi’s (2017) summary for an understanding of key concepts, issues and
approaches in descriptive political representation.
3
Elizabeth Ganter - Paper presented at IPSA 2018 World Congress, Brisbane 21-25 July 2018
overlooked perspectives. Through their different orientations they may help build cross-
cultural understanding and make government seem more legitimate to alienated
populations (see Phillips 1995: 167-8). But the ability of descriptive representatives to
deliver these benefits depends entirely on the quality and robustness of their relationship
with the represented, with their communities outside government. This is a sensitive and
sometimes fragile relationship, and good representatives need to look after it carefully or
risk seeming inauthentic to their people.2
One way in which descriptives representatives might look after the relationship with their
people is by respecting and protecting their people’s right to be heard. In a trustee-style
relationship, representatives make judgements about the best interests of their group
without referring back to the group. Trusteeship sits well with representative bureaucracy
because public servants do make autonomous judgements and cannot under public service
ethics check back with their constituency. In circumstances of trusteeship a descriptive
representative might use their positional authority to guide consultation and ensure there
are processes in place for absent people to be heard.
A way in which descriptives representatives might inadvertently abuse the representative
relationship they are in with their people is by stepping into the space where their people
could and should be heard, and substituting their own voice. Here is how it happens. Being
in a position to speak for the group distances the representative from the group. It is in the
nature of representation that the representative is at a distance from those they represent,
otherwise there’d be no need for representation. But when the representative is selected
on the basis of group identity, being at a distance challenges their legitimacy at its source.
And the distance from the rest of the group is often greatest at the very moment when the
representative is best positioned to speak. It is one of the deep and abiding problems of
descriptive representation that the representative so positioned, especially if acting alone
or under pressure can now all too easily step beyond their authority and into the privileged
and unaccountable position of speaking as the absent group. Now there is no
representative relationship, so this is no longer representation. This is substitution.
The theorists have outlined the circumstance in which substitution may be justified, such
as when proper consultation is impossible or a crucial opportunity would otherwise be
missed (see Alcoff 1995; Spivak 1988). But in the context of Indigenous public sector
employment in Australia, it was one of the most important findings of my research that
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander public servants most often left, or lost faith in, the
public service because of the random expectation they speak in place of, or substitute
themselves for, their absent communities. This expectation abuses the representative
relationship. And in political terms, to ask an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander public
servant what Indigenous Australians think is to conceal the rest of their population with all
its diversity of interests from view and relieve government of the effort and cost of reaching
out to that population.
2
Suzanne Dovi argues that a good representative relationship must be based not on elitism or exclusion but on
mutual relations with dispossessed groups in which there are shared fates (Dovi 2002).
4
Elizabeth Ganter - Paper presented at IPSA 2018 World Congress, Brisbane 21-25 July 2018
- The constituency relationship
The constituency relationship is the relationship between the government and all
Indigenous Australians. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander public servants are in this
relationship on both sides. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander public servants can be
consulted on their employment relationship with government. They can choose to be
consulted on their side of the representative relationship with their people. They can be
trustees for the views and perspectives of Indigenous Australians. They can advise
government how to communicate with Indigenous Australians. But in a just democracy,
they cannot be consulted on the interests of their constituency as a whole. When my
interviewee asked “How can you make decisions about Aboriginal people when you can’t
even talk to the people you’ve got here that are blackfellas?” she wasn’t asking to
substitute for her absent population but pointing out a communication problem, the
government’s communication problem with her constituency. As an employee of
government who had her own relationship with that constituency, she was offering to help.
The constituency relationship between government and Indigenous Australians is of long
standing and deep complexity. Within this relationship, the government is on trial by
Indigenous Australians for its authenticity, consistency, care, respect and capacity to learn.
My research participants, senior Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who had been
revolving in and out of public service employment for decades, gave me to understand that
they would stay in government longer if it worked harder on its relationship with their
communities. As it was, these ‘reluctant representatives’ were always on the lookout for
more clearly representative roles in external Indigenous organisations where they could
take a break from the tensions of representing on the inside.
Iris Marion Young designed some of her most important work on democratic justice to
mitigate the risk of identity-based substitution, arguing that civil society would be drawn
more effectively into democratic structures through plural representative relationships
than by identity representation alone (see Young 1997; Young 2000).3 The original vision
for Indigenous public sector employment recommended by the Royal Commission of
Australian Government Administration in 1976 (Commonwealth of Australia 1976)
assumed this kind of plurality, ie that representative bureaucracy would not be standing
alone but sit alongside external Indigenous political representation. I suggest that too much
weight has been placed on Indigenous public sector employment in the absence of clear
structures for external Indigenous political representation in Australia.
Representation through Indigenous public sector employment reaches its limit of political
value and relevance when it becomes a substitute for constituency, or for proper
consultation with diversely situated Indigenous Australians on matters affecting their
communities. The cost to government of not recognising the representative relationship
that is at stake for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander public servants is much more than
poor retention in the employment relationship, but a full constituency relationship with its
First People.
3 Young wrote: ‘The representative function of speaking for should not be confused with an identifying
requirement that the representative speak as the constituents would, to try to be present for them in their absence’
(Young 2000: 127).
5
Elizabeth Ganter - Paper presented at IPSA 2018 World Congress, Brisbane 21-25 July 2018
References
Alcoff, Linda (1995). The Problem of Speaking for Others. In: Roof, J & Wiegman, R (eds.) Who can
speak?: Authority and critical identity. University of Illinois Press, Urbana.
Commonwealth of Australia (1976). Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration:
Report. Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra.
Dovi, Suzanne (2002). Preferable Descriptive Representatives: Will Just Any Woman, Black, or
Latino Do? American Political Science Review 96(04):729-743.
Ganter, Elizabeth (2011). Representatives in Orbit: Livelihood options for Aboriginal people in the
government of the Australian desert The Rangeland Journal 33385-93.
Ganter, Elizabeth (2016). Reluctant Representatives: Blackfella bureaucrats speak in Australia's
north, ANU Press, Canberra.
Lahn, J & Ganter, E (in press). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in public service roles:
negotiating representation, recognition and relationships in Australian government
bureaucracies. Journal of Australian Political Economy Special Issue. Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Employment: Key issues for policy, practice and research.
Phillips, Anne (1995). The Politics of Presence, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel (1967). The Concept of Representation, University of California Press,
Berkeley.
Richardson, Henry S. (2002). Democratic Autonomy: Public reasoning about the ends of policy,
Oxford University Press, New York.
Smith, R (2013). Representative Bureaucracy in Australia: A post-colonial, multicultural society. In:
von Maravić, P, Peters, BG & Schröter, E (eds.) Representative bureaucracy in action:
Country profiles from the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia. Edward Elgar Publishing, UK.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988). Can the Subaltern Speak? In: Nelson, C & Grossberg, L (eds.)
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. University of Illinois Press, Urbana.
Young, Iris Marion (1997). Deferring Group Representation. In: Shapiro, I & Kymlicka, W (eds.)
Ethnicity and Group Rights - Nomos XXXIX New York University Press, New York.
Young, Iris Marion (2000). Inclusion and Democracy, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
6