The attacks on red tape with every announcement of savings cuts lets us imagine it is these mindless processes that will be dismantled, as if doing less with less is not already here, creating the thicket, as the logical result of cuts and rationings that pretended they were not attacks on frontline services. On red tape as cultural phenomena, see Akhil Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2012); and Matthew S. Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2012).
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Routes/Worlds,” e-flux journal 27 (Sept. 2011) →.
I borrow the term “ruined” public housing from Catherine Fennell, “The Museum of Resilience: Raising a Sympathetic Public in Postwelfare Chicago,” Cultural Anthropology vol. 27, no. 4 (2012): 641–666.
Bob Gosford, “A yarn with Michael Coggan, journalist,” Crikey, Nov. 28, 2010 →.
The report by the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse, titled Ampe Akelyernemane Meke Mekarle: “Little Children are Sacred,” can be found at →. For critical analysis of the Intervention, see Coercive Reconciliation: Normalise, Stabilise, Exit Aboriginal Australia, eds. Jon Altman and Melinda Hinkson (Melbourne: Arena Publications, 2007).
Millions of dollars were assigned to create 750 new houses, 2500 refurbishments, and 230 “demolish and replace” homes in some seventy-three Aboriginal communities within four years of the program’s commencement.
See Nigel Adlam, “Path of Least Resistance for Angry Anderson,” Northern Territory News, Aug. 1, 2009.
From here on, the most expensive house in the most isolated and climactically extreme conditions could cost no more than AUD $450,000, inclusive of indirect, freight, and labor costs, while refurbishments could not exceed AUD $100,000.
Witnessed by the author. Ethnographic fieldwork on SIHIP and other social policy fields took place in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012 as part of my Australian Research Council QEII Fellowship (DP1094139) pursuit of the question, “Can there be good policy in regional and remote Australia?” My time with SIHIP bureaucrats in government back rooms was limited to this brief period when the program was in crisis mode, before the federal minister Jenny Macklin made it clear that ethnographic documentation was not desired and my research permission was refused. (For more on the “event,” see →; also Murray McLaughlin, “Indigenous Housing Boss Removed,” transcript, The 7:30 Report, Aug. 18, 2009, Australian Broadcasting Corporation →.) I later traced SIHIP’s ramifications in Groote Eylandt, including the attempt by the Anindilyakwa Land Council to establish its own civil and civic engineering works company so that future projects could be managed in situ.
Tess Lea and Paul Pholeros, “This is not a pipe: the treacheries of Indigenous housing,” Public Culture vol. 22, no. 1 (2010): 187–209.
Tess Lea, “What’s Water Got to Do with It? Indigenous Public Housing and Australian Settler Colonial Relations,” in “Other People’s Country: Law, Water, Entitlement,” special issue, Settler Colonial Studies (forthcoming).
For discussion of Groote Eylandt and the sacking of Earth Connect, see Tess Lea, “Ecologies of Development on Groote Eylandt,” Australian Humanities Review 53 (Nov. 2012) →.
See Tess Lea, “When Looking for Anarchy, Look to the State: Fantasies of Regulation in Forcing Disorder within the Australian Indigenous Estate,” Critique of Anthropology vol. 32, no. 2 (2012): 109–124.
See, for example, the Australian Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP) – Review of Program Performance, Aug. 28, 2009 →; Australian Government Auditor-General for the Northern Territory, Strategic Indigenous Housing And Infrastructure Programme Report To The Legislative Assembly, June 2010 → ; Australian Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Strategic Indigenous Housing Infrastructure Program (SIHIP): Post Review Assessment (PRA), March 10, 2010 →.
Anthropologist Jon Altman valiantly attempted to place an iodine trace on the plethora of evaluations that surrounded the Intervention to determine when its work could be considered “done.” Failing to find the terminus, he instead turned attention to the exercise of trying to define “what is, or was, the Intervention?” This definitional quest likewise disintegrated.See Jon Altman and Susie Russell, “Too Much ‘Dreaming’: Evaluations of the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Intervention 2007–2012,” Evidence Base 3 (2012): 1–24.
For instance, housing intervention and cost information from previous regional and remote construction programs was either deemed commercial-in-confidence by the private companies, or archived in Canberra by the aptly named storage specialists Iron Mountain and were not available for SIHIP project reference without both Freedom of Information probes and prior knowledge of exactly where the files were dispersed and how they were catalogued, down to level of barcodes.
See Chris Graham, “Macklin’s town camp takeover derailed by Tangentyere letter,” National Indigenous Times, July 31 2009.
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism, (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2011), 183.
The expressionless exhaustion of Indigenous householders besieged by the shape-shifts of wild policy was and is mirrored within social service and community organizations, with their partially privatized responsibilities for recuperating money for their care work. The performance of accountability over a plethora of specific-purpose short term grants demands canny skills in brokerage and translation, as the local compromises required to get anything implemented are re-imaged to match the fragmented and abstracted contract and reporting requirements of different parts of different funding bodies. See discussion on the arts of policy brokerage by David Mosse, “Is Good Policy Unimplementable? Reflections on the Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice,” Development and Change vol. 35, no. 4 (2004): 639–671.
Patrick Sullivan, “Bureaucratic Process as Morris Dance: An Ethnographic Approach to the Culture of Bureaucracy in Australian Aboriginal Affairs Administration,” Critical Perspectives on International Business vol. 4, no. 2/3 (2008): 127–141; 128.
See Tess Lea, Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts: Indigenous Health in Northern Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2008).
But see David Graeber, “Dead Zones of the Imagination: On Violence, Bureaucracy and Interpretive Labour,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory vol. 2, no. 2 (2012): 102–128.
See Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “The Child in the Broom Closet: States of Killing and Letting Die,” South Atlantic Quarterly vol.107, no. 3 (2008): 509–530.
Improvised dwellings are defined as a structure used as a place of residence that does not meet the building requirements to be considered a permanent dwelling, including caravans, tin sheds without internal walls, humpies, and dongas. See Nadia Rosenman and Alex Clunies-Ross, “The New Tenancy Framework for Remote Aboriginal Communities in the Northern Territory,” Indigenous Law Bulletin vol. 7, no. 24 (2011): 11–16. See also Alison Larkins, Remote Housing Reforms in the Northern Territory, report by the acting Commonwealth Ombudsman, June 2012 →.
Cited in Rosenman and Clunies-Ross, “The New Tenancy Framework.” 13.
Larkins, Remote Housing Reforms in the Northern Territory.
Graeber, “Dead Zones of the Imagination,” 121.
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel(New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011).
Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment, 73.
I would like to thank Dr Morgan Richards of The Design Embassy for her intellectual generosity in conceptualising and designing the intervention infographic.