Avoiding responsibility: the ANAO Performance Audit of childhood development

O, what may man within him hide,

Though angel on the outward side!

Measure for Measure, Act three, Scene two

 

The ANAO have recently issued a new performance audit titled Closing the Gap in Schooling and Early Childhood Development — Partnership and Reporting (link here).

The focus of the audit is the implementation of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap as it relates to 3 targets related to addressing inequality in outcomes related to schooling and early childhood development: targets 3, 4 and 5 of Closing the Gap.

According to the Productivity Commission Closing the Gap dashboard (link here), at present, Target 3 on Early Childhood Education is improving and on track with 94.2 % of children enrolled in pre-school in 2024 (but see the discussion of data issues below). Target 4 on Children Thriving is worsening and not on track, with only 33.9 % of Indigenous children commencing school being developmentally on track. Target 5 on Student Learning Potential has improved but is not on track with 68.1% of Indigenous people aged 20-24 having attained Year 12 or equivalent in 2021.

While comprising less than 120 pages including appendices, the ANAO Performance Audit is a dense and complicated read, not assisted by its focus on intricate program detail and the complexity of the processes across multiple portfolios, jurisdictions and programs that impact upon these targets.

In para 1, the report states [footnotes removed]:

The objective of the National Agreement is to ‘overcome the entrenched inequality faced by too many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people so that their life outcomes are equal to all Australians’. The Australian Government is jointly accountable with the state and territory governments for the implementation of the National Agreement.

In para 9, the ANAO lay out the objectives of the audit as follows:

… to assess the effectiveness of partnership arrangements, funding design activities and measurement of progress for schooling and early childhood development commitments under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap.

In this post, I do not propose to attempt to summarise the audit in any comprehensive way but instead will focus on those findings which seem to me to reveal something deeper about the National Agreement, its implementation, and the performance of the agencies involved. I recommend readers at least have a look at the introductory Summary and Recommendations section to obtain a sense of the overall shape and contents of the Performance Audit.

Paragraphs 11 to 14 of the Summary and Recommendations section outline the conclusions of the audit. Bolding of text has been added to emphasise key points.

In paras. 13 and 14, the ANAO note that:

More can be done to align mainstream federal funding agreements to the priority reforms. There is a lack of transparency over how federal funding agreements support Aboriginal community-controlled organisations…

The Australian Government’s progress reporting for Targets 3, 4 and 5 could be more reliable and complete. Dashboard information published by the Productivity Commission on Targets 3, 4 and 5 is accurate, however Target 3 results (the only one of these three targets considered to be ‘on track’) are not fully meaningful due to a measurement issue. Many ‘supporting indicators’ set out in the 2020 National Agreement on Closing the Gap, which are intended to lead to greater understanding and insight into how governments are tracking against the targets, were not developed as at June 2025. The Australian Government’s annual reports on Closing the Gap are accurate but increasingly incomplete and unmeaningful. The NIAA has not done enough to appropriately advise the government about annual reporting requirements established in the National Agreement.

In para. 17, referring to placed based agreements the ANAO state:

In 2021 it was agreed that state and territory governments would resource the establishment and governance costs for any place-based partnerships in their jurisdiction. Place‑based partnerships were not fully established by 2024 as specified in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. …. The NIAA coordinated Australian Government participation in governance arrangements but did not coordinate with the relevant state governments to facilitate establishment of the two place-based partnerships. Australian Government reporting on place-based partnerships, including for place‑based partnerships relevant to schooling and early childhood development, is deficient and worsening.

In para. 19, the ANAO note:

… The Australian Government has not met the requirement in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap to report annually on the allocation of grant funding to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations (including ACCOs).

In para. 22, the ANAO note:

The coordination and publication of the Australian Government’s annual reports on the Closing the Gap National Agreement have been facilitated by the NIAA. While accurately drawing on the PC dashboards, information on Targets 3, 4 and 5 has become less complete over time, reducing transparency over Closing the Gap progress in schooling and early childhood development.

ANAO Recommendations

The ANAO made only four formal recommendations (pages 11 and 12), each of them quite anodyne. The response to the single recommendation to the Education Department was ‘agreed’. The three recommendations to NIAA recommend actions simply amount to requests for mere compliance with the terms of the National Agreement. In each case, the NIAA response might best be described as prevarication.

Recommendation One focusses on reporting on the implementation of place-based partnerships; see paragraph 2.25 to 2.36. In para 2.34, the ANAO note that the last three annual reports on closing the gap compiled by NIAA have not complied with the requirements of clause 37 of the Agreement. The NIAA response was not to agree, nor to disagree, but to ‘note’ the recommendation, adding a comment that the content of the annual reports is a matter for Government.

Recommendation Two, which arose from the analysis in Chapter 3 of the Audit on funding design focusses on the extent to which the annual reports list the number of Community controlled organisations receiving funding, a requirement of clause 118 of the National Agreement. The NIAA response was identical to that provided in relation to Recommendation One. In this case, the ANAO had noted (para. 3.46) that NIAA had not briefed the Minister on the requirement to include this information prior to her approval of the Annual Report.

Recommendation Three was directed to the Department of Education and dealt with improved monitoring of the same issues. The Department’s response was to agree with the recommendation and (in effect) promise to do better.

Recommendation Four (para 4.36) dealt with reporting on progress on closing the gap. The ANAO had examined this issue in detail in Chapter Four of the audit and raised a series of detailed issues which I won’t seek to summarise. I will note one instance (para. 4.13) where the formula used to measure Target Three used different data sources for the numerator and denominator, and this led to inaccuracies and overestimates in the progress being achieved. In 2021, the Productivity Commmission commissioned a review from the ANU to identify improved ways of dealing with the data measurement problems. The ANU report recommended in November 2024 the use of an alternative data source ‘to avoid the biased and at times mathematically impossible observations that result from the numerator-denominator mismatch’. The ANAO report that as of June 2024, the Joint Council’s Partnership Working Group had not considered the recommendation and further reported that the Productivity Commission had advised (footnote 124) that a further study would be required. In this policy domain, everyone hastens slowly.

