The 2025-26 ALC Corporate Plan: a new strategic direction?

 

Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw

When honour's at the stake.

Hamlet Act four, Scene four.

 

For reasons that will become apparent, the following post focusses primarily on economic development issues, and particularly the proposed development of the Winchelsea Mine on Aboriginal land in the Groote Eylandt archipelago. I have added bolded text to extracts from the Corporate Plan and elsewhere for emphasis.

The Anindilyakwa Land Council Corporate Plan 2025-26 (link here) identifies five key activities: Caring for country; Economic and community development; Monitor mining and mine closure; Preserving culture; and Governance. I will focus here on just one: economic and community development.

In relation to economic and community development, the plan identifies (page 7) the following activities:

Work collaboratively to pursue commercial and community development outcomes that builds a prosperous future for the Traditional Owners of the Groote Archipelago.

1.      Distribute mining royalties to support the growth of a culturally informed, diversified and sustainable post mining economy in line with the wishes of TOs.

2.      Support the implementation of the Local Decision Making Agreement (LDMA) across housing, education, economic development, law, justice and rehabilitation, health and wellbeing, and local government to achieve self-determination.

3.      Provide appropriate support structures including the operation of the Finance Committee and the Royalty Development Unit to build capability and capacity of Anindilyakwa-led Aboriginal Corporations.

4.      Work in partnership with Aboriginal Corporations to strengthen Traditional Owner led commercial and community development activities.

5.      Work with stakeholders to build the Anindilyakwa Mining Trust (AMT) investment to support a perpetual future Groote Archipelago cultural economy.

6.      Deliver a community support program to improve Traditional Owners wellbeing, address community needs and to work collaboratively with community service providers.

7.      Build Anindilyakwa data sovereignty to support informed and evidence based local decision making.

In relation to the ALC’s operating context, the Corporate Plan notes (page 12) the following developments in relation to the oversight of section 64(3) payments of royalty equivalents to Aboriginal corporations representing TOs and affected communities:

The ALC has appointed a Finance Committee under ALRA section 29(A) to review matters pursuant to ALRA section 35(2), 35(4), 35, 35B and/or 35C and where applicable, make recommendations to the ALC Board.

It also notes that the ALC does not have any subsidiaries.

Under Economic Transformation (page 13), the Corporate Plan refers to enterprise developments focussed on seafood exports but makes no mention of the Winchelsea mine. In relation to infrastructure there is mention of the Little Paradise developments, but without mentioning their linkage to the proposed mine. Also mentioned is that the ALC has a service agreement in place with Anindilyakwa Royalties Aboriginal Corporation (ARAC) to project manage and support delivery of some infrastructure projects on the Groote Archipelago.

In a section headed Significant agreements- Mining and Exploration, which deals primarily with South32’s GEMCO mine, the Corporate Plan adds a short paragraph:

 Winchelsea Mining. The ALC will be reviewing arrangements with Winchelsea Mining to ensure Traditional Owner's interests are met and that the principles of free, prior and informed consent are adhered to.

There is no reference to the fact that Anindilyakwa Advancement Aboriginal Corporation (AAAC) owns 70 percent of Winchelsea Mining, nor any reason provided for initiating the review. The substantial previous allocations to AAAC and GHAC in support of the mine are not mentioned. AAAC and GHAC are both corporations to which activity 4 above refers.

In a section headed Cooperation (page 21), the Corporate Plan states:

Aboriginal Corporations operating on the Groote Archipelago are the recipients of ALC's ALRA section 64(3) royalty distributions and play a crucial role in supporting ALC's purpose to invest in the present to build a self-sufficient future for Traditional Owners. The ALC works closely with local Aboriginal Corporations to implement the LDMA to transfer the control of services and assets to Traditional Owners in the areas of economic development, education, housing, health, law, justice and rehabilitation and local government. The ALC offers support services to Aboriginal Corporations and enterprises to enhance governance and business management. A services deed is in place with ARAC, for the ALC to provide business administration services, project management and program delivery.

Implicit in the text of the recent Corporate Plan is a significant shift in emphasis and presumably strategic intent away from framing the proposed Winchelsea mine as the mechanism for creating a self-sustaining Fund which will underpin the economic and social development of Groote in perpetuity.  The salience of this shift is evident when the previous ALC Corporate Plan (2023-24) is compared.

In that document, the section headed Significant agreements (page 14) stated (inter alia):

 As mine closure approaches in 2030-31, … Working groups have been established to provide focus on a range of considerations including … opportunities for Winchelsea Mining Operations.

Winchelsea Mining is a joint venture that is majority owned by the Anindilyakwa Advancement Aboriginal Corporation and that has been purposefully established as a future Groote enabling project with a core vision to raise enough revenue to support the economic and social future of the TOs of the Groote Archipelago. Capital construction of the Winchelsea mine is expected to commence in 2025. The mining venture will provide annual fixed payments to impacted clans, provide guaranteed payments into the AMT and surplus profits will be reinvested into major projects for the benefit of TOs. It is proposed that the Winchelsea mine closure plan will include re-purposing the mine site to scale up aquaculture operations post mining.

The ALC Strategic Plan 2023-33 issued in January 2024 was even more explicit regarding the ALC involvement in driving the Winchelsea mine. The overview stated (page 5):

By taking a strategic holistic perspective captured within the Strategic Plan 2023-33 the ALC enhances the administration and decision making relating to the distribution of ALRA S64(3) royalty monies which forms a significant function of the ALC. The Strategic Plan 2023-33 seeks to maximise the economic opportunities available while mining is taking place on the Groote Archipelago by resource companies South32 and Winchelsea Mining Pty Ltd, and to utilise the royalties received to stimulate and grow a diversified, culturally informed, and environmentally sustainable post-mining economy.

On page 26, the Strategic plan states:

The ALC actively advocates for an economic development landscape that is diversified and that stimulates establishing and running enterprises that meet the principles listed above. The ALC provides Aboriginal Corporations on the Groote Archipelago with support to build capability, governance and viability to operate enterprises that achieves positive outcomes for their businesses and the Groote Archipelago communities.

