Visions and Violence of Policy An ethnography of Indigenous Affairs bureaucratic reform in the Northern Territory of Australia Thomas Michel Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2019 1 This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes. I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged. I declare my previously published works are: Michel, T. (2018). The Lifeblood of the Cyborg: Or, the shared organism of a modern energy corporation and a small Northern Territory town. Energy Research & Social Science, 45 (November 2018), 224-234. Michel, T. (2016). Cyborg Wadeye. Arena Magazine, 142, 34-37. Michel, T. (2015). The Special Case of Reform in the Northern Territory: What Are The Lessons? In I. Tiley & B. Dollery (Eds.), Perspectives on Australian Local Government Reform. Sydney: Federation Press. Michel, T., & Bassinder, J. A. (2013). Researching with Reciprocity: Meaningful Participant- Based Research in a Remote Indigenous Community Context. Paper presented at the Australian Centre of Excellence for Local Government (ACELG) 3rd National Local Government Researchers' Forum, 6-7 June 2013, University of Adelaide, South Australia. http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ocs/index.php/acelg/PNLGRF/paper/view/478 Michel, T., & Taylor, A. (2012). Death by a thousand grants? The challenge of grant funding reliance for local government councils in the Northern Territory of Australia. Local Government Studies, 38(4), 485-500. Michel, T., Gerritsen, R., & Thynne, I. (2010). Northern Territory Scoping Study: Australian Centre of Excellence for Local Government Rural-Remote and Indigenous Australia Program. http://www.acelg.org.au/publications/Rural-Remote%20and%20Indigenous%20Local%20 Government?combine=&field_date_value[value][year]=&field_program_nid=All&field_publi cation_type_tid=All Thomas Michel May 2019 2 Acknowledgements This research project represents a decade-long journey for me, and its production has relied on the support, collaboration and encouragement of dozens of generous people. Firstly I would like to thank the people in my various professional workplaces who enabled me to pursue my studies, including Trish Angus, David Ritchie, Michael Berto and Phil Petersen. I am grateful to Marnie Ford, Timothy Dumoo and Jacky Green who granted me permission to use their artwork in this thesis. Many academic colleagues, friends and interlocutors challenged me intellectually, provided practical support and gave me invaluable feedback on various parts of this thesis: Bligh Grant and Jonathan Marshall from University of Technology, Sydney; Rolf Gerritsen and Ian Thynne from Charles Darwin University; Will Sanders from Australian National University; Fiona Allon from University of Sydney; my colleagues and friends from the University of Sydney’s Department of Gender and Cultural Studies; and Elliot McAdam, who generously spoke to me at length on two occasions about his experiences in the 2008 shires reform. I am deeply grateful to Christen Cornell, who patiently reviewed almost all of my written work. I am also particularly thankful to Julie-Ann Bassinder, who conducted much of the community interview fieldwork and has remained intellectually engaged with this project throughout. The completion of this project has not only relied upon others’ intellectual contributions, but also on practical and emotional support in all aspects of my life. Thank you to Tracey Moyle for her financial and co-parenting support, and to my dear friend Joanna Fogarty for generously providing me with a weekly home in Sydney for my university visits. I’m also thankful to Lisa Spolén for her recent support and love. And I never could have completed this project without the provision of accommodation, proofreading, meals and child- minding from my parents Joanne Michel and Alan Cook – I’m eternally grateful, mum and Alan! Finally I want to pay my appreciation to Tess Lea, who has been my supervisor and mentor during this entire project. Her incisive intellect, ongoing dialogue and generous spirit encouraged me to take risks and hone my arguments into a much more rigorous thesis than otherwise would have been possible. 3 Table of Contents WARNING: This thesis contains images of Indigenous people who may now be deceased. Chapter One: Introduction – Visions and Violence 5 PART ONE: PALIMPSESTS 40 Chapter Two: Translations of Self-Determination 44 Chapter Three: The Killing of Johannes Noltenius 80 PART TWO: VIOLENCE 100 Chapter Four: The Violence of Naming 105 Chapter Five: Open Roads, Locked Gates 127 PART THREE: AXIOMATICS 161 Chapter Six: ‘5000 is a nice round number’ 167 Chapter Seven: Cyborg Wadeye 203 Conclusion: Connections and Disconnections 238 Appendix A: Research Interview Methodologies and Statistics 243 Appendix B: Empirical analysis of scale economies for the Northern Territory’s rural-remote local government sector, before and after the 2008 council amalgamation reform 265 