In relation to the meaningfulness of annual reporting on closing the gap, in para. 4.27, the ANAO state:

When preparing the Australian Government 2022 Annual Report, a brief to the NIAA Chief Executive Officer from the Closing the Gap Branch stated that, in order to meet commitments under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, the annual report would ‘at a minimum’ need to comply with Clause 118 of the agreement (see paragraph 4.23).

Yet, as noted in para 4.29:

since the 2022 Annual Report, for Targets 3,4 and 5, the completeness of target information included in the annual report has declined (Table 4.4), reducing transparency over outcome progress for schooling and early childhood development commitments.

In concluding their audit, the ANAO cited (para 4.34) the Productivity Commission (PC) 2024 Review:

In 2024 the PC’s three-yearly Review of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap found that implementation plans and annual reports were not fulfilling the intended purpose. The review found that the two documents did not reconcile (annual reports contained a limited set of the actions that governments had committed to and reported on actions not listed in the Closing the Gap implementation plan). The review found that reporting on progress was high level or incomplete, and delivery risk and issues were not included. The PC concluded:

By and large, the annual reports focus on listing activities that have been undertaken, while giving significantly less attention to describing what has not been delivered as planned and areas where there has been little progress.

Recommendation Four and the NIAA response are the concluding two paragraphs of the ANAO Audit report:

4.36 The Australian Government improve the completeness and meaningfulness of the Australian Government’s Closing the Gap annual reports and comply with clause 118 of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap by: drawing from the Productivity Commission dashboard to include information about target results and status; and including risks, successes, failures and lessons learned.

National Indigenous Australians Agency response: Noted

4.37 Any amendments to the Commonwealth Closing the Gap Annual Report is a matter for consideration by Government. The NIAA will brief the Government on the ANAO findings and recommendations.

Commentary

The following comments in response to this audit are high level and are best characterised as comprising a set of assertions and questions based on my own experience rather than detailed analyses.

The ANAO are to be commended for their detailed analysis of what is a complex and dynamic policy domain, however, I was left with a deep-seated sense that they are much too cautious. Their analysis itself focusses on compliance with process, taking the National Agreement as the benchmark, and assessing all that is going on (or not going on) against that benchmark. But the benchmark itself (that is the institutional architecture of Closing the Gap) is deeply flawed and as I have argued elsewhere (link here and link here), seems likely to have been deliberately designed to be partial in its focus, and to be so complex and complicated that no interested observer (not even the ANAO) can effectively monitor its implementation. The result is that there is no way for anyone, from the Joint Council down to scribblers based in universities, to keep governments accountable. In these circumstances, the ANAO’s efforts in devoting around a year’s work to assessing compliance against a flawed benchmark is in effect a wasted opportunity. In addition, the audit reflects a wider flaw in ANAO reports, namely that the formal recommendations do not adequately reflect the shortcomings identified in the analysis. This appears to be a deliberate policy aimed at not upsetting the Executive arm of government (which effectively controls the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit to which the ANAO reports), while maintaining a technical commitment to independence and evidence-based analysis. For an example of the operation of this dynamic hidden in plain sight, refer to Appendix Two of the ANAO Performance Audit.

A close reading of the Audit makes extremely clear that NIAA are failing comprehensively in both ensuring the National Agreement is implemented, and in undertaking the policy work (that used to be core business for the APS) that would allow and ensure that the policy was being updated and made increasingly effective. It is as if the NIAA considers that suggesting improvement to the National Agreement is someone else’s job. And as for the NIAA responses to the three recommendations, they amount to telling the ANAO and the wider public to ‘go jump’; in effect, they are saying it’s not their problem.

As the NIAA CEO states in her response letter in Appendix 1, the NIAA ‘will continue to work with Government to support implementation of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap within its remit.’ [emphasis added]. How this supporting role and implicitly constrained remit aligns with the functions contained in the Executive Order establishing NIAA (link here) is difficult to reconcile. Those functions are unequivocal and provide NIAA with an expansive remit involving leadership and coordination across the breadth of the public sector:

•  To lead and coordinate Commonwealth policy development, program design and implementation and service delivery for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
• To provide advice to the Prime Minister and the Minister for Indigenous Australians on whole-of-government priorities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
• To lead and coordinate the development and implementation of Australia’s Closing the Gap targets in partnership with Indigenous Australians

The ANAO performance audit is the result of perhaps a year’s work by a team of around eight analysts, yet there is no discussion about

·       whether the schooling and education elements of closing the gap are in fact working well or not, and if not why not;

·       the implications of rapid demographic change in the Indigenous population;

·       why there is no target directed to improving school attendance;

·       whether there are regional differences in outcomes, and if so what to do about them;

·       whether the 44 separate programs (listed in Appendix 7) directed at the three targets in focus are designed to be effective (rather than just whether they involve partnerships or community-controlled organisations);

·       and importantly, whether the $1.48bn allocated nationally to addressing the targets (see Appendix 7) is too little, or perhaps too much, spent well or poorly, or whether it is poorly directed.

Of course, the response to this critique will be that I am asking for an evaluation not a performance audit. Or to put it another way, I am focussing on effectiveness, whereas the ANAO and the relevant agencies are focussed on efficiency. If so, I plead guilty. The 2024 PC review of Closing the Gap did not address most of these issues and arguably failed to adequately address the structural conflict of interest involved in its management of the dashboard and reporting framework for Closing the Gap. There is a desperate need for an independent and comprehensive macro-evaluation of the entire Closing the Gap framework.