It goes on to describe the activities of Groote Holdings Aboriginal Corporation (GHAC):

In February 2021, Groote Holdings Aboriginal Corporation (GHAC) commenced operations and will play a significant role in the delivery of the Economic Development Implementation Plan. GHAC has been established to benefit all clans of the Groote Archipelago and structured to facilitate the delivery of major projects and to hold assets and infrastructure that benefits the Groote Archipelago. GHAC’s main area of focus is on the Little Paradise Development which includes a suite of projects pursued by TOs on their land to support their future economic prosperity.

The document identifies the Little Paradise hub as (inter alia) the logistics and base camp for Winchelsea mine operations and workers accommodation.

At pages 34-36, the Strategic plan outlines the proposed operations of the Winchelsea mine. Selected extracts include:

The role of the ALC in relation to Winchelsea mining is to carry out the ALC’s functions under ALRA S23(ea) and to support TOs of the Groote Archipelago to pursue commercial activities, which includes resource development. The ALC’s role has been to consult with TOs and to support TOs to pursue the commercial opportunity in line with their wishes, to distribute royalty monies to support standing up the project, to support TOs to establish the commercial arrangements, regulatory and government approvals and enter into the ALC and Winchelsea Mining Agreement. Winchelsea Mining Company is a joint venture between Anindilyakwa Advancement Aboriginal Corporation (AAAC) and AUS China International Mining Pty Ltd, with AAAC holding a large majority (70%) of the interest in the joint venture. While TOs have long held the position that mining on the Groote Archipelago should not and will not last forever, there is an acceptance of the economic benefits that extracting the resources held on their lands can provide.

Winchelsea mine is positioned as a future Groote enabling project with a core vision to raise enough revenue to permanently support the economic and social future of the TOs of the Groote Archipelago. A 30-year mining lease was granted by the NT Government for the Winchelsea mining operations in March 2022. Once the mine goes into production it is expected to be operational for at least 10 years. A significant milestone was achieved in March 2023 with the completion of the Winchelsea Joint Ore Reserves Committee Reserve Statement (Winchelsea Mining Pty Ltd, 2023) which provides an independent sign-off, of the environmental reports, geology, ore reserves, purchasing agreements and other pertinent factors and which is a requirement before obtaining approval to mine. The mining venture will provide annual fixed payments to impacted clans, provide guaranteed payments into the Anindilyakwa Mining Trust and surplus profits will be reinvested into major projects for the benefit of TOs….

At pages 41-42, the Strategic Plan states in relation to the role of GHAC:

GHAC has been established to purchase and own major assets to facilitate transportation and access to major economic development locations. By utilising economic stimulus funding from NIAA, GHAC has purchased vessels and provides services (at cost) to support major economic development projects by providing transportation of goods and personnel to support the construction of the Boarding School on Bickerton Island, the Winchelsea mining operations, and the Little Paradise Development.

GHAC was also funded from the economic stimulus package to extend the jetty at Winchelsea Island, establish a new jetty at Little Paradise and to establish a new ramp on Bickerton Island. The jetties and ramps are critical to the commencement of mining at Winchelsea Island, the Little Paradise Development, and the construction of the Boarding School on Bickerton Island, respectively.

Not only was the ALC driving the development of the Winchelsea mine, but NIAA COVID era economic stimulus funding was utilised for the development of the jetties on Winchelsea Island and at Little Paradise.

Comment

The key take out from the latest Corporate Plan is the significant shift away from the centrality of the Winchelsea mine as the potential future cornerstone of economic development on Groote. The latest corporate plan does not rule out future support by the ALC (via section 64(3) allocations) for the mine, but neither does it suggest that such support will be automatically forthcoming.

While it is a much more coherent and sensible approach than previously in place, it suffers from the same lack of underlying explanation and rationale that infected the previous strategic documents. In short, there is a disturbing lack of transparency in the failure to explain why the ALC has shifted direction. It is unclear whether the ALC has undertaken new analysis that it is not prepared to reveal, or whether the ALC’s shift is based on external factors it is not prepared to reveal.

This gap is of concern, because without being transparent about why the shift in strategic direction was required, and what are the specific issues which have led to this significant change of strategic direction, the ALC Board is effectively announcing that it is prepared to continue to pursue strategic pathways based primarily on the degree to which they meet the political imperatives of the moment. In turn, this severs the link between developing a culture of hardheaded analysis of the risks they are facing, the opportunities that might be pursued, and the costs of the alternative choices available to the ALC in the pursuit of those opportunities. In other words, while the new strategic directions appear to be an improvement on the past choices made by the ALC, there is no guarantee that the new choices will be the best strategic choices available, and nor is there a guarantee that the ALC will not revert to the poor decision making practices that have led them to the (belated) realisation that a change of strategic direction is required.

Of course, if the ALC now understands that the Winchelsea mine will not provide the post manganese mining sustainable economic future that was the putative rationale for ALC support, does the ALC have an alternative pathway in mind to such a future? Or does the ALC recognise that such an aspiration is (and arguably always was) a chimera? If the former, the ALC owes it to its constituents to lay out that pathway backed by rigorous analysis and data. If the latter, it owes its constituents both an apology and as much advance warning as possible of the impending cessation in the almost fifty-year flow of royalties and royalty equivalents to Aboriginal people on Groote.

A second take out which is graphically demonstrated by the involvement of NIAA in funding infrastructure directly related to the proposed Winchelsea mine through the economic stimulus funding provided by NIAA during the COVID epidemic is that the NIAA has dropped the ball and is both conflicted in terms of its regulatory responsibilities, and unwisely implicated in implicitly encouraging implementation of the previous strategic approach that the ALC has now determined requires drastic revision or perhaps complete disposal. Whatever the failings of the ALC in pursuing what appear to have been deeply flawed strategic objectives, the responsibility for those failing is shared with the NIAA, and arguably, the NIAA should be held to a higher level of responsibility. This insight begins to make transparent just one of the potentially multiple reasons the Commonwealth and its agency the NIAA have adopted a position of radical secrecy over all that has transpired on Groote Eylandt over the past decade.

