‘Dinosaur’ departments need to be educated about communities, says Indigenous advocate

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Government departments behave like “dinosaurs” and need to be educated about what regional and remote communities want, says leading Indigenous advocate Catherine Liddle.

“We had a conversation recently with a department where they told us they didn’t know that the lack of services in regional and remote areas was there,” said Liddle, who is CEO of the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care, a peak body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families.

“They didn’t know that, perhaps, there wasn’t a telephone you could pick up and ring and ask for help. They didn’t know that there was no service delivery.

“There’s another piece of work there that moves past the Budget and says it’s awesome if politicians have goodwill, but how do you fundamentally change the dinosaurs that [are] government departments?”

Liddle was speaking at the ACOSS post-Budget event in Sydney, in which attendees agreed increases to welfare payments were welcome — including the raise to JobSeeker — but did not go far enough.

ACOSS CEO Cassandra Goldie was critical of the stage three tax cuts, pointing out that two-thirds will go towards wealthier men from a gender-responsive budgeting analysis perspective.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who gave his own keynote address, told Goldie during a Q&A segment that the tax changes do not come in for more than a year, with his focus on Budget repair.

“We are trying to make the Budget a bit more sustainable and the tax changes really are about trying to get more value for money and trying to create more room for these sorts of priorities that we’ve been discussing,” Chalmers said.

Speaking after the event, Goldie said she was “absolutely ready” to have a conversation with the government about revenue.

“While some like to suggest [that Australia is] high-taxing, high-spending, we are not,” Goldie said.

“We have to continue to help the public understand what drivers of our level of inadequate essential services and inadequate social protection systems are.

“The big picture is we are not raising enough revenue to invest properly in essential services and the safety nets that any country would want to have.”

The treasurer also said a wellbeing budget framework is expected mid-year, which was “deliberately decoupled” from the May Budget, with an employment white paper due later in 2023.

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