Agencies control what is to be evaluated and when, and often decide to delay or cancel publication (link here). The bottom line is that across the public sector the resources directed to systematic and comprehensive evaluation of Government programs is minimal and decentralised notwithstanding the comparatively recent establishment of the Australian Centre for Evaluation (link here). Invariably, agency initiated evaluations focus on micro programs rather than larger programs, thus avoiding the possibility that an evaluation will reach politically embarrassing conclusions. Governments prefer not to be held to account for lack of effectiveness and find it much easier to manage issues that can be characterised as related to efficiency or process. A focus on effectiveness involves asking whether adequate resources are being allocated, whereas a focus on efficiency sets the issue of adequate funding aside. The absence of adequate investment in effectiveness evaluation is a root cause of structural and systemic policy failure, especially where the interests advocating for greater access to government resources are comparatively weak.

Conclusion

The bottom line here is that the ANAO has done an excellent job in identifying and laying out the myriad ways in which implementation actions directed towards just three of the 19 Closing the Gap targets are not meeting the benchmarks established in the National Agreement. One can only wonder what the comparative results would be for the 16 targets not examined. Yet the more fundamental questions of effectiveness that permeate the policy architecture established to implement and monitor ongoing policy and program action to close the gap have not been addressed.

The Commonwealth Government has not provided a response to the Productivity Commission Review of Closing the Gap completed in 2024, and no Commonwealth Government has formally responded to the 2017 Productivity Commission Review into an Indigenous Evaluation Strategy (link here). What we observe here is the contemporary and ongoing maintenance of Stanner’s Great Australian Silence (link here). In these circumstances, the ANAO by deciding to initiate a Performance Audit focussed on process has in effect provided yet more political and policy cover for ongoing Government inaction in relation to addressing the endemic and systemic effectiveness issues that prevent the Closing the Gap policy from succeeding.

The continuing policy failure on Closing the Gap, and the deliberate refusal to avoid addressing issues related to the effectiveness of current policy approaches is a tragedy for Indigenous interests (particularly those Indigenous citizens suffering deep social and economic disadvantage), but also a tragedy for the nation. It represents a major failure of our political democracy.

 

 

23 January 2026

ANAO financial audits and the case for ALRA reform

 

Come, I have learned that fearful commenting

Is leaden servitor to dull delay;

Delay leads impotent and snail-paced beggary

Richard III, Act four, Scene four

In early December, I published a post on the absence of the Annual Reports for the ALC and AINT prior to Estimates. In that post I was critical of the fact that no formal extension for the delay appeared to have been granted. There was no statement to the Estimates Committee hearing advising Committee members and the public that the reports had been delayed and extensions granted. I have now belatedly discovered that the relevant approvals were sought and granted and the documents were tabled (link here and link here). Those approvals only extended to 30 November, and do not appear to have been renewed or further extended. The tabled correspondence identifies resource constraints within the ANAO as the reason for the AINT audit delay, and staff turnover for the ALC delay. This post suggests that there may be other issues in play as well.

In December, shortly before the end of 2025, the ANAO published a report titled Audits of the Financial Statements of Australian Government Entities for the Period Ended 30 June 2025 (link here). The ANAO helpfully note upfront that:

3.1 A financial statements audit is finalised when the auditor has formed an opinion on the financial statements, and that opinion has been expressed through a written report….

After providing some high-level data on audit completions, the ANAO reported:

3.7 There were four entities for which the 2024–25 financial statements audit had not been finalised by the ANAO as at 30 November 2025. They were Anindilyakwa Land Council, Northern Territory Aboriginal Investment Corporation, Aboriginal Investment NT Trust, and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. Further details are included in Chapter 4.

I don’t propose to pursue the issues around the ASIS audit apart from noting that there do not appear to be further details in the DFAT portfolio entry in Chapter 4 nor is ASIS listed in the Report Appendix. Secrecy prevails in the world of espionage! Presumably the Inspector General of Intelligence (link here) will be following through on this issue.

The ANAO report includes an extended analysis of the timeliness of annual reports (paras 3.11 to 3.24). This indicates that some 20 agencies reports had not been tabled as at 30 November 2025 (para 3.24) representing 11% of the agency reports requires to be tabled. Of these however (as indicated above) only four relate to the non-completion of the audit. Three of the four relate to the entities established by the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (ALRA) administered by the Minister for Indigenous Australians and funded from appropriations to the Aboriginals Benefit Account (ABA) established under ALRA. In contrast to the tabled documents seeking and providing approval for extensions, the ANAO make no comment regarding the cause of the delays.

In relation to the Northern Territory Aboriginal Investment Corporation (AINT) and the Aboriginal Investment NT Trust, there is no information in the ANAO report apart from the advice that the audit is continuing. There is no indication on its website (link here) advising the delay in the finalisation of the annual report. The website does list the contracts entered into in 2024-25 as required by a Senate Order (link here) which indicates that the AINT has entered into a contract with CIML (an investment advisory firm) for the ‘management of Investment Trust’ with an associated cost of $19,243,073. If this payment is in fact the cost of the management of the investment trust, which according to the 2023-24 AINT annual report (page 76) potentially totals $560m (this being the amount expected to be received from the ABA), then the amount of $19m appears on its face potentially excessive. It amounts to 3.39 percent of the investment fund (but might conceivably be for multiple years). When I asked my own AI adviser (Anthropic’s Claude) about the likely fees typical investment advisers would charge, it replied:

If the trust is managed by a genuine institutional investor such as …a government investment agency; a sovereign wealth fund; a large corporate trustee with pooled institutional assets, then yes, you'd typically see those lower institutional rates of 0.10-0.30%, or even lower for very large mandates.

