Administrative Reform as Bureaucratic Violence in the Australian Northern Territory

This chapter is based on the results of my 2010–2016 ethnographic research project involving interviews with about 60 key bureaucratic players in the 2008 shires reform and around 830 residents (mainly Indigenous) of communities directly affected by the reform, and also my own experience as a Northern Territory bureaucrat. In NT bureaucratic circles the 2008 shires reform was widely perceived as a necessary, rational solution to intractable flaws in the previous community council system. I develop a counter argument, identifying the 2008 reform as an example of bureaucratic violence. The violence of the reform was displayed firstly by bureaucracy’s naming of ‘dysfunction’ and ‘crisis-events’ within the community council sector. Secondly, violence was manifested in the gap in ‘interpretative labour’ between bureaucrats and their policy referents in understanding the motivations and outcomes of the reform. Finally, statistical evidence was a key tool in the production and reinforcement of bureaucratic violence and unequal power relations. The chapter is not positioned as polemic. I intend it to open new analytical avenues. It provokes an understanding of this policy reform as part of an assemblage of power, rather than an instrumental or necessary policy response to practical issues. This radically recasts how reform outcomes can be assessed.