Frameworks built around local decision making already move government some distance away from a purely centralised model, through alliances, regional assemblies and negotiated agreements with communities. Once that shift has happened, debating whether community participation should exist at all becomes moot — it already does. The genuinely open question is how much authority, responsibility and resourcing should sit with those local structures, and how that should be balanced against government's own obligations for stewardship of public funds.
Getting that balance right, and being explicit about where responsibility sits at each level, is what separates governance reforms that hold together from ones that quietly unravel under their own ambiguity. Vague or aspirational language about "community voice" tends not to survive contact with an actual funding round, an actual audit, or an actual dispute between two community bodies over the same resource.
What tends to work better is naming the decisions explicitly, level by level: which decisions government retains outright, which are made jointly, and which sit entirely with community structures such as Alliances and Assemblies. NSW's OCHRE policy framework and its Local Decision Making component are, at heart, an attempt to make that division explicit rather than leaving it to be worked out informally each time a decision arises.
For an Aboriginal Community Organisation like IRAAC, this plays out in a very practical way. Community voice — what individuals and families say they need — has to travel through program delivery, into centralised reporting, and up to Boards and government in a form that's still recognisably the same thing that was originally said. Every step in that chain is an opportunity for local decision-making authority to either be reinforced or quietly eroded, depending on how the reporting and governance systems are designed.
This is precisely the space Sebenza works in: not deciding how much authority should sit with community — that's a decision for community, government and the organisations themselves — but making sure the governance and reporting infrastructure actually carries whatever answer is agreed, intact, all the way to the top.