The Chief Executive of the Australian and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG) has called for a greater investment in Indigenous leadership by Australian Public Services.
Delivering a speech at a Senior Indigenous Public Servant forum in Canberra last week, ANZSOG’s Ken Smith said Australian and New Zealand Public Services must continue to evolve and change their structures and cultures to recognise the value of having Indigenous leaders.
“It is essential public services do more to recognise the value of having Indigenous leaders, recruit and support those leaders, create pathways and change definitions of leadership to reflect how Indigenous people work between government agencies and NGO’s (NFP’s, mutuals and the private sector) and individual communities,” Professor Smith said.
He said encouraging Indigenous leadership and embedding Indigenous values and approaches across the public sector would help build organisations that were culturally competent, innovative and able to service communities more sensitively and appropriately.
“It is critical that we have Indigenous voices front and centre, in positions of real power, and that the Public Service listens, learns and builds relationships in the way Indigenous people want,” he said.
Professor Smith said Indigenous Public Servants faced unique challenges in operating in Western institutions while maintaining their commitment to culture and communities.
“Many public sector Agencies struggle to recognise and accommodate this, let alone appreciate the value of those connections, and this failure in turn causes Indigenous public servants to leave,” he said.
“We are all losers from this failure.”
Mr Smith said the ANZSOG gathering presented a unique opportunity to channel the “collective wisdom of Indigenous public sector leadership and use ANZSOG’s influence to turn it into positive action” across the 10 jurisdictions of ANZSOG.
“I hope this year’s forum can come up with fresh ways to address the priorities that have been identified in the last two forums: building support networks, developing leaders, increasing representation, holding individuals accountable and building culturally competent workforces,” Professor Smith said.
He said the focus of this year’s ANZSOG forum was to discuss broader reform agendas and capability investment in “a changing Public Sector”.