My next post will provide an update on information that has recently come to my attention regarding the management and strategies of the ALC in recent years and in addition (and of most relevance to the issues discussed in this post) an indicative assessment of the direct and indirect costs incurred to date on the old, and apparently discarded strategy of shaping the ALC strategic agenda around the Winchelsea mine proposal.

 

12 November 2025

Domestic and Family Violence and Closing the Gap

Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins

 Remorse from power.

Julius Caesar Act 2, Scene 1

The National Agreement on Closing the gap sets out 17 targets and four priority reforms. Target 13 relates to domestic and family violence (link here).

Target 13 is specified as follows:

By 2031, the rate of all forms of family violence and abuse against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children is reduced at least by 50%, as progress towards zero.

The following text is taken from the Productivity Commission dashboard:

Nationally in 2018-19, 8.4% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander females aged 15 years and over experienced domestic physical or face-to-face threatened physical harm (figure CtG13.1). There is no new data since the baseline year of 2018-19.

The national data point of 8.4% incorporates varying jurisdictional data points rangeing from 10% in NSW to 6.4% in Qld.

If we unpack the specification of the target, it becomes clear just how meaningless it is. The benchmark data have not been updated for six years. More problematically, the AIWH (link here) cites research from 2011 that found that ‘around 90% of violence against First Nations women and most cases of sexual abuse of First Nations children are undisclosed’. [Willis M (2011) ‘Non-disclosure of violence in Australian Indigenous communities’ Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice no. 405, AIC]. Moreover, multiple instances of family violence against an individual are recorded as equivalent to one instance and thus embed the potential for systemic undercounting into the target specification.

The PC Closing the Gap dashboard section on Target specifications for Target 13 notes, inter alia:

Experiences of harm are likely to be under‑reported. Due to the sensitive nature of the questions, responses were not compulsory, and a person may have chosen not to answer some or any of the questions.

The physical and threatened physical harm data collected in the 2018–19 NATSIHS is not comparable to other ABS data sources collecting similar data, including data from: the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey; the General Social Survey; the Personal Safety Survey; or, Recorded Crime – Victims.

And also, in relation to Future Reporting:

Future reporting will seek to include the following additional disaggregations: remoteness areas and other small geographic areas (where available); disability status; gender; age; and Indigenous status.

Yet there appears to be no progress whatsoever in measuring the target trajectory, let alone updated disaggregation. Importantly, the PC dashboard also notes that comparable data on non‑Indigenous people is currently not available. Given that the problems with the target specification mean that the benchmark data points are essentially meaningless, this is perhaps not surprising.

The FDSV Summary on the AIHW website (updated July 2025) reports (link here) the following data on mainstream domestic and family violence:

Results from the 2021–22 PSS showed that an estimated 3.8 million Australian adults (20% of the population) reported experiencing physical and/or sexual family and domestic violence since the age of 15. It is estimated that of all Australian adults:

·         11.3% (2.2 million) had experienced violence from a partner (current or previous cohabiting)

·         5.9% (1.1 million) had experienced violence from a boyfriend, girlfriend or date

·         7.0% (1.4 million) had experienced violence from another family member (ABS 2023c).

Clearly this is substantial issue across all demographic segments of Australian society. The AIHW notes (link here) that:

Comparable national data are not available to compare the prevalence of FDV among different population groups.

This may be a deliberate policy by ABS and AIHW to avoid the potential misuse of such data to typecast and/or demonise ethnic groups in Australia. It does mean however that the fundamental conceptual basis of ‘closing the gap’, namely decreasing the variation in rates of domestic violence between mainstream population and First Nations populations cannot be applied to the issue of domestic violence.

There is a strong sense from the AIWH and ABS discussion of family violence that the rate of Indigenous family violence is higher than the rate in the mainstream. Yet there is no direct data available. One way to get a better sense of this is to consider national homicide rates. Intuitively, homicide rates are a function of numerous factors, but one of the obvious factors would be rates of family violence. Thus, by looking at the extreme outcomes of family violence, we can get a sense of the comparative significance of family violence within Indigenous and non-Indigenous contexts.

The Australian Institute of Criminology report Homicide in Australia 2023–24: Statistical Report 53 (link here) reports 55 intimate partner homicides nationally of which 46 were women (page 11) in 2023-24. The following extracts have been selected to shine more light on the potential significance for comparative rates of family violence, and bold text added for emphasis. The authors note (page 11):

The [national] female intimate partner homicide rate in 2023–24 was 0.43 per 100,000 female population aged 18 years and over. This is a marked increase from the rate of 0.32 per 100,000 recorded in 2022–23 and the second highest rate of female intimate partner homicide in the last 10 years.

In terms of geographic location, they note (page 14):

Excluding Western Australia, the homicide rate for incidents in regional and remote areas exceeded the national incident rate for 2023–24 (1.08 and 3.51 per 100,000 respectively vs 0.98 per 100,000), while the rate of incidents in major cities was lower than the national rate (0.77 per 100,000) [emphasis added].

In terms of Indigenous status (page 20):

Of the 277 homicide victims in 2023–24, 44 (16%) were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and 226 (82%) were non-Indigenous (see Table 13) ….. Between 1989–90 and 2023–24, 14 percent (n=1,407) of homicide victims were Indigenous and 85 percent (n=8,637) were non-Indigenous

In relation to Indigenous victims (page 24):

The homicide victimisation rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in 2023–24 was 4.31 per 100,000 relevant population (see Table 17), a decrease from the rate of 5.36 per 100,000 recorded in 2022–23.