Assuming a rate of 0.30%, the annual cost for a fund of $560m would be $1.68m. The listing of both AINT and the AINT Trust suggests that the ANAO are delving more deeply into these arrangements. Of course, there may be circumstances of which we are not aware that explain these payments, and apart from the questions raised above, there are no indications of issues of concern at this point. However, ina previous post I expressed my scepticism of the broader context underlying the establishment of AINT and the implicit assumptions that seem to have taken hold (link here). There is one other interesting item included in the AINT Entity Contracts listing: Yamagigu Consulting were paid $267k for ‘Nation Building Consulting’ for four months work. Yamagigu were the governance advisers chosen by the ALC when the NIAA required them to appoint a governance adviser following the termination of the former CEO Mr Hewitt.

Anindilyakwa Land Council

There is no further mention of the ALC in the ANAO report apart from Appendix One where it is listed and annotated with the words ‘Audit not yet completed’.

Notwithstanding the parsimonious details, it is possible to hazard a guess at what may be delaying the audit report for the ALC by considering the commentary provided related to the audits of the three other NT land councils.

The ANAO identified seven instances across the whole government sector of serious legislative non-compliance, which it described in the following terms (para 3.61):

Significant legislative breaches include instances of significant potential or actual breaches of the Constitution; and instances of significant non-compliance with the entity’s enabling legislation, legislation that the entity is responsible for administering, and the PGPA Act.

Of these seven, two related to NT land councils (see para 3.62).

In relation to the Northern Land Council: Royalty Trust Account:

The ANAO identified contracts where the distribution of royalty monies to traditional owners was not made within six months, as required under subsections 35(3) and 35(4) of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976;

Further details can be found at paragraphs 4.14.71 to 4.14.78.

In relation to the Tiwi land Council: Non-compliance with the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. Further details are available at paras. 4.14.87 to 4.14.94. For reasons that will become evident, it is worth recounting this issue in full:

4.14.90 The ALRA Act establishes TLC’s responsibilities for payments in respect of Aboriginal land, requiring payment of an amount equal to amounts received to, or for the benefit of, the traditional owners of the land, within six months after that amount is received through the Royalty Trust Account. Previous audits have identified non-compliance with this requirement of the ALRA Act.

4.14.91 During the 2023–24 audit, the ANAO identified that a total of $808,000 of royalties had been held by TLC for more than 6 months. TLC sought advice regarding distribution of the funds by an alternative mechanism to an identified Aboriginal Corporation who would then pay the funds to the appropriate traditional owners to assist with their township leasing rental payments in accordance with Section 35(4B) and Section 36 of the ALRA Act. These sections of the ALRA Act require that any funds received by TLC from the Aboriginals Benefits Account must be paid to a relevant Aboriginal Corporation within six months of receipt.

4.14.92 TLC advised the ANAO that it has taken all reasonable steps to comply with subsection 35(4B) of the ALRA Act, which requires payment to an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Corporation for the benefit of traditional owners.

4.14.93 As no such corporation currently exists, TLC sought Ministerial approval under subsection 35(5) for an alternative payment method. The Minister declined the proposal and did not issue a determination to enable compliance with subsection 35(4B). [emphasis added]

4.14.94 During the 2024–25 final audit, the ANAO noted that funds continue to be held in TLC’s land use funds account. The TLC advised the ANAO that it is awaiting the establishment and registration of a corporation by the Wulirankuwu clan group with ORIC before releasing the funds. TLC is providing administrative support to Tiwi Resources Pty Ltd to assist with progressing this establishment

I found the bolded text above intriguing. While the ANAO remit does not extend to assessing the actions of Ministers, the factual recounting of the Minister’s decision not to issue a determination raises legitimate questions. The obvious question of course is, why did the Minister decide to allow the legislative breach to continue and be ongoing rather than take the decision to distribute the funds as provided for in the Act? Did she just fail to respond, or did she provide the TLC with reasons? If not, why not?

While legislative compliance is important for obvious reasons, the actual consequences of these breaches on the life opportunities of the relevant land council constituencies are minimal. However, this may not be the case in relation to the broad swathe of events over the past few years on Groote. Nevertheless, I have recounted these two cases because they suggest the audit strategy being pursued by the ANAO in its financial audits. They point to a new focus on royalty distributions and the relationships between the land councils and the corporations that are the beneficiaries of the relevant section 64(3) payments.

While we do not know just what has given rise to the delays in the ALC audit, one obvious supposition would be that it relates to the relationship between the ALC and the key corporations which have received the bulk of the ALC section 64(3) payments over the past six years or so. I dealt with these issues in my recent post titled The Angels Weep (link here). I have long ago formed the view that the ALC (at least under its former CEO Mr Hewitt) has utilised its financial assistance and cross board appointments to several corporations to which it is allocating royalty equivalent payments to exercise effective control over those corporations and have argued that this would be both a legislative breach and would undermine the accuracy of the ALC financial statements. The facts supporting the development of my view were first laid out in the ANAO performance audit of the ALC published in 2023 (link here).

In this context, it is worth noting that none of the four corporations that might be said to be at the centre of this ‘effective control’ issue (ARAC, AAAC, GHAC and Anindilyakwa Leaders Future Fund Aboriginal Corporation) has yet posted their 2024-25 financial reports on the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations website, and thus all four are technically in breach of the CATSI Act. While I suspect that the Registrar normally gives corporations some leeway in posting their financial reports, it is of concern that none of them has yet done so. It is my understanding (though I stand to be corrected) that the ALC provides assistance to all four corporations with their financial record keeping, and thus these reporting problems potentially signal deeper issues and problems within the ALC. This is despite the assistance provided during the last financial year by governance advisory firm Yamagigu, at considerable cost. Moreover, AAAC (which owns 70 percent of the proposed Winchelsea mine) has yet to post its 2023-24 financial report, and the Office of the Registrar has recently announced that it has initiated an investigation into GHAC, albeit without providing any background information related to the issues of concern being examined.

