“In my experience, change in organisations always goes swimmingly to the point of implementation, but then there are always going to be winners and losers,” writes NOEL BEDDOE.

I imagine that high school principals can seem pretty powerful people if you are a part of an audience asked to rise in respect for the entrance of the official party at a school presentation night.

Or if you are sitting in the office of the principal while that person outlines for you the shortcomings in the behaviour of your child and announces whether his school attendance is to be suspended.

In fact principals face this unavoidable reality – whatever decision they make will be seriously wrong in someone’s eyes and we are a society in which people have a number of avenues for the aggressive pursuit of dissatisfaction with the performance of public officials.

The stresses this situation creates can take their toll – in NSW over the past 10 years, for example, some scores of public school principals have faced compulsory medical retirement for illness associated with stress.

For more than 12 years I responded to requests from the NSW Department of Education and Training (as then it was) or the NSW Secondary Principals Council to visit schools to support inexperienced principals, or principals experiencing difficulties in relationships, often with Aboriginal communities.

As a result of those experiences, and in my attempt to deal with change in the school of which I was principal, I developed a structure for managing school improvement. It went : Issues Identification, Validation, Prioritisation, Options Search, Policy/Procedure Creation, Implementation, Evaluation, Reporting and, hopefully, Celebration.

It has been fascinating to watch our community, the ACT, move through some of these steps as we acknowledge the reality of Aboriginal incarceration and recidivism in the territory custodial system.

In my experience there is never a lack of people wishing to participate, formally or informally, with the first step of the process, the identification of areas of problematic performance for an organisation. They will precede their analysis by saying. “The problem is…” or “We should…” or “Why can’t we…”. 

For many years there have been those who have been deeply concerned at the relationship between our Aboriginal community and our policing/justice/corrections systems.

Validation? Not difficult – we have the lowest overall jail detention rates of any state or territory in our nation, but the highest rates for our Aboriginal population.

When I served on the bench of the NSW State Parole Authority we were deeply concerned at the difficulty of reducing overall recidivism rates below 50 per cent; recidivism among Aboriginal Territorians is over 90 per cent. No other state or territory has Aboriginal recidivism rates even approaching this figure.

Essentially, this means that if an Aboriginal person enters incarceration in the ACT it is unlikely that that person ever will resume normal life as a free person.

Priority? A vital question. Our territory has roughly the population of, say, the Blacktown Council area of western Sydney; I’m sure that that body does a fine job of meeting its responsibilities; it is not trying to run its own transport system, education system, health system, justice system, custodial system – these extraordinarily expensive services all are provided by the NSW Government – we must fund our own.

Funding our public services is always a massive challenge.

So, what priority do we give to coming to grips with this issue in the lives of many of our Aboriginal families? That depends, really, on who we think we are.

In the vote regarding the creation of an Aboriginal Voice in the national constitution we were the only state or territory with a majority “Yes” vote; we like to think of ourselves as informed and just in matters of racial acceptance, and yet we tolerate treatment of our Aboriginal people that is far worse than that of any national neighbours.

Options Search? Well, yes, Jumbunna has done that for us with a report and recommendations, summed up in CityNews by Julie Tongs.

Reports brutally expose depths of disadvantage

So now we are up to Implementation.

In my experience, change in organisations always goes swimmingly to this point. But, ah, when we get to the point of implementation there are always going to be winners and losers; resources normally are finite; new expenditures have to come from somewhere; people have to change their behaviours, something most of us are not only reluctant to do but are capable of seeing as an insulting requirement – change inevitably meets resistance; there are very few governments in the world that have seen political capital in increasing expenditure on its prison population.

So, how will the Implementation phase go as we move along this journey we have begun? We’ll get an inkling when we see the government’s response to the Jumbanna work.

I await that response with great interest.

Noel Beddoe was official visitor to the Keelong Juvenile Justice Centre in The Illawarra district of NSW before its closure and served on the bench of The NSW State Parole Authority for three and a half years.