On page 26:

Around two-thirds of Indigenous female victims from cleared incidents were killed by an intimate partner (64%, n=9; see Table 20), almost double the proportion of Indigenous women killed by an intimate partner in 2022–23 (38%, n=5). Between 1989–90 and 2023–24, over two‑thirds of Indigenous women victims of homicide were killed by a current or former intimate partner (69%, n=337). In 2023–24, Indigenous women experienced an intimate partner homicide victimisation rate seven times greater than the rate for all Australian women (2.84 per 100,000 relevant population vs 0.43 per 100,000 respectively).

In relation to non-Indigenous victims (page 27), the authors note:

The homicide victimisation rate of non-Indigenous Australians was 0.88 per 100,000 (see Table 22), an increase from the rate of 0.74 per 100,000 recorded in 2022–23.

In relation to offenders, the authors note inter alia:

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander homicide offender rate in 2023–24 was 6.87 per 100,000 relevant population). Males comprised 78 percent of Indigenous homicide offenders (n=43) with an offender rate of 10.80 per 100,000. A fifth of Indigenous offenders were female (22%, n=12) with an offender rate of 2.99 per 100,000 (page 37).

Two-thirds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander [primary homicide offenders] … and 46 percent… of non‑Indigenous primary homicide offenders (excluding New South Wales) had a known history of domestic and family violence (page 44).

The AIC evidence that Indigenous female homicides occur at much higher rate than in the mainstream is consistent with the hypothesis that there is a very strong correlation between prior domestic violence and later homicides. While every homicide is a tragedy, my purpose here is to focus on family violence and the strong suggestions that it occurs as much higher rates within Indigenous households than mainstream households. The gap exists; we just do not know its depth and width.

Given that the current Closing the Gap target 13 is both only intermittently measurable, likely to be grossly under-reported, and deeply flawed conceptually, there is  an overwhelming case for the parties to the National Agreement on Closing the Gap to revise it into a form that both reflects the lived reality of Indigenous people’s lives and which allows progress or regression to be measured so that the results of government efforts to reduce the enormous adverse impact of family violence on Indigenous women and children will be transparent.

Last week, the Australian Government’s Domestic, Family and Sexual Violence Commission handed down its Yearly Report to Parliament (link here). The report includes a number of recommendations relevant to First Nations (Recommendations 11, 12, 15, 1617 and 18). The report identifies the data shortcomings related to Closing the Gap target 13 but doesn’t criticise its inherent limitations as a policy target. It mentions some extraordinary statistics, for example, that in 2023-24, Indigenous women were 27 times more likely to be hospitalised for family violence than non-Indigenous women (page 33). Yet despite a detailed account of the issues confronting Indigenous families (pages 78 to 89), its recommendations were bound up in process: the establishment of more advisory bodies, more funding, and commitments to work with organisations implementing various action plans and the like. In short, more of the same.

While the DFSV Commission is clearly well-intentioned, there was no cut through policy agenda proposed despite the discussion appearing in a section headlined Priority Areas for Action. There was minimal discussion of the role of alcohol and drugs in creating the preconditions for family violence to occur, and no discussion of the desirability of constraining access to alcohol across the community at large. To be clear, I am not suggesting that alcohol use is the only cause of family violence, but it clearly of such importance that reducing and /or constraining access to it is a necessary if not sufficient policy action in addressing the epidemic of family violence in remote Australia, and probably beyond. If the argument for doing so requires further strengthening, then its complicity in contributing to Indigenous hyper-incarceration (link here) provides a rationale in its own right for taking action.

I discussed the systemic underpinnings of the domestic violence crisis in remote Australia in an earlier post this year (link here). That post argued that the domestic violence crisis in the NT is a symptom of a wider crisis, and that alcohol is a key element of that. In an even earlier post from 2023 discussing the withdrawal of alcohol controls  following the lapse of the Commonwealth Stronger Future legislation (link here), I pointed to the clear statistical links between alcohol and domestic violence:

To take just one data point, alcohol related domestic violence assault offences spiked in Alice Springs, Katherine, and outside major centres in the 12 months to March 2023 (link here). The only location where there was a decline in these offences was in Darwin. Across the NT, there were almost 1000 extra reported assault offences over the year coinciding with the nine months of reduced [alcohol] restrictions. With the majority of NT electorates in the Darwin region, it is not difficult to develop a hypothesis for why the NT Government may have been intent on removing alcohol restrictions in the bush. In the light of the issues outlined above, the unqualified confidence of the Committee (set out in para. 3.66) in the capacity and political willingness of the NTG to manage alcohol related harm astounds me. [note: the hyperlink above is to a web page that has been updated since 2023]

While alcohol is likely a key driver of the high rates of domestic violence across remote Australia (and possible more broadly) it may not be the only driver. Nevertheless, I suggest that in the absence of greater controls, domestic violence and other social dysfunction will continue unabated, and in turn this will open the flood gates for more punitive social and economic policies.

The deeper problem of course is that governments are adept at creating policy silos, commissions, action plans and advisory committees that provide a defensive fig leaf against criticism when some egregious event hits the headlines but are content to do nothing to address systemic issues facing the most disadvantaged members of the Australian community. The fact that we allow governments to pursue these fake strategies without holding them to account makes all of us complicit in creating and sustaining the existence of the conditions that engender violence against women and children.

Summing up, I see two specific policy opportunities which would make a tangible and substantive positive impact on the family violence crisis engulfing remote communities (and likely on communities beyond remote Australia). First, revise and reframe Target 13 in the Closing the Gap policy framework to replace the current unworkable and deeply flawed target with a target that is measurable and reflects the real world. Second, initiate a comprehensive policy shift based on the policy approaches recommended by experts and the World Health Organisation (WHO) to constrain and reduce unfettered access to alcohol in communities and regional towns (and ideally major cities). The adverse health impacts of alcohol use are well known, and the WHO now advises (link here):

There is no form of alcohol consumption that is risk-free. Even low levels of alcohol consumption carry some risks and can cause harm.