Conclusion

The Minister and her agency have spent the last three years effectively in denial, suggesting by their inaction and their systematic lack of transparency that the challenges facing the ALC are of little or no consequence. While the audit of the ALC financial statements may ultimately provide a thumbs up on the ALC finances for 2024-25, the broader context of continuous high level staff turnover, the ongoing National Anti-Corruption Investigation, and the potential misallocation of millions of dollars in royalty equivalent funds (monies appropriated by the Commonwealth Parliament) over recent years as I set out in my recent post The Angels Weep, and the delays in audits and financial reporting to the Parliament as set out in this post, suggest a deeper malaise characterised by ongoing and increasing financial risk, and the possibility of wider social consequences that are not visible through the lenses used by governments and their bureaucracies. In my view, that malaise extends to the absence of effective regulation by successive ministers and their agency, NIAA.  

If I am only half right, there would be a strong case for the ANAO to initiate a performance audit of the allocation of funds appropriated to the Aboriginals Benefit Account (ABA) by the Parliament, and for a deeper Parliamentary inquiry into the administration of the ALC and associated beneficiary corporations over the past 12 years or so. While I have little doubt that the NACC will ultimately uncover some egregious behaviours related to the ALC’s administration, I doubt that the NACC will manage to get their heads around the myriad social, economic and political complexities that have emerged on Groote over that period and nor will they focus on the wider policy solutions required that flow from the issues they uncover.

It is almost twenty years since the last major independent review of the operations of the ALRA. It is time to have a considered and proactive examination of the legislation and its fit with contemporary expectations given its salience in the Northern Territory and its importance to the lives of so many Indigenous Territorians.

Without ongoing and incremental reform, the risks are that the rolling crises in ABA allocations will continue until they reach a point where a future government decides the political cost of the abolition of the ABA arrangements aimed at benefiting Indigenous Territorians is less than the cost of the criticism that will continue to flow from a poorly regulated policy space. The current Commonwealth Government is unlikely to act without proactive engagement by Indigenous interests across the NT on these issues. Keeping your head down, and supporting the status quo, is a successful strategy until the day when the world changes and external forces intervene. That day may not be imminent, but it will surely arrive at some point in the coming decade or two. Support for proactive and incremental reform from the Indigenous leadership in the NT would allow Indigenous interests to shape the extent and speed of reform and would be preferable to cataclysmic retrograde policy changes without Indigenous input at some point in the medium term future.

 

5 January 2026

 

Essential policy reforms for Northern Australia policy

 

What seest thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?"

The Tempest, Act one, Scene two

 

According to the Commonwealth Office of Northern Development (OND) (link here), Northern Australia can be characterised (inter alia) by the following ‘quick facts’:

• Northern Australia comprises 53% of Australia's land mass [see the map at the link above].
• It is home to 1.4 million people or 5.2% of Australia's total population.
• It has an Indigenous population of over 230,000, which comprises 17.4% of northern Australia's population, compared to 3.1% nationally.
• Indigenous rights and interests cover 78% of the north's land mass.
• The cattle industry represents the largest economic land use, covering around 60% of northern Australia's land area.
• 7.7% of northern Australia's workforce is employed in mining compared to 1.9% nationally.
• There are 8 world heritage sites in northern Australia.

A Walking Shadow has addressed numerous issues related to northern Australia over the past decade. While my posts have generally focussed on remote issues as opposed to northern issues the two institutional and policy frames are largely, but not entirely, isomorphic. Northern Australia includes several major urban centres (Darwin, Cairns, Townsville, Hedland) and remote Australia as defined in say ABS statistics or the Remote Jobs and Economic Development program excludes urban areas and extends well to the south of the notional boundaries of northern Australia. Clearly, the demographic and economic geography of the two frames are quite different, especially when considering Indigenous policy issues (although it must be remembered that many Indigenous citizens are resident in northern urban areas).

The wider formal policy context is laid out in the Government’s Northern Australia Action Plan 2024–2029 (link here) published in November 2024. The Action Plan updates the 2015 White Paper on Northern Development Our North: Our Future (link here). The policy architecture for northern development remains essentially unchanged since 2015: a ministerial forum with representation from the relevant states, the Northern Territory and the Commonwealth (link here); an Office of Northern Australia located within the Infrastructure Department (link here) and an Indigenous Reference Group (link here). There is a Minister for Northern Australia, currently Madelaine King and an Assistant Minister for Northern Australia, currently Senator Nita Green.

The Minister for Northern Australia released her annual statement on Northern Australia on 24 November (link here) which doubles up as the Government response to the NAIF review undertaken over the past year or so. My assessment of the review (link here) was very critical and worth reading (or even rereading) if you wish to properly contextualise the most recent ministerial statement.

The Minister’s Annual Statement on Northern Australia (link here) accompanied the publication of the Northern Australia Action Plan 2024-2029: Annual Progress Report 2025 (link here). The Annual Statement is a slick exposition acclaiming the government engagement with northern Australia across the breadth of the policy domain.

On NAIF, the Minister exudes positivity:

Our main vehicle for investment is the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, or NAIF. It has proven to be a catalyst in getting crucial projects off the ground. NAIF now has an impressive portfolio of 32 project investments — fourteen in Queensland, ten in Western Australia and eight in the Northern Territory. This represents more than $4.3 billion in approved loans to projects which are forecast to generate more than $33 billion in public benefit and support thousands of jobs across the north. By the end of October, around $2.8 billion in NAIF funds had been drawn down to progress these projects.

