Plus ca change

Our Productivity Commission regularly investigates Indigenous disadvantage as a social and economic cost to the nation.
Their latest report, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage gives the usual depressing rollcall of statistics - premature death rates, chronic diseases, imprisonment, overcrowding, low educational attainment and so on.
With little or no improvement in any of the social indicators.
Reaction from the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, the egregiously awful Mal Brough, was predictable.
First cab off the rank in the blame game was the defunct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), a representative body (fully-elected Board) which in 2004 finally died from the slow death of a thousand cuts it had been suffering from the day the Howard Government was first elected nearly 12 years ago.
Boofhead Mal said the government couldn't be blamed for the lack of progress.
It was all the fault of ATSIC.
I think my memory is in better shape than Mal's, because I recall one of the first acts of the Howard Government was to take responsibility for Indigenous health away from ATSIC and give it to the Federal Health Department.
ATSIC was never responsible for education, only for giving advice which the mainstream department largely ignored.
It was underfunded for housing and kept warning the Federal Government that it needed to spend $4 billion to clean up Indigenous housing nationwide.
Get the picture?
Then Mal said it was all the fault of Indigenous people anyway and if only they'd show a bit of personal responsibility all would be well.
The Productivity Commission offered four critical elements in making a way out of the mess:
• Cooperation between Aboriginal people and government and business;
• A bottom-up, rather than top-down approach;
• Good governance; and
• Continuing government support.
Most of these are self-evident and I won't go into them too much.
This government hasn’t cooperated, it hasn’t sought direction from Indigenous people, it’s failed to engage with them and it’s run by the ‘user pays’ mentality.
On the question of governance, the report said there were six indicators of good governance – governing institutions, leadership, self-determination, capacity building, cultural match and resources – all of which it says must be in play if success is to be sustained.
I think the government falls down on all of them.
And it certainly falls down heavily on the concept of a 'bottom-up' approach.
Mad Mal loves telling people what to do and he hates listening - a trait he has in common with most of the people who've held this portfolio.
They all know best.
The tragic thing about all this is that the profile of disadvantage the Productivity Commission lays out is not news: it's an update on what we already knew from other reports.
The only way the profile will change - in other words the only way Aboriginal people can have any expectation of decent lives - is when central government realises it can't get away any more with blaming and shaming or top-down policy.
They have to start listening to advice and acting on it.
And, above all, they have to have an elected representative structure (emphatically not Child of ATSIC) to help them do it.
Lapdog advisory bodies just don't cut it because (and this is being repeated in the Greenhouse debate) governments will always try to get away with what's least inconvenient.
And that's no longer good enough for Indigenous people and other Australians in the 21st Century.