While the politics of controlling access to alcohol induced harm, and the consequential impacts such as family violence, are challenging, the objective case for doing so requires governments to take action even without considering the wider individual and societal costs of dealing with the fallout. These wider costs include the adverse impacts on the life opportunities of children born into families affected by alcohol abuse, family violence and whose parents are incarcerated, and the economic costs for taxpayers of excessive hospitalisations, and avoidable incarceration. Finally, what does it say about us as a nation when we can adopt without apparent remorse policies that create so much pain and harm. That truly is an abuse of our democratic power.

 

6 November 2025

The 2024 NAIF Review: missed opportunities

Striving to better, oft we mar what's well.

King Lear Act one, Scene four

The Minister for Northern Australia, Madelaine King MP tabled the statutory review of the North Australia Infrastructure Facility (NAIF) on 28 August 2025. In her short media release (link here), she thanked the review panel which comprised the Hon. Warren Snowdon (Chair), Professor Peter Yu and Dr Lisa Caffery, and indicated that the Government would consider the review and respond to the 21 recommendations over the coming months. It is unclear why the Government and Minister have been so slow to respond to the Review. A cynic might surmise that when addressing a policy issue on its merits is not front and centre, then political management comes to the fore.

The review is available on the Infrastructure Department website (link here). The published submissions made to the review are also available on that website, albeit on a separate page which may be vulnerable to deletion at some point in the medium-term future. This would be unfortunate (link here).

This blog has followed NAIF closely over the past decade, and (inter alia) has been quite critical of its narrow focus on commercial (private sector) infrastructure and its effective absence in financial social infrastructure (link here, link here and link here). I posted my submission to the current review in September 2024 (link here) whereas (contrary to common practice such as adopted by the Productivity Commission) the Government decided not to publish the submissions to the review until it had released the review itself. The review was provided to the Minister on 12 February 2025 and released six months later on 27 August.

While the review team brought significant experience of northern Australia to the task, and extensive background in both politics, policy and Indigenous affairs, my high-level reaction to the final product has been one of disappointment and in some respects incredulity. The review team appears to have been heavily influenced by the Department and NAIF, both formally and informally. I wont list all the available evidence for this assertion but invite readers to read the Review Report Executive Summary and consider whether it reads as a ministerial media release or as the summary of a truly independent policy review.

More substantively, the conceptual framework adopted by the Review is to my mind flawed and underdone. There is virtually no data presented to underpin the arguments pursued. The single graph on page 22 (lifted from the NAIF submission) is difficult to interpret (it would have been more appropriate to present it as a bar chart) and the key take-out (contrary to the Review conclusion) is that over the past nine years, less than $2billion in concessional loans have been drawn down by successful proponents. In relation to Indigenous data, there is none provided to speak of and there are several questionable assertions that are smoothed over by statements suggesting data shortcomings in the census mean that Indigenous data is unreliable.

There is no clear description of the how the NAIF works, and what the net cost of The NAIF is to government is on a year-by-year basis. While there is the occasional mention of the views of those consulted or who made submissions, the Review makes no attempt to summarise even at a high level the totality of the views they received either thematically or by topic. This then allows the Review to avoid any discussion of why particular views advocated were either accepted or rejected and the reasons for doing so. Many if not most submission authors will likely conclude that the Review just ignored their views.

At a more technical level, key conceptual flaws in the Review report include:

·       The level of demographic analysis in the Review is close to zero. Yet this is crucial for understanding the infrastructure needs of the North. One consequence of this analytic gap is to facilitate avoiding the question of just who is the NAIF aiming to support: the users of infrastructure in northern Australia, or the owners of firms investing in infrastructure in northern Australia?

·       It is unclear from reading the Review whether the alleged benefits arising from NAIF decisions are real or imagined. (The Review somewhat amazingly mentions on page 22 ‘forecast benefits of $38.2 billion in public benefit for the north’ arising from the $4.4billion ‘committed’ (but over $2billion not yet drawn down). There is no mention of the source for this data, nor when this benefit will accrue, no explanation of why it is public benefit and not private benefit, no indication of whether it includes provision for failed projects (see the Addendum below for extracts from the AFR article about the NAIF dated 21 October 2025 headlined ‘$200m losses highlight risk of government ‘picking winners’) and no indication that these alleged benefits have been discounted appropriately to reflect their Net Present Value.

·       There is no examination of the rationale for NAIF assistance (i.e. why should government be subsidizing particular projects, how to determine if market failure exists or not, and what is the appropriate definition of infrastructure to use). If there is no market failure, then firms will invest if there is a commercial return available. If there is not a commercial return available, but there is a public interest in the project proceeding, then the concessional finance is best structured as a public investment with the returns being allocated to taxpayers. The risk in the NAIF model (not discussed in the Review) is that the provision of concessional loans to privately owned firms risks making no difference to the ultimate decisions on whether firms will invest but transferring the net quantum of the concession from taxpayers to firm owners.

·       There appears to be a preconceived assumption that the best way to assist remote Indigenous citizens resident in northern Australia is through support to Indigenous businesses. In relation to infrastructure investment required to support Indigenous communities across the north, the Review has adopted a framework built around what I termed in a recent post (link here)  ‘the policy pivot to Indigenous economic empowerment’ and which Professor Peter Yu has been instrumental in developing and advocating. Indeed, Chapter Four where the Review deals with Indigenous issues is titled: ‘Supporting First Nations economic empowerment’. While there is nothing innately wrong with such a focus, it is only partial and includes an inherent bias away from core infrastructure traditionally built by government in remote communities including housing, schools, essential services, health and community administration infrastructure, and importantly townscaping (roads, parks, ovals etc) usually provided by local governments. In focussing on Indigenous controlled commercial business opportunities, the Review has implicitly given governments at all levels an implicit ticket of leave to (yet again) not take the action necessary to bring social infrastructure up to acceptable standards (link here) in hundreds of remote communities.