She proceeds to briefly comment on NAIF support for projects in agriculture (the Kimberley cotton gin), renewable energy (Arafura Rare Earth’s Nolans project north of Alice Springs; and the Alpha High Purity Aluminium smelter in Gladstone) before pivoting to extolling the (national, not northern) critical minerals strategy and the signing of the ‘historic’ Australia-US Critical Minerals and Rare Earths Framework where ‘together, our nations committed to mobilising at least AU$1.5 billion each towards an AU$13 billion pipeline of priority projects over the next six months’. She omits mentioning how the government will measure and report on progress on this commitment.

On NAIF itself, the Minister announced — in response to the most recent NAIF Review and the ‘overwhelming support for NAIF across government, industry and from the public’ — the Government’s intention to legislate an additional ten-year lifespan for the facility thus ensuring greater certainty for the current flow of potential projects seeking support. This makes sense, but implicitly signals more of the same rather than any major change in emphasis. This is a lost opportunity.

On First Nations’ participation in NAIF, the Minister stated:

NAIF-funded projects are supporting almost 1400 Indigenous jobs and over $200 million in Indigenous procurement.

Unfortunately, as I noted in my previous post on the Review, the NAIF does not publish aggregated tables of Indigenous employment, and potentially conflates permanent and casual, and construction and operational jobs. Similarly, there are no aggregated data on Indigenous procurement. Assuming the Indigenous Procurement Policy framework is applied, a $200m spend will likely mean around $100m is directed to First Nations corporation owners (who are not necessarily resident in the North).

The web page for the Indigenous Reference Group on Northern Australia lists the meeting dates and communiques, along with the IRG’s submissions on various topics over the past five or so years. I think it is fair to say that the IRG has been largely silent in public discussion of northern policy issues related to Indigenous issues, and there is not one issue which springs to mind where the IRG has led or shaped the wider policy discussion. I will leave it to readers to consider why that might be.

The broader context left unmentioned by the Minister (and the IRG) is that there are upwards of 40,000 unemployed citizens across remote (and primarily northern) Australia, and over 90 percent of these are Indigenous. The Government’s Remote Jobs and Economic Development (RJED) Program (link here) is funding 1700 jobs across remote Australia and is aiming to lift that to 3000 jobs by 2027. Between them, RJED and NAIF are presently funding 3100 jobs and approximately 35,000 First Nations citizens are unemployed and on income support across remote Australia. This makes clear that private sector investment, even when subsidised by government, will not on its own solve the challenges of deep social and economic disadvantage across the north or Australia.

On present policy settings, this assertion will remain valid for at least the next decade and likely beyond. The case for doing much more is irrefutable, but it requires hardheaded policy analysis, policy advocacy and of course political commitment, all of which appear to be in short supply. The same cannot be said for political flim flam.

In a section headed Looking to the Future, the Minister stated:

we’ve made enormous progress on our northern agenda, but we know our job is far from done. Transport and connectivity, housing and health – these are challenges we must continue to tackle, so that northern communities can fully participate in the opportunities on offer, and to grow resilient northern economies.

She is correct of course. She mentions several useful and important initiatives the Government continue to support. For example, she notes that

Our Indigenous Biosecurity Program now partners with 67 Indigenous ranger groups and two Indigenous cattle stations along 10,000 km of northern coastline.

The biosecurity program and the associated ranger groups are clearly important and potentially pathbreaking programs which has been in existence for some decades. Yet there are no rigorous evaluations of the biosecurity program and its interaction with ranger groups that I am aware of, and it is unclear how effective the devolved governance of the program is, and whether there exists any effective regulatory oversight to ensure that it is delivering more than an income stream for local community residents and a PR opportunity for the interests involved including governments.

Finally, there is a short section headed A Safe and Secure North.  The minister notes:

our government is acutely aware of northern Australia’s strategic importance in our region – investing up to $18 billion in our northern bases over the next decade. Major projects include:

• upgrades at the Bradshaw Field, Kangaroo Flats, Mount Bundey and Robertson Barracks training areas in the Northern Territory, and

• upgrades to RAAF Bases at Tindal, in the Northern Territory, • Learmonth in Western Australia, and

• Townsville in Queensland.

Articles by John Coyne of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (link here and link here) provide more information and detail and strongly support the Minister’s agenda on northern security. For my part, I am somewhat more sceptical, but this is an issue for another post.

However, I can’t resist comparing the quantum of funding currently available for remote community housing in the NT (some $4bn over ten years in joint NTG and Commonwealth funding) with the $18bn available over ten years to upgrade defence training facilities across the north. Clearly reasonable people will differ on what are appropriate responses to the respective budget pressures for remote housing and northern defence infrastructure, but I for one do not consider that the nation has struck the right balance here.

As I argued in my submission to the NAIF review (link here), finding a way to allocate NAIF funds to supporting remote Indigenous housing and associated infrastructure would be a game-changing initiative, with flow on advantages in facilitating better health, education and employment outcomes in remote Australia.

Properly designed, such an initiative would be the most decisive policy intervention available to the Commonwealth in terms of delivering a step change in the life circumstances and opportunities of remote Indigenous communities and underpinning the long-term inclusion of Indigenous communities in the future of the north. It would incentivise the states and territories to invest more in sustainable social and economic infrastructure in the north and would target the existing deficits that will continue to constrain the opportunities that must be grasped if northern Australia is to reach its full potential.

The second major opportunity that would drive a step change in reducing remote Indigenous disadvantage would be to massively expand RJED, the remote jobs program. As I have previously noted (link here , link here and link here), the Prime Minister stood up at Garma three years ago and claimed that the previous government’s remote income support program, the Community Development Program (CDP), was a failure, and committed to replace it with funding for real jobs. His Government has dropped the ball on that commitment, with less that two thousand RJED program jobs funded, and over 35,000 income support recipients on a program which can only be described as ‘CDP lite’.

