From Fragmentation to System Re Design: What the Jumbunna Review Reminds Us about Whole of Government Responsibility.

“No single agency created these harms, and no single agency can undo them.” Jumbunna Institute Review, July 2025'

If you’re passionate about co-design, community engagement, systems reform work, the public sector and policy, then this is the article for you to be across this week.

I’m doing a clean-up of my laptop over the holiday break. It was in that state that I couldn’t even make out the picture of my kids behind the endless file thumbnails on my desktop. I am at the pool with my three kids, and I can't hotspot or connect to the Wi-Fi, so while I got to cleaning up my desktop for a fresh start to 2026, I stumbled across this reflection piece I wrote earlier in the year around whole-of-government responses to reform work in social policy – that, like many of my pieces is often started and rarely finished. Anyway – that’s the prelude; let’s get into it.

Flashback to June and the final report of the Jumbunna Institute was released into the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the ACT criminal justice system is clear in its diagnosis and bold in its recommendations.

With 99 of these recommendations, the report does not call for a minimalist reform agenda or new pilot programs it specifically calls for a coordinated, whole-of-government response grounded in truth-telling, cultural safety, structural reform, and First Nations leadership. This immediately piqued my interest when I first read the summary and saw it shared online here. As one of the most defining moments in my public sector career was in the delivery of a whole-of-government social policy response. I felt that I could relate to what I was reading because I had seen promise in what can be achieved when we do things differently.

It took me right back to being in community and running these roundtables with young people on the future of their town.

As someone who has both lived experience within systems of harm and professional expertise designing responses to them, this is more than a policy discussion for me. This work is deeply personal, practical, and urgent. Whether we are thinking about forced child removals, youth mental health and wellbeing or health and justice.

Communities experience these impacts as interconnected and intersecting. However, our systems are designed to fragment and silo them, resulting in only incremental improvements to key social outcomes. This is because social issues are not experienced by communities as binary or discrete challenges.

What the Jumbunna Review Calls For

The Jumbunna Review sets out a blueprint for how to dismantle systemic injustice not just in the criminal justice system, but across child protection, policing, health, housing, education, youth justice and community services.

At the heart of the review is the recognition that over-representation is not accidental. It is a product of interlocking systems, policy failures, and the absence of coordinated, culturally informed design.

This resonates with me personally when I remember my youth and the removal of my sister. I also remember the intersection of so many touch points where there was an opportunity to respond with care and where support might have painted a different picture for my family. Professionally I see this overwhelmingly with regards to youth crime and where we see so clearly the intersection of health/education//justice so clearly implode on each other.

Key recommendations include:

• Establishing a dedicated whole-of-government coordination mechanism to ensure shared responsibility.

• Embedding First Nations governance and leadership at all levels of decision-making.

• Mandating cultural safety, trauma-informed practice, and accountability measures across agencies.

• Requiring transparent reporting, data-sharing, and collaborative performance frameworks.

• Resourcing community-led, place-based solutions that centre healing, prevention, and early intervention.

What many may not realise is that we already have a policy mechanism designed to deliver this kind of coordinated response: the NSW Government’s Solution Brokerage framework, introduced under the 2015 Premier’s Memorandum M2015-02.

Solution Brokerage was designed to address complex, cross-agency issues where existing structures failed. It:

• Authorises the Head of Aboriginal Affairs to declare a priority issue and mobilise government response.

• Establishes a three-tiered model depending on complexity—local to state-wide.

• Appoints a named Officer in Charge to lead coordination and delivery of a structured Response Plan.

• Requires departments to commit time, resources, and outcomes within tight timelines (typically six months).

• Embeds community voice and leadership through genuine partnership and community governance not just consultation and engagement after the fact.

  
  

It’s not a theoretical model. It’s not aspirational. It’s already policy.

Bowraville: A Case Study in Whole-of-Government Reform

This is the whole of government social policy response project I walked about at the start of this article. In 2016, the Bowraville community was declared a Solution Brokerage site. I had the privilege of leading the co-design and implementation of this process. This was as a result of the parliamentary enquiry into the family response to the Bowraville murders.

It brought together stakeholders from justice, housing, health, child protection, education, employment and community. But crucially, it wasn’t just about getting everyone in a room it was about transferring decision-making power and creating the structures to make that work sustainable.

Through this work, we:

• Created a locally governed and now incorporated community body, Jaanymili Bawrrungga, to lead long-term cultural governance and accountability.

• Held culturally grounded roundtables and workshops to identify community priorities: youth programs, healing spaces, infrastructure, and trauma-responsive service delivery as well as health and medical services.

• Developed and implemented a multi-agency Response Plan, led by an Officer in Charge and supported by the NSW Secretaries Board.

This wasn’t just a community engagement project. It was system redesign in action. It gave a blueprint for how place-based work in communities experiencing complex needs could look like. And how Government could transform how they worked to maximise impact on the ground.

The Jumbunna Review calls for the exact kind of coordination, cultural governance, and structural reform that Solution Brokerage enables. It wasn’t a perfect policy mechanism – the ombudsman evaluated it at the time, and the findings were mixed – that said Bowraville was evaluated positively and that was largely because of the leadership at a secretary level to cut through the bureaucracy and red tape, make decisions and get things done.

And yet too often, government reverts to siloed thinking, departmental inertia, or programmatic fixes when what’s needed is systemic alignment and governance reform. I mean the out of home care crisis is a great example. We love to put the blame on that solely on agencies like DCJ and the Minister responsible for that portfolio, but that’s a lazy position in my opinion because it ignores the broader systems impacts on and intersections with our communities, particularly Aboriginal communities that heighten and contribute to the ultimate problem.

We already have the tools. We’ve already piloted what works. Too many people say it can’t be done but when you get leadership at that level taking ownership and championing responses to doing things differently shifts can happen.

The question now is: do we have the political will and courage to resource and embed it?

Bowraville showed me personally what’s possible when we treat First Nations leadership, whole-of-government coordination, and structural change not as aspirational values but as operational imperatives.

If you’re working on something exciting and want to have a yarn with the team about any ways we can collaborate together in 2026. Reach out, we would love to connect to learn more!

Happy New Year!

Authored by Sam Alderton-Johnson for Impact Policy