Elizabeth Ganter

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

Elizabeth.ganter@anu.edu.au

Mobile: 0400 124639

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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.

1. 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
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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.

2. 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.
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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).

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Elizabeth Ganter - Paper presented at IPSA 2018 World Congress, Brisbane 21-25 July 2018

3. 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).
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Elizabeth Ganter - Paper presented at IPSA 2018 World Congress, Brisbane 21-25 July 2018

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