While the RJED program falls within the PM&C portfolio, and is administered by the Minister for Indigenous Australians, I mention this issue here because the Minister for Northern Australia cannot responsibly avert her eyes from a program that is of such significance to the future of the north and is chronically underperforming. This is especially the case because of the potential synergies between NAIF funded projects and the use of RJED program funds. She should be advocating for its reform both inside the Cabinet room and more widely.

The failure to date of the Commonwealth to grasp the opportunities for reform of NAIF and the RJED program means we will continue to read stories like this one from Roebourne in Western Australia’s Pilbara (link here) for at least the next decade, and probably beyond.

 

30 December 2025  

 

 

Bemusement and bewilderment: why the secrecy with the ALC?

 

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!

Macbeth, Act two, Scene three

 

In late September 2025, I lodged an FOI request with the NIAA and indirectly the Minister for information related to some elements of the circumstances under which the former CEO of the ALC, Mr Mark Hewitt was in October 2024 terminated by the Anindilyakwa Land Council (ALC) and his contract paid out. As I noted in a previous post (link here) the ALC, advised and assisted by a senior NIAA officer, and without its own legal officer in the room, decided to terminate Mr Hewitt, agreed to pay him a termination payment that was estimated to total around $500,000, and in its formal decision gave no reasons for the termination. Neither the ALC nor the Minister for Indigenous Australians announced the termination and virtually all references to Mr Hewitt were deleted from the ALC web page.

Set out below are extracts from a letter recently received from the NIAA in relation to an ongoing FOI request lodged in late September:

Dear Mr Dillon, Freedom of information request - FOI/2526/015

1. I refer to your request dated 29 September 2025 to the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) under the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (FOI Act) for access to the following documents: “

1. Any documents held by NIAA or the Minister referencing any request by the Minister or her Office relating to the tenure of the employment of Mr Hewitt by the ALC.

2. Any documents including correspondence, emails, texts or file notes of phone conversations between the ALC and the Minister, her Office and/or the NIAA that (a) advise the Council’s decision to terminate the former CEO; or (b) provide or reference reasons for the decision to terminate Mr Hewitt’s employment; or (c) deal with the administrative and financial arrangements for the departure of Mr Hewitt and /or his spouse, or (d) relate to the next steps in relation to filling the CEO position or Ms Liu’s employment within the ALC, AAAC, or Winchelsea Mining Corporation.

3. Any briefing or advice to the Minister or her Office from NIAA (or other agencies) relating to the processes surrounding Mr Hewitt’s termination or to the arrangements for handling his exit from the ALC.

4. Any briefing or advice from NIAA to the Minister or her Office related to either the approval of ALC Budget cover or the approval of funding for termination payments relating to Mr Hewitt and/ or his spouse.

5. Any documents signed by the Minister or her delegate related to the financial and other arrangements associated with the termination of employment of Mr Hewitt and his spouse from employment with the ALC, associated Aboriginal corporations and/or Winchelsea Mining Corporation.” …

3.  I am writing to advise you of my decision that you are liable to pay a charge in respect of the processing of your request. My preliminary assessment of the charge you are liable to pay is $181.40. A 10% deposit of $18.14 is payable….

5. In accordance with section 29 the FOI Act and the Freedom of Information (Charges) Regulations 2019 (Charges Regulations), a charge can be imposed in respect of a request for access to documents under the FOI Act. The charge is for the search and retrieval of documents, decision making and provision of access to documents. Payment of the charge does not guarantee access to the requested documents.

6. I have assessed the work the NIAA would need to do to process your request and have calculated the breakdown of charges set out at Annexure A [not included in these extracts]…

8. I note that in your request for documents, you requested that any charges for processing this request be waived on the grounds of public interest. You specifically referred to “the importance of probity, transparency and accountability in decision-making relating to the appropriate use of financial allocations governed by the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 and the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013”.

9. Notwithstanding this waiver request, I have decided to impose charges for the processing of this FOI request.

10. In making the decision to impose charges, I accept your contention regarding the importance of probity and transparency. However, I consider that it remains appropriate to impose a charge for the processing of the request.

11. The imposition of a charge in these circumstances reflects the work associated with processing the request, as well as the administrative burden placed on third parties to review documents which they are consulted on….

17. You have 30 days to respond to this notice in writing.

18. You may choose to: • pay the deposit amount or the full charge amount, and notify the FOI Coordinator in writing, • contend the charge has been wrongly assessed, or should be reduced or not imposed and explain your reasons, or • withdraw your request….

30. In accordance with section 31 of the FOI Act, the period for processing your request stops from the date you receive this notice until:

• the day you pay the charge (the deposit amount or the full charge),

• if the amount of the charge is changed following review under the FOI Act, the day you pay the revised charge (the deposit amount or the full charge), or

• if a decision is made not to impose a charge following review under the FOI Act, the day you are notified of the decision….

Kind regards, Sean Worth

Group Manager Integrity Group 16 December 2025

Yesterday, I paid the fees, admittedly feeling a degree of incredulity. I sent an email confirming the payment to the NIAA FOI team, and included the following text in the email:

Good afternoon FOI team

I have paid this fee in full.

Let me for the record register my bemusement and bewilderment at the way in which my request for fee waiver on the grounds of the public interest in transparency and accountability over matters involving substantial sums of taxpayer funds was cursorily dismissed by the decisionmaker. 

I acknowledge of course that the imposition of fees is provided for in the Act and regulations, but I also note that it can be used to deter citizens from pursuing access to information, and that this would not be in the public interest. Unfortunately, such deterrence appears to be de rigeur within the Commonwealth especially in circumstances where ministers or senior officials appear to be potentially subject to embarrassment. 

In this context, I can't help but remind you that section 3 of the FOI Act 1982, which sets out the objects of the legislation provides (emphasis added) in subsection (2):

The Parliament intends, by these objects, to promote Australia's representative democracy by contributing towards the following:  (a)  increasing public participation in Government processes, with a view to promoting better - informed decision - making; (b)  increasing scrutiny, discussion, comment and review of the Government's activities.

and in subsection (4): 

The Parliament also intends that functions and powers given by this Act are to be performed and exercised, as far as possible, to facilitate and promote public access to information, promptly and at the lowest reasonable cost.

