‘Ask Aboriginal people yourself’: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Public Servants and the Problem of Substitution

This chapter elaborates the speaking dilemmas that may be experienced by minority representatives employed by bureaucracies. ‘Ask Aboriginal people yourself’, the advice to government of one Aboriginal public servant interviewed by the author, evokes the problem of identity-based substitution. When Aboriginal public servants speak on behalf of their communities, they risk substituting, or standing in for, communities who are absent from government and should have the opportunity to speak for themselves. While this kind of informal representation is sometimes necessary for public servants as trustee-type representatives, such speaking can obscure the more important political relationship between government and the wider constituency of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. This was a common dilemma among the author’s research participants, the majority of whom felt corralled into Indigenous-specific roles regardless of broader skills and interests. The chapter views their accounts in the light of political theory on the descriptive representation of historically disadvantaged groups. Although designed for electoral contexts, this body of theory enables a useful critique of the idea of representative bureaucracy that is implicit in Indigenous public sector employment policy, explaining why many Aboriginal public servants leave government departments for more clearly representative roles.