Indigenous Affairs
At the conclusion of the NTER policy evaluation project, the results of the evaluation were used to inform the next ten years of policy for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory – the new National Partnership Agreement for Closing the Gap in the Northern Territory. This project involved the coordination of a Federal Government taskforce, consisting of 17 different government bodies and with a $3.4-Billion-dollar budget, set up to design policy that would affect Aboriginal people across three states and a territory.
The Australian Government identified three key areas for consultation across the 73 prescribed Aboriginal communities affected by the Northern Territory ‘Intervention’:
– School attendance and educational achievement — ensuring all children go to school and succeed
– Economic development and employment — ensuring Indigenous people are part of the Territory’s economy and that people have jobs
– Tackling alcohol abuse — ensuring people and communities do not go on suffering the devastation caused by too much alcohol.
This role focused heavily on the integrity of the policy design during the project, objectively assessing new policy proposals across the Federal Government departments and agencies delivering services in the Northern Territory. Again, this project attracted a lot of media attention that had the potential to shift the debate and influence the policy outcomes.
