Published works

This is the Final Report of the Hazards, Culture and Indigenous Communities (HCIC) project. This project considered the challenges and opportunities arising out of engagements between Indigenous peoples and natural hazard and land management government agencies in southern Australia. The majority of this activity has focused on cultural burning, which has also been our focus.

Significantly, there is very limited existing research about these engagements, and limited public sector experience in engaging with Indigenous peoples. This constrains evidenced-based policy and practice and practitioner decision making. This lack of capacity was clear in the responses to the 2019-20 bushfires. The natural hazard sector is now required to do this retrospective and forward-looking learning, to foster more culturally safe natural hazard mitigation, and better connect the logics of hazards, risk and resilience. Indeed, our research found that when the sector does not account for cultural protocols and permissions as part of its core business, this produces barriers to collaboration because it:

• consolidates suspicion amongst Aboriginal people about public sector intentions;
• compromises the role of Aboriginal staff recruited to act as conduits between the public sector and Indigenous peoples;
• often results in Aboriginal people being perceived as delaying an activity, thereby entrenching racist attitudes that working with Indigenous people is difficult;
• continues to undermine Indigenous peoples’ self-determination, rights and relationships with Country and each other; and,
• works against government policy to support partnership approaches with Indigenous peoples.

We undertook qualitative research, primarily through forming partnerships with key practitioners working in this space and undertaking research activities that iteratively learnt from these partnerships. In this, researching both Indigenous and non-indigenous values has been important in order to navigate and analyse this intercultural context. 

Our research findings are structured in two sections: the first presents the results from our literature review, the second presents a synthesis of the research findings arranged under six headings, as listed below, with recommended first steps for the natural hazard sector under each heading. Given previous sector and research practices, the suggested first steps require significant sector leadership and investment in Indigenous-led research.

Research findings

Unfamiliarity with the context itself

There needs to be a rapid growth in sector capacity in understanding the context itself, especially:

• Indigenous peoples’ as First Peoples, their territories, societies and governance processes. This includes the fundamentals of Indigenous knowledge and governance, and their identities, organisational forms and policies.
• Australian government agency responsibilities towards Indigenous peoples’ distinct rights and interests under various laws and policies.
• Discriminatory histories and geographies of marginalisation and erasure, including with respect to ‘settled’ and ‘remote’ Australia.
• How natural hazard collaborations are part of legal, political, cultural and social domains, and not simply technical matters.

Essentially, the sector needs to understand where it sits in relation to Indigenous peoples.

Trust and partnerships

The shared motivations held by some Indigenous and non-indigenous individuals to form collaborative partnerships are challenged by their operating context, including a lack of trust, bureaucratic constraints, tokenism, racism, and a lack of resources. The sector needs to move beyond statements of support, to develop specific policies and programs that demonstrably grow opportunities for Indigenous engagement and partnership. We suggest these policies should be:

• developed in coordination with Aboriginal peoples, groups and networks engaged in these issues, providing a context for partnership arrangements and management objectives to be appropriate to diverse Aboriginal peoples and their regional and landscape contexts;
• based in principles of Indigenous self-determination and non-discrimination, addressing both general and specific issues, and be developed on meaningful terms in collaboration with Aboriginal peoples and their organisations; and,
• supported by allocating ongoing budgetary lines, as well as appropriate funding models, for Aboriginal people working both within and with the sector. This includes funding to participate in collaborations and implement them, as well as funding for Aboriginal governance to underscore such participation.

Centring Country and First Peoples

It is clear from our research that if emerging collaborations are to be sustainable, Aboriginal people need to be centred on meaningful terms across a suite of natural hazard practices and policies. We suggest this should involve:

• supporting Aboriginal peoples’ governance organisations to lead, partner and participate in natural hazard risk and resilience, and land and water management more generally;
• ensuring that Aboriginal staff are present across all levels of agency decision-making;
• building capacity in sector understandings about Country as a required expertise for all public servants across all employment levels. An often-raised example is the sector’s own emergency management training;
• building capacity in principles of non-discrimination as a required expertise for all public servants across all employment levels; and,
• supporting knowledge exchange and networking for Aboriginal and non-indigenous practitioners to learn about working together and to mentor each other.

