Outsiders or Insiders? Strategic Choices for Australian Indigenous Leadership

Abstract

The outsider-insider conundrum In the last couple of years, Cape York Aboriginal leader, Noel Pearson, has taken to writing regular columns in The Weekend Australian newspaper. On 7-8 July 2007, he wrote a column in which he reflected on the reactions of Indigenous leaders to the then recently announced Commonwealth ‘intervention’ in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities, following the Northern Territory Government’s Little Children are Sacred report (BIPACSA 2007). Pearson was critical of Indigenous leaders, such as the Northern Territory Government minister Marion Scrymgour and the former Chief Executive Officer of ATSIC and now head of National Indigenous Television (NITV), Pat Turner, who were ‘nay-saying’ the intervention. He suggested that there was a ‘psychological incapacity’ among many Indigenous leaders ‘to step up to politics in mainstream Australia’ and that this was ‘one of the reasons’ why Indigenous people ‘continue to lose in this country’. Indigenous leaders, he argued, ‘have to deal with the Government and the politics of the day and devote our maximum energies and talents towards making good of things that otherwise seem bad’ (Pearson 2007a). Pearson seems to be arguing that more Indigenous leaders need to become ‘insiders’ of Australian political processes who engage strategically with whatever political circumstances emerge and whoever is in government. Conversely he seems to suggest that, psychologically, many Indigenous leaders are locked into an ‘outsider’ position of inflexible stand-taking, on the basis of history, identity or philosophical commitment. The terms ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, as descriptors of Australian Indigenous leadership styles, are my own rather than Pearson’s. But I do think they are a convenient way to capture Pearson’s argument. My aim in this chapter is not specifically to agree or disagree with Pearson’s argument and judgment about the psychology of most Indigenous leaders, but rather just to think some more about the ins and outs of Australian Indigenous leadership: how, when and why Indigenous leaders use insider and outsides stances. My own, more analytic, argument is that these leadership styles are complementary, that they entail and feed off each other systemically in public life, rather than existing as clear alternatives between which individual Indigenous leaders can always be clearly allocated. I will begin, however, by making a few comments about the apparent relative numbers of Indigenous leaders in three constituent and overlapping spheres of ‘public leadership’ the political, administrative and civic.