The Commonwealth policy pivot to Indigenous economic empowerment

  

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought;

And enterprises of great pith and moment,

With this regard, their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

Hamlet Act three, Scene one.

 

According to Senator Lidia Thorpe, the Prime Minister’s speech at Garma last week was an exercise in ‘optics” (link here). An editorial by the National Indigenous Times (link here) headed ‘Economic partnership or political theatre? Government’s Garma plan questioned amid worsening outcomes’ opined:

Yet there is reason to question whether this latest suite of announcements represents real change or another layer of process wrapped in new branding. Closing the Gap targets remain in crisis. Many indicators are worsening, particularly in the Northern Territory where Indigenous incarceration rates are among the highest in the world and child health outcomes lag far behind the national average.

The Prime Minister’s speech at Garma (link here) represents the culmination of the Government’s post referendum pivot to economic empowerment first articulated by the Prime Minister at Garma in his 2024 speech to Garma titled Economic Empowerment for Indigenous Australians (link here). In his 2024 speech he committed his government to take up the challenge to pursue a ‘comprehensive economic policy challenge for Indigenous peoples.’ He announced that the Government was creating a new First Nations economic partnership building on the work of the Coalition of Peaks and the nascent First Nations Economic Empowerment Alliance.

The recent 2025 speech was followed by a more detailed media release outlining the specific details of what is being proposed (link here). The key announcement is the release of the text of the new First Nations Economic Partnership Agreement between the Commonwealth and the Coalition of Peaks and the First Nations Economic Empowerment Alliance (link here). To be clear, this Partnership Agreement is national in scope and represents a new and complementary addition to the institutional framework established in 2020 with the establishment of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap.

There are two new elements to the structural architecture of this agreement: the first is the addition of the First Nations Economic Empowerment Alliance (FNEEA)  (link here) as a formal party to the Agreement; the second is the absence of the states and territories from the Agreement (in contrast to the National Agreement on Closing the Gap). I can see arguments both for and against having the states and territories involved, and on balance see the undoubted and direct involvement and engagement of the Commonwealth as a strong positive. There is no reason why the Commonwealth could not engage with relevant states and territories on relevant issues either through the regular meetings of the (so called) National Cabinet, through the Joint Council on Closing the Gap, or through targeted engagement with relevant states and territories as needed.

The key institutional changes foreshadowed in the PM’s speech and the associated media release were the references to making better use of capital and equity in special investment vehicles such as the North Australia Infrastructure Fund (NAIF) and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and ‘ensuring’ these agencies ‘are delivering for First Nations communities across Australia’. Both of these foreshadowed changes remain opaque however as they are subject to detailed development by the parties to the new Partnership Agreement.

I have long been a critic of the NAIF’s failure to allocate resources to infrastructure investment in remote Indigenous communities (link here and link here). The latest review statutory review of the NAIF undertaken by former Member for Lingiari, Warren Snowdon, Dr Lisa Caffery and Professor Peter Yu was delivered two months late (link here) to the Minister for Northern Australia, Madeleine King in February this year and is yet to be publicly released (link here). One might be forgiven for thinking that the report has been warehoused to inform and feed into the new Partnership’s deliberations. On my reckoning it must be published by 1 September (the NAIF legislation requires the minister to table it within fifteen sitting days of receipt). Whether the Review’s yet to be revealed recommendations will emerge unscathed from the further prolongation of partnership review and the possible necessity for legislative amendment are moot.

A second potentially important institutional change is a proposal for the Partnership to consider ways to enhance the work of Indigenous Business Australia and the Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation, two key statutory corporations in the Indigenous Australians portfolio with economic development focus. Again, it is not clear what is intended here, although there are suggestions in the publications on the website of the