Administration and regulation

There is a clear need for more culturally appropriate and equitable regulatory, training and qualification regimes for bushfire management across Australia. From our research findings this includes: 

• Changes to bushfire codes of practice to enable more Aboriginal community members to participate and lead cultural burns, including provision for Elders and children;
• The re-considering of agency job design, levels, reporting and paperwork arrangements, to support and recompense the cultural authority brought into the public sector by Aboriginal people;
• Embed policy support for the sector to take partnership approaches to Aboriginal communities;
• Ensure current training for all personnel is culturally appropriate to Aboriginal participants, centres Aboriginal educators, and builds awareness of Aboriginal peoples’ rights and inherited fire responsibilities to look after Country; and,
• Examining the fit of current funding schemes to the context of southern Australia.

Expert evidence and erasure

Academic and government research has failed, almost without exception, to consider Aboriginal peoples’ experiences with natural hazards in southern Australia. To address this imbalance, the public sector needs to create specific funding streams to address this research gap. These funding schemes should be:

• Indigenous led, as directed by Australian government research protocols (AIATSIS 2012, NHMRC 2018);
• Have long timeframes (i.e. 7-10 years) which are vital to ensure that the research meets ethical standards;
• Have research projects that engage Aboriginal people as researchers and research advisors.
• Treat Indigenous peoples equitably, including robust protections for their intellectual property and self-determination.

Accounting and reporting

Our research showed that there was very little attention given by the sector to accounting and reporting their policy commitments and legal obligations towards Aboriginal peoples, reducing sector transparency, accountability and coordination. In response, we suggest that a;; land and emergency management agencies should include in their annual reports details about:

• the number of Indigenous-identifying staff;
• current Indigenous employment targets, Reconciliation Action Plans and other relevant policies;
• the amount and percentage of their annual budgets that they spend on contracting services from Indigenous organisations.
• the number of cultural burns they have resourced or supported;
• the number of Indigenous peoples they have supported through relevant land and fire management training and qualifications; and, 
• any progress they have made towards partnership approaches with First Peoples for natural hazards resilience, including whether they have internal Indigenous advisory or governance units.

We emphasise that conducting a cultural burn in of itself is not necessarily a good outcome, as the value of the cultural burn is dependent on the meaningful involvement of First Peoples.

Fundamentally, we argue that the sector and Aboriginal peoples have to build capacity, meet, and be more organised locally and across larger regions. To do so, we suggest:

• The founding of a national ‘Indigenous Partnerships and Policy’ group;
• The founding of a national Indigenous bushfire practitioners’ network; and,
• Federal, State and Territory agencies to support and/or convene events that bring together Indigenous and non-indigenous practitioners together across regions.

In summary, we suggest that land and emergency management agencies need to:

• Establish consistent performance indicators relating to their collaborations with Aboriginal peoples in bushfire management;
• Invest time and resources into networks and agency capacity to support them; and,
• Support Aboriginal peoples’ capacity to take leadership roles to grow public sector capacity in more meaningful and purposeful reporting and accounting.

Concluding remarks

With the recent catastrophic bushfires, there is an expressed demand for greater engagement with Indigenous peoples iconic burning practices. More generally, it may be that the public sector has reached a tipping point, whereby adversarial approaches to working with Indigenous peoples are being authentically replaced with partnership approaches. In this, the findings are not just of relevance to the natural hazard sector, but across other public sector practice.

Fundamentally, sector leadership has to consider: why and how it wishes to collaborate with Indigenous peoples; allocate the resources and time to understand the status quo that has excluded Indigenous people to date; create processes and structures to support Indigenous leadership, participation and collaboration across the sector; and, address deficiencies in how sector performance is currently measured and reported.