16 Unpacking the ‘truth’ about the health gap: decolonising methodologies, cultural archives and the national aboriginal and torres Strait Islander health plan 2013–2023

Truth and authority are key concepts in settler colonial knowledge systems that inform Aboriginal health policy: ‘truth’ about policy ‘problems’ and authority in who can determine policy solutions. The growing emphasis on evidence-based policy means that policymakers increasingly draw on research and western knowledge as their sources of truth and authority. In this way, policymakers construct policy as an objective ‘solution’ to Aboriginal health ‘problems’. However, drawing upon Foucault’s notion of the ‘cultural archive’ or ‘storehouse’, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) shows that western research has generated representations of, and stories about Indigenous peoples (particularly ‘problems’) that claim ‘truth’ and ‘authority’ but are instead embedded in white, western ways of knowing and categorising the world – and serve colonial power structures. We used Bacchi’s (2009, 2015) ‘What’s the problem represented to be’ framework to analyse ‘problems’ represented within the Australian National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Plan 2013–2023. The Plan acknowledges that the health and well-being of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is connected to ‘trauma’, ‘dispossession’, and the ‘interruption of culture’. However, in the Plan, western knowledge, described as ‘clinical’ and ‘evidence based’, is given primacy over Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s ‘cultural’ knowledges. What is left unproblematic in the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Plan 2013 – 2023 is the way this ‘cultural’ versus ‘clinical’ knowledge binary draws upon settler colonial hierarchies of knowledge, obscuring the ways even health policy serves settler colonial power structures. We conclude that, while positive, growing awareness of the role of colonisation in producing health disparities across settler and Indigenous populations has not translated into unsettling the knowledge systems upon which policy is created. We provide some reflections on how decolonising research methodologies may also inform policymakers seeking to ‘unsettle’ the truth and authority, particularly ‘evidence’, that influences policymaking.