I was in one of the online meetings to design the new CTG partnership agreement between the Coalition of Peaks and Ken’s National Indigenous Affairs Agency... I got a call in Sept 2019, not long before the meeting started, given a quick explanation and then emailed a document.

I sat in the video call listening to points from the email I was sent being read aloud. After they were read aloud we were asked if we had any comments. There was silence. I suspected others were in the same boat as me and hadn’t had a chance to read them before the meeting.

After a prolonged awkward silence the meeting facilitator said “I’m going to take silence as consent” and moved on to the next point. I quickly left the call, because silence is not consent.

I later raised my concerns with ppl from the Coalition of Peaks (CoP), and with someone from the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA). I never heard back from anyone though.

Later that month I had a chance to sit in another session, held with members of one specific peak body during a large national gathering they were holding. It was held outside, in groups of 20 or so, with no whiteboards/butchers paper or anything for ppl to workshop ideas on.

In the group I was in, people asked questions like “who are the coalition of peaks?” and “We really need more time to discuss this” and “I can’t hear you”- they were told they could go online to fill out a survey as individuals as there simply wasn’t time to go over those issues.

I again left, as I felt that just by sitting there I was validating what felt to me to be a dodgy process. There were representatives from the CoP and NIAA there. I raised my concerns with them but, again, I never heard back from anybody about it.

And now that the new agreement is being announced, I am entirely unsurprised that the priority areas identified from the community consultation process are the same as the priority areas identified by the NIAA and the Coalition of Peaks before the consultation process began.

As for the new targets, eg parity on incarceration rates by 2093, none of those were discussed in any of the lower level meetings I sat in on, but they’re pretty bloody disappointing all the same.