Can we improve the cultural capability of the APS? 

First Nations employment in the Australian Public Service (APS) hasn’t increased in the past 20 years. 

Indigenous public servants represent 3.5 per cent of the APS workforce. They are underrepresented in senior roles and leave the APS more quickly than non-Indigenous employees – despite dedicated efforts to address these issues. 

Dr Lisa Conway wanted to know why. 

So the proud Yorta Yorta woman enrolled in a PhD at the Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University (ANU). 

Her research, which explores ways to improve the APS’s cultural responsiveness and improve the cultural safety of Indigenous employees and customers, has been recognised for its ground-breaking contribution to public administration. 

For Conway, a senior public servant and Chair of the APS’s Indigenous Senior Executive Service (SES) Network, the journey to this pivotal research began long before she entered academia. 

She was applying for Centrelink payments while pregnant with her first child when a chance conversation with an Indigenous service officer planted a seed. 

“He said, ‘You’re smart. I can see you’ve been on ABSTUDY. What else are you going to do with yourself?’” Conway recalls. 

“At the time, I told him to mind his own business, but that conversation stayed with me.” 

Encouraged by a Centrelink career counsellor, Conway pursued a social work degree, eventually joining the APS as a customer service officer. 

Over the years, she climbed the ranks, driven by a desire to influence policy rather than just implement it. 

“I wanted a seat at the table,” she says. “I wanted to change the system from within.” 

She went on to lead the Indigenous Social Work group within Services Australia. 

She was “advocating internally, and doing a lot of work teaching, building cultural capability in social work services,” she says. “But that wasn’t enough.” 

She found herself frustrated by what she calls the “cultural blindness” of the APS. 

“If you don’t realise there’s a White culture, you can’t think about what biases you might be embedding in things.” 

This lack of awareness has a huge impact on Indigenous employees and on service delivery. 

“It’s almost like a muscle to flex – you’ve got to be able to see culture to see where the issues are.” 

“Realistically, the cultural issues that First Nations people face aren’t part of their own culture, it’s about how they’re impacted by white Australian culture,” Conway explains. 

Her PhD thesis, ‘Public administration in Blak and White: uplifting the cultural capability of the Australian Public Service’, shows how institutional whiteness in the APS produces a ‘blindness’ that impedes cultural responsiveness. It uses the APS’s largest delivery agency, Services Australia, as a case study. 

Conway undertook her research with the support of a Pat Turner Scholarship from the Sir Roland Wilson Foundation.  

“I really wanted to do it at ANU because I feel like there’s a much stronger connection to the Australian Public Service,” she says. 

To demonstrate one of the impacts of White culture, Conway draws a comparison between the APS’s workforce strategy for First Nations people and the equivalent strategy for people with disabilities. 

The disability strategy, she notes, is “all about how we need to change the mindset and the culture of the APS, while the First Nations strategy is all about how we need to get ‘them’ more interested in their careers. It’s not about changing mindset and behaviour – it’s about changing us.” 

Conway used Indigenous research methodologies to interview non-Indigenous decisionmakers in the APS. 

“I went out to look at White Australian public servants to see how they make decisions … and if they considered culture, either their own or others, in the way they did policy,” she says. 

She used deep listening, or Dadirri, to allow herself and her interviewees to share knowledge without judgement. This was a way for Conway to model culturally responsive behaviours while conducting her research. 

She found that White culture is so thoroughly embedded in APS systems and processes that it impedes the service’s ability to effectively design and implement policy for First Nations people. 

“Unless it’s welfare policy, we’re not considered at all,” Conway says. 

Her research also found that decision making in the APS is susceptible to bias and inconsistency; not all knowledge is being collected and considered. 

Senior decisionmakers are not considering the “ripple effects for us and the policy impacts,” she says. 

“If somebody is having a red hot go at being really culturally safe and is trying to do the right thing, you can’t cut them off at the knees if they get it wrong.”

To address this, Conway developed a model for building cultural capability in the APS. 

Her approach emphasises cultural humility – recognising that no one is an expert in another’s culture – and cultural responsiveness, which involves understanding and respecting cultural differences without making assumptions. 

Her research also highlights how attempts to improve cultural capability through increased representation in the workforce puts an unfair burden on First Nations employees in the APS. 

“We conflate being Indigenous with being an expert in Indigenous culture,” she explains. 

“Staff don’t necessarily have that cultural knowledge, and it’s not their job…it’s a cultural load – or exploitation, you might like to call it.” 

This is where cultural responsiveness comes in. 

“Many Indigenous people haven’t grown up connected to their communities. We need to help them on their journey, not expect them to carry the burden of educating others,” Conway says. 

Conway notes that fostering a culturally safe environment for all requires creating a teachable workplace and empowering people to reflect on their own worldviews and biases. 

“If somebody is having a red hot go at being really culturally safe and is trying to do the right thing, you can’t cut them off at the knees if they get it wrong,” she says.

Conway is already making inroads towards her goal of creating a more inclusive and culturally safe APS. 

In her current role as Assistant Secretary of the First Nations Employment Policy and Programs Branch at the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR), she is implementing a cultural capability program based on her research. 

“My team now have the lens that I have,” she says. 

“It’s almost like a muscle to flex – you’ve got to be able to see culture to see where the issues are.” 

Conway’s innovative approach saw her win the Australian Political Studies Association’s prestigious PhD Award for her thesis. 

“It was a bit of extra validation,” she says. “It means I can hold my own in this space, even if I did things differently.” 

Conway now plans to turn her thesis into a book so her research can reach a broader audience. 

“I want to keep my voice,” she says. “This isn’t just about academia – it’s about creating real change.”