I would hope that you would give serious consideration to the damage that is being done to the reputation of the public service and the NIAA in pursuing this course of action as a general policy. 

You have my permission to pass these comments on to the decision maker, the NIAA CEO and indeed the minister

Sincerely michael dillon

Conclusion

In the scheme of things, recounting this skirmish in the transparency war over the as yet unresolved events on Groote is of little consequence. I have decided to publish it because it is indicative (yet again) of the lengths to which the Commonwealth will go to avoid coming clean on what has transpired on Groote Eylandt over the past decade.

I responded with bemusement and bewilderment, because the NIAA has regulatory responsibilities for the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, the Aboriginals Benefit Account and the Land Councils established under the legislation. On Groote Eylandt where the Anindilyakwa Land Council operates, there are increasing indications that the problems first identified by the ANAO in May 2023 will ultimately lead to significant misallocations, and potentially losses, of many millions of dollars of royalty equivalent payments intended to benefit traditional owners and other community members affected by mining (link here), and there are still questions unanswered in relation to very significant sums of royalties paid to the Anindilyakwa Mining Trust and later transferred to a local corporation, but apparently not received by that corporation (link here). Or even more pointedly, when a senior NIAA officer attends the ALC Board meeting which decided to authorise a termination of the former CEO with associated payments estimated at $500,000 for reasons neither he nor the ALC Board is prepared to reveal publicly, the NIAA can’t see a problem. Nothing to see here!

Yet when an engaged citizen, taxpayer and policy analyst seeks to exercise legislated rights under the FOI Act, the NIAA sees fit to exercise its discretion to charge me $181.40. Am I expected to sleep soundly tonight secure in the knowledge that the FOI regulations are being administered by NIAA without fear or favour?

The endemic lack of transparency, and the extraordinary efforts the Commonwealth makes to keep the lid on the bubbling cauldron serves to add to the confusion that seems to pervade every aspect of the issues involving the ALC on Groote Eylandt.

One is left wondering, just what is it that the Commonwealth has to hide given the continuing and sorry cascade of unanswered questions, dubious decisions, deliberate distraction and incessant obfuscation?

 

18 December 2025

A strange country?

 

My bounty is as boundless as the sea,

My love as deep; the more I give to thee,

The more I have, for both are infinite.

Romeo and Juliet, Act two, Scene two

Randolph Stow was prominent in Australian literature and letters in the late 1950s and sixties and seventies. He is well known for his evocation of Australian landscapes, notions of home and homecoming, cross-cultural paradox and the complex challenges of living life on the margin. His most well-known novels are perhaps Tourmaline, The Merry-Go-Round-in the Sea, and my personal favourite, To the Islands.

In the 2019 Randolph Stow Memorial Lecture (link here) published in the excellent occidental literary journal Westerly (vol 64.1), Andrew Lynch considers four inter-connected themes that permeate Stow’s writings: trauma, myth, love and home. I don’t propose to summarise nor critically assess Lynch’s astute and incisive observations but rather wish to lean on him to showcase the enduring and contemporary relevance of Stow’s writing as we try to come to terms with the complexity, irrationality, and seemingly ubiquitous horror of the world around us, be it local, national or international.  

Accordingly, I will quote at some length from a section of Lynch’s lecture under the heading Trauma:

The protagonist of the story, an ageing Anglican missionary, Stephen Heriot, has lost his sense of purpose in life, and believing he has killed an Indigenous man, wanders into ‘Dead Man’s Land’, thinking about ‘being born out of crimes’: ‘  “It was because of murders that I was ever born in this country. It was because of murders that my first amoebic ancestor ever survived to be my ancestor. Every day in my life murders are done to protect me. People are taught how to murder because of me”  ’ (To the Islands 159–60). Heriot feels personally implicated in an endless cycle of violence. Part of this feeling comes from self-obsession and melancholic introversion, but part of it comes from his increasing inability to disconnect the work of his mission from the broader mission of colonial exploitation. In his pastoral life, he looks for a fusion of Indigenous and European cultural expression. But, as a white man, he comes to see himself as an aggressor to the local people, and his attempts to identify with them create a sense of survivor guilt. Typically of Stow’s protagonists, Heriot’s ending is to find himself alone. Yet in his aloneness he takes the next step on an inner journey, as at the land’s edge he looks out over the sea for the islands of the dead:

The old man knelt among the bones and stared into the light. His carved lips were firm in the white beard, his hands were steady, his ancient blue eyes, neither hoping nor fearing, searched sun and sea for the least dark hint of a landfall. ‘My soul,’ he whispered over the sea surge, ‘my soul is a strange country.’ (208)

In a final section of the lecture under the heading Love and Home, Lynch observes, inter alia, that for Stow:

Love brings grief, but it is the creative energy that survives trauma and death, and allows continuity.  

And later summarising the concluding revelation of the protagonist of a later novel, The Girl Green as Elderflower, Lynch notes:

It’s not ancestry — ‘where are you from?’ — but where you love that makes ‘home’.

If this makes sense, if we agree with the sentiment, then it raises important issues for we Australians, as the corollary is that if we want Australia to be and to remain our ‘home’ in that deeper sense, we must find ways to ensure that love (or if you prefer, values such as deep respect, generosity, acceptance, and forgiveness) are present in and hopefully permeate our civic society and our lives: our personal lives, our professional lives, our institutional lives and even our political lives.

The alternative is to live out our days in a strange country, infected by xenophobia, inhabited by strangers, estranged from each other, and importantly, estranged from our own selves.

 

15 December 2025