·       There is no discussion of the rationale for focussing on support to small businesses rather than limiting NAIFs focus to infrastructure needs of strategic significance. Throughout the discussion, the Review advocates for the NAIF to expand its focus to the provision of smaller business loans. Such an expansion risks adding significant process to NAIF’s operations (with the concomitant risks of loss of focus) at the risk of losing strategic focus on the major infrastructure issues confronting northern Australia. It is never made clear why this should be a NAIF responsibility and not some other government entity’s role, either at state or national level. Both NIAA and Indigenous Business Australia have the capacity to fund such a program in the Indigenous policy space if they so chose.

·       There is an inadequate discussion of the rationale for the Review’s findings and recommendations to provide NAIF with greater autonomy. The Review essentially argues and recommends that the NAIF be converted from a ‘facility’ or mechanism for providing concessional finance operating within the Infrastructure Department’s financial balance sheet into an entity with its own balance sheet and governance structure. In effect, it is arguing for the establishment of a North Australia Infrastructure Finance Corporation, though it doesn’t articulate this overtly. To do so, it argues that the current model underpinning NIAF’s operations has a negative effect on the Department, the NAIF, the relevant Jurisdictions and proponents (see Observation 2 on page 13). It also points to the apparent success of the existing Board and Executive team’s leadership. (see Observation 3 on page 13). The message is that the governance quality of the NAIF is such as to warrant greater independence and autonomy. The reality is that the record of the NAIF has been very patchy with critical ANAO reports (link here) and as recently as 2023, there were allegations that it was ignoring its own processes (see Addendum below). The Review Discussion fails to demonstrate that the systemic flaws evident in 2019 are no longer a risk and fails to provide a comprehensive argument for the quite significant changes it is proposing. There may be a case for doing what the Review recommends, but to my mind, it does not make anywhere near a persuasive case for doing so. Not least in relation to the Review proposals, there is no discussion of whether there are potential additional costs for taxpayers going forward.

·       There is zero discussion of the issue of transparency, and its role in protecting taxpayers from potential missteps that are facilitated by excessive secrecy and the systemic issues that led to the critical 2019 ANAO review discussed above. The media reports NAIF as being overly secret (see the extracts in the Addendum in the articles by Wilson and Ludlow); the Review makes no attempt to assess this and identify a way forward. This is of particular importance because a shift to greater NAIF autonomy will exacerbate financial and governance risks which adequate transparency and greater commitment to merit in selecting Board members would play some role in managing (see Bill Shorten’s comment on former Board appointments in the Wilson article extract below).

·       It is significant in my view that there does not appear to have been an independent effectiveness evaluation (as opposed to the five-year statutory reviews such as the current Review) since the NAIF was established. Those Reviews have been largely focussed on operational issues and not overarching effectiveness. It is circumstances like the challenges facing the NAIF which strengthen the argument for a Commonwealth Evaluator General (as proposed by Nicholas Gruen) to independently evaluate major strategic initiatives by the Commonwealth on a periodic basis.

The conceptual shortcomings evident in the approach adopted by the Review inevitably invites deep scepticism regarding the robustness of its recommendations. To my mind however, the potential analytic flaws are not the major problem with the Review.

The fundamental policy problem is that the Review represents a missed opportunity. It fails to undertake a rigorous and conceptually sound examination of the problem NAIF exists to address, then identify potential solutions, and then recommend an approach to addressing the problem. Instead, it appears to be providing cover for an agenda that has already been decided. In relation to Indigenous interests in northern Australia, the Review focusses overwhelmingly on the absence of Indigenous engagement with NAIF (as if this will somehow drive greater social and political inclusion of Indigenous interests in northern Australia) rather than focussing on the absence of NAIF’s engagement with driving increased investment in social infrastructure. It won’t surprise readers if I acknowledge that this was the core message in my submission (link here), which was comprehensively ignored by the Review.

Incentivising greater investment by local, state/territory, and national governments in social infrastructure across the north will drive greater indigenous inclusion because that is where the overwhelming levels of needs are. Indigenous people represent a substantial proportion of the permanent population of the north. They deserve inclusive policies, not exclusion. What is required are across-the-board improvements in employment, health and education. These three sectors are all adversely affected by the extreme infrastructure deficits facing remote Indigenous populations including in northern Australia (link here).

In terms of driving medium- and longer-term change that will expand the contribution of northern Australia to the nation’s economic, social, cultural and strategic wellbeing and improve the quality of life of citizens living in northern Australia, the NAIF represents a potential mechanism to make a major contribution. So far, the NAIF has failed to take up this role, and the recent Review offers no real roadmap for it to do so going forward. This is both a missed opportunity, and to my mind a tragedy.

 

 

Addendum: Extracts from selected AFR articles

Grant Wilson AFR 18 July 2022, The NAIF is no longer an abject failure, (link here Paywall):

Before the federal election in May 2019, and in full campaign mode, then-Labor leader Bill Shorten eviscerated the Northern Australian Infrastructure Facility.

He characterised NAIF as an “abject failure”, and committed to an overhaul, with an emphasis on projects of national economic significance, such as gas infrastructure from Beetaloo Basin. Shorten was particularly aggrieved that “half of the board members are donors to the LNP…

…A longer-term issue for NAIF to consider is its status as a facility. As distinct from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC), that also operates as a special investment vehicle of the federal government, NAIF has not been fully corporatised, and does not have a special account to receive appropriations.

This setup, while understandable given NAIF’s initial five-year remit, undermines the quality of its financial reporting. The contrast to the CEFC is stark, where financing facilities are included as part of the income statements and balance sheet, enabling its financial performance to be assessed on a comprehensive basis.

 

Aaron Weinman, AFR 23 June 2023, NAIF allegedly broke its own lending rules for barramundi farm (link here Paywall):

The Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility allegedly ignored its lending rules on at least two investments, and later pressured an employee who raised concerns to quit in a bid to avoid embarrassment while it sought about $2 billion in additional funding from the federal government.

The NAIF reviewed several loans it had written over the past 18 months but when some were deemed a potential concern – meaning the borrower could struggle to repay the debt – staff played down the severity of the borrowers’ creditworthiness, according to documents filed as part of an unfair dismissal claim lodged with the Fair Work Commission.

