New deputy VC faces old cultural challenge

There is an opportunity here, not just to shape the direction of the university as a whole, but to allow Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians to embrace the leadership that Australia needs to take it into the next generations: Professor Shane Houston With the appointment of a new deputy vice-chancellor the University of Sydney has committed itself to playing a role in improving the cultural competence of non-Aboriginal Australians in their engagement with Aboriginal Australians Professor Shane Houston who has a distinguished career in health economics and the public sector delivery of health services to Aboriginal people takes on the job of deputy vice-chancellor with responsibility for indigenous strategy and services at the university’s city-based campus this week. Houston is a Gungulu man from central Queensland. He has been actively engaged in Aboriginal advancement issues for more than 30 years, at a community level, in government and internationally including various United Nations related activities. He comes to Sydney from his job as executive director, systems performance and Aboriginal policy with the Northern Territory Department of Health and Families. At a press conference University of Sydney vice-chancellor Dr Michael Spence stressed that while Houston would have responsibility for indigenous strategy the university was recruiting an experienced manager who would work as part of a team running the institution. We did not want a bloke at the table who always had to raise the indigenous issue, he said. “We have been very fortunate in finding Shane with senior experience in running public sector institutions”. Houston said his career to date had given him important insights into how Australia can and should work. He also said he got a sense that “the university was seen, by people I trust, ...as a place committed to significant reform, that had real leverage around willingness to take on large issues. “There is an opportunity here, not just to shape the direction of the university as a whole, but to offer an opportunity to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians to embrace the leadership that Australia needs to take it into the next generations.” He also said it seemed to him that the University of Sydney had a unique position as Australia’s oldest university, as being the alma mater of Aboriginal activist Charles Perkins and as being on the land where Aboriginal people first confronted the colony of NSW. Houston’s appointment is the first time an indigenous Australian has been in a vice-chancellor role in an Australian university in the more than 100 years the institutions have existed in the country. Houston said he thought this was partly because most Aboriginal people saw themselves working in communities. “You can be either inside the tent or outside the tent. Historically Aboriginal people thought change was best achieved outside the tent. I think in the past 10 years you are seeing people move inside the tents.” This combined with a maturing within the tertiary institutions helped. Spence said there were two stories to tell about Aboriginal peoples in Australia, and apart from the normal story there was the story of remarkable resilience by a people who until relatively recently were not allowed to vote. “A university is an evolving knowledge community so is indigenous Australia. This is not about merely recognising and defending the Aboriginal culture that Europeans first found ...it is about engaging with Aboriginal Australia as it is now as everything evolves...This is the challenge.” The Aboriginal student population at Sydney is just over 1 per cent and Spence said the aim was to reach general population parity. Aboriginal Australians make up approximately 2.5 per cent of the country’s population of 21 million. Spence said while part of Houston’s job would be to think through meeting the educational needs of Aboriginal students and their research efforts, there were also challenges in the cultural competence area to be met. On this issue Houston said the biggest challenge he faced in his management of the delivery of remote health services where a lot of non-Aboriginal people were employed delivering those services, was that there was a gap between the perception brought to the role and the needs of those sorts of environments. “If we are able to build the level of (cultural) competence of non-Aboriginal Australians there will be better outcomes for Aboriginal Australians and importantly we will see changes ...a greater embracing of Aboriginal culture as part of our culture.”