Bibliography 290 4 Chapter One: Introduction – Visions and Violence Figure 1.1: Timothy Dumoo’s artwork (2008). Reproduced with permission from the artist. The Painting At first glance, the conflict about Timothy Dumoo’s painting is not much of a story. Even naming the episode as a ‘conflict’ may infuse it with too much drama – if we can call what happened an event, it was certainly minor, more like a non-event (Berlant, 2007: 758-759; Povinelli, 2011: 3-15). The artefact of the painting itself (Figure 1.1 above) is an unreliable reference point for beginning this story: it was never well known, and may have now disappeared from sight and memory altogether. Yet grappling with its uncertain status is key to this thesis. For some years the painting hung in the foyer of the Victoria Daly Shire Council offices in the Northern Territory (NT) town of Katherine. This particular shire council had emerged out of a contentious amalgamation reform of the NT’s local government sector in 2008, whereby 5 fifty-three rural, Indigenous-majority community councils were forcibly amalgamated into eight regional shire organisations. The painting had been chosen as the winner of the new organisation’s logo competition. In and of itself this did not make it remarkable. The display of Indigenous-style art has become a familiar pastiche of corporate Australia, mimicked in outback places like Katherine. The canvas was neither large nor imposing. If you had ever had chanced to visit to the council’s front counter, you could be forgiven for overlooking it. And in the vagaries of the Northern Territory’s local government policy, the host organisation for the artwork has since been restructured into two new regional councils. From 2014, Victoria Daly Shire Council no longer exists in its original form, nor does its logo. The winning entry of this now defunct organisation’s logo design competition has become an entirely forgettable relic. A forgotten painting and the associated discarded corporate logo may seem an odd narrative launch for an ethnography of bureaucracy in the Northern Territory. Yet the ambiguous boundaries and meanings of this event provides insights into the politics surrounding the 2008 shires reform, and the “doing” of government policy in Australia’s Indigenous affairs arena more generally. It also reveals the key methodological approach of this thesis. My investigation avoids constructing significant points of a policy’s history through rational representations of its “major events” (such as dates marking legislative change, statistical measures of institutional functionality, constructed episodes of crisis, and so forth). Instead, this thesis offers a more decentred and indeterminate approach that focuses on “minor events”, where policy is intertwined in complex social, institutional and historical settings (Vike, 2002). The narratives of major events that nonetheless dominate bureaucratic understandings of the 2008 shires reform are neither accepted as matter-of- fact nor ignored in my thesis. Instead, these claims on truth are treated as expressions of social power relations: as a site where bureaucratic actors claim cultural, ideological and moral leadership over a policy domain, but where this leadership is always at risk of challenges, contestations and subversions (Gramsci, 1988: 189-200). By early 2008, many of the weighty decisions concerning key aspects of the NT’s sweeping local government reform had already been made by the Minister and his bureaucratic 6 advisors (including the new structures, boundaries, budgets, service delivery responsibilities and senior management staff for the new local government entities). But as part of its community engagement and consultation strategy, the NT Government had established “Shire Transition Committees” in each region. These advisory committees met monthly, were comprised of representatives from each community in the prospective shires, and had such matters as corporate mission statements, shire ward names and so forth delegated to their deliberations. One such sanctioned initiative taken by the Victoria Daly Shire Transition Committee was to open a logo competition to the public, with a prize purse of $1,000 to the entry which best represented the new shire. Figure 1.2: Timothy Dumoo. Photo: Unattributed (circa 2003). Dumoo, an established artist from the township of Wadeye and an active councillor of the local Thamarrurr Council, was one of the few entrants in the competition. In terms of artistic skill and composition, his submission was the standout. The following is the explanatory text he included with the painting: 7 The picture painted on the canvas tells a story of the twelve different tribal groups representing their homeland and communities. The twelve councillors will walk together with their right foot forward for a better future… with their culture and totems inside their body and their mind on working for the people back at their communities.