 

Mark Ludlow, AFR 10 August 2023, The $7b fund for projects commercial lenders won’t back (link here paywall):

In June, a former member of the NAIF’s credit committee lodged an unfair dismissal claim with the Fair Work Commission. They alleged the NAIF ignored its own lending rules on at least two investments, including $31.4 million in loans to the Humpty Doo Barramundi farm in the Northern Territory, which had “deep credit issues”, and the Kalium Lakes project….

… As of June 30, the NAIF has committed $3 billion in loans to 25 approved projects, with the agency confirming to the Financial Review that $1.41 billion in loans have been drawn down by 23 projects.

The NAIF, which can provide debt or equity finance, won’t publicly release a detailed breakdown of projects, saying it is up to potential proponents to reveal how much they have drawn down from their approved loans. Some money has been repaid to government, but NAIF won’t confirm how much.

 

Ronald Mizen AFR 21 October 2025, $200m losses highlight risk of government ‘picking winners (link here paywall):

Taxpayers will be forced to carry more than $200 million in losses after two companies backed by government loans failed, an outcome economists say underlines the risks of trying to pick winners with public money.

The Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility loaned $84 million to potash aspirant Kalium Lakes in 2019 and $150 million to mineral sands operation Strandline Resources in 2020. Kalium collapsed in 2023, while Strandline went into administration in February this year.

 

2 November 2025

Restitution of Indigenous lands in Australia: how should we frame it?

 

A man may see how this world goes with no eyes.

Look with thine ears.

King Lear, Act four, Scene six.

 

I recently read an excellent overview article examining progress over the past sixty years in restoring rights over land to Indigenous groups and interests. That article, Aboriginal Land Rights in Australia: Neither National nor Uniform, authored by Francis Markham and Heidi Norman provides what is perhaps the best and most valuable overview of the development of land rights across the nation in recent decades. See the abstract and hyperlink to the article at the link (link here). The authors combine a synoptic account of the nation’s struggle to come to terms with the reality of dispossession of First Nations with succinct but detailed accounts of the variable processes adopted across the multiple jurisdictions that comprise the Commonwealth of Australia.

Their conclusion states, inter alia:

Legislative responses to recognize Aboriginal land rights were initially led by the states, and the Commonwealth in the Northern Territory. The Woodward Report [to the Whitlam Labor Government] was intended to guide state-based responses; however, both the Fraser coalition government in the late 1970s and the Hawke Labor government in the 1980s failed to advance a national land rights agenda that left advancing Aboriginal interests in land to the states and litigation through the courts. … Litigation that successfully challenged the legality of occupation [the Mabo Case] necessitated a Commonwealth Government response confirming land dealings and creating a mechanism for the recognition of native title. State-based responses after recognition of native title rights and interests have continued to evolve. … In Victoria and Western Australia, settlement processes have been underway that utilize the structures of the Native Title Act, and that also engage the states in the negotiation of a range of social justice aspirations that go beyond land repossession.

In this chapter we argue the land rights recognition in Australia is an outcome of shifting state–Commonwealth relations within the Australian federation. This has led to a hugely varied and spatially uneven set of legislative land rights regimes across Australia, placing onus on Indigenous Peoples to work to advancing their rights and interests in the absence of agreed-upon national standards or leadership from the Commonwealth government.

The conclusion emanates from the detailed recounting of the processes that led to the various state and territory responses, and the value derived from having a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction narrative of the processes pursued. There are very few potential readers who would not learn something new from reading this account. I did have a few minor quibbles. For example, notwithstanding detailed discussion of the Aboriginal Land Fund Commission which operated between 1974 and 1978, there is no mention of its successor, the Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation established in 1995 following the passage of the Native Title Act (link here). My idiosyncratic quibbles however do not detract from the overwhelming value and importance of the article.

The authors’ core analytic frame seeks to provide an explanation of the narrative laid out in Altman & Markham’s 2015 article (reference below) which used a series of quite stunning maps to visually demonstrate both the extent of dispossession and the partial extent of restitution since settlement. The authors explanation, which is persuasively argued, is that both Labor and Coalition national governments, for different reasons, failed to legislate a national land rights regime consistent with the Woodward Commission principles that underpinned the Commonwealth’s 1976 land rights legislation in the NT (despite having the constitutional power to do so). This failure continued notwithstanding that several states, particularly WA and Qld, failed to legislate adequate state land rights legislation. This left a ‘centralising’ High Court with the opportunity to step into the gap and recognise the existence of native title under common law principles.

The authors suggest that the High Court decision in Mabo ‘may be seen as a move by the judiciary to force the Parliament to legislate on the unresolved question of national land rights, which the Commonwealth had abandoned for almost a decade.’

While the authors’ assessment is framed around a comparative assessment of governments’ actions against the (arguably arbitrary) benchmark of uniform national land rights consistent with the Woodward commission principles, it seems to me that it is not the only approach to assessing the slow and rocky progress in coming to terms with Indigenous dispossession across the nation, nor to understanding what transpired.

In one alternative framing, it might be argued, contra the authors, that the High Court was focussed more on addressing the injustice of dispossession in contexts where prior alienation of the land in favour of the Crown had not occurred. This did have national application by virtue of being Australian law, but it did not necessarily require national legislation. The fact that the Keating Government decided to legislate the Native Title Act was in this framing essentially a political decision aimed at removing uncertainty, and the threat of a loss of social cohesion and political support across the community had the issue been left to the states to manage. The political objective was thus not to reach a consensus between the states and Indigenous interests (see page 137) but to establish processes consistent with the High Court decision that provided certainty to existing non-Indigenous landowners (hence the post 1975 validation provisions) and thus to the electorate at large. Such an alternative framing is consistent with the authors’ conclusion that the NTA was reformist not revolutionary in its impact.

A second alternative framing would look past the antics of political parties vying for political office, and analyse the events in this space over the past sixty years as an ongoing conflict between the state (representing core economic interests such as miners and pastoralists) and the heterogeneous and diverse Indigenous interests, mediated by temporally divergent contact histories, divergent political systems in different states and territories, and the ongoing systemic exclusion of Indigenous people from the benefits taken for granted in the mainstream settler community. In this framing, the political gridlock over national land rights was the outcome of deep-seated ideological and interest-based differences and was only undone because the adverse consequences on dominant interest groups from the loss of political cohesion arising from perpetual and systemic exclusion had different and temporally determined consequences in different jurisdictions. There is evidence for this framing in a close examination of the Noonkanbah issue which the authors mention, but without seeking to look beneath the public narratives promulgated by the Western Australian Government and its then Premier, Sir Charles Court.

The extraordinary action of the Court Government in despatching from Perth, in a blaze of manufactured publicity, a police-protected convoy of drilling trucks to facilitate drilling on a mere exploration lease (that was eventually abandoned by Amax, the explorer), does not stack up. It was designed to create conflict, with the ALP Opposition, the unions, and with Aboriginal interests and to promulgate a narrative of irrational opposition to mining and the economic development associated with it. Conveniently, albeit never acknowledged or recognised by governments nor the media, it created a major distraction from the simultaneous battle between miner CRA (now Rio Tinto) and Aboriginal groups over site destruction at the proposed Argyle diamond mine which ultimately extracted diamonds conservatively valued at around AUD$8 billion over the 37-year life of the mine. There was clearly an incentive to find a way past the strictures in the then WA Aboriginal Heritage legislation.

In this framing then, the question becomes why did the High Court act to break the policy and political gridlock when it did? I don’t pretend to have a definitive answer but suspect it would comprise a combination of wider judicial and political context, realisation that social cohesion would be at risk if the increasing gap between the values the nation claims to live by and the values being applied, as well as the emergence of individual agency by progressive and forward-looking individual judges.

A third alternative framing (which I find attractive) would focus on the prolonged impact of systemic exclusion in leaving Indigenous interests without the ability to apply robust interest group pressure. Yet as those impacts weakened, Indigenous interests were able to mobilise and drive incremental gains, assisted by allies such as progressive lawyers and the unions. I note that the authors of the article spend remarkably little time focussing on the roles of Indigenous advocates in both driving reform and change, and in addressing why those efforts failed where they did and succeeded where they did. It strikes me that these are important issues that require consideration in any overarching account of the drivers of the restitution agenda over sixty years.

The authors comment in the last sentence of their conclusion (quoted above) that this places the onus on Indigenous interests to advocate to advance their rights and interests in the absence of leadership from the Commonwealth resonates with this framing. However, a close reading suggests that the authors (a) believe that governments have a responsibility to, in effect, do the right thing. There is also perhaps an implication or suggestion — and I may be wrong in attributing this to the authors — that (b) Indigenous interests only need to criticise government for their non-performance or quote the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples often enough, for governments to see the light and do the right thing. While I vehemently agree with proposition (a), I have concerns with any suggestion along the lines of (b). A realist interpretation of public policy formation on land rights, Indigenous policy, or indeed any public policy in modern Australia, suggests that governments react only to organised interest groups (except where electoral pressure emerges which forces a reconsideration), and that where there is a gap between the public interest and the interest group interest, then the public interest suffers. Think about gambling or health insurance, or FOI ‘reform’, or alcohol regulation policy, or virtually any other issue governments touch (link here).

A fourth potential framing would focus more on the institutional underpinnings of the restitution process. I don’t propose to outline this in detail, but would point readers to my own 2017 paper on the strategic challenges facing native title (link here) which covers only part of the policy landscape the authors cover in their paper.

To sum up, Francis Markham and Heidi Norman have produced an excellent and succinctly comprehensive overview of the development of the policies of land restitution to Indigenous interests in Australia over the past sixty years. Their article will expand the wider understanding of the history of land rights in Australia and deservedly be widely cited over the coming decade and perhaps beyond. Yet it relies on a particular framing, which I am not arguing is wrong or misconceived, but rather might be seen as incomplete or partial given that at least several credible alternative framings exist (and probably more that I have not identified).

My deeper purpose in this post is to argue for a wider acknowledgment of the constraints of particular narratives however attractive and well-conceived they may be, and thus for a wider openness to the idea of narrative diversity in shaping the underpinnings of policy development and policy critique. Implicit in this view is an argument for a stronger commitment to understanding the intellectual and conceptual rationales for, and underpinnings of, particular policy approaches. I have a sense that both governments and to a lesser extent the academy have lost sight of the importance of intellectual dialogue and debate as a crucial element in driving better policy outcomes.

Werner Heisenberg wrote (in his 1958 book Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science) that ‘We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’ In discussing and assessing Indigenous policy there is a parallel need to be aware of the ‘method of questioning’ underpinning both the narratives employed, the frames of reference utilised to justify, assess and critique those policy narratives, and the rationales adopted to justify the policy decisions taken.

 

References:

Altman, J. C., & Markham, F. (2015). Burgeoning Indigenous land ownership: Diverse values and strategic potentialities. In Brennan, S., Davis, M., Edgeworth, B., & Terrill, L. (eds.), Native Title from Mabo to Akiba: A vehicle for change and empowerment (pp. 126–142). Melbourne: Federation Press. Google Scholar

 

Dillon, M.C. (2017) Emerging strategic issues in Native Title: future political and policy challenges, CAEPR Discussion Paper 292/2017, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, ANU. https://cipr.cass.anu.edu.au/research/publications/emerging-strategic-issues-native-titlefuture-political-and-policy-challenges

 

Markham, F., & Norman, H. (2025). Aboriginal Land Rights in Australia: Neither National nor Uniform. In W. Nikolakis (Ed.), Land Rights Now: Global Voices on Indigenous Peoples and Land Justice (pp. 119-148). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009521581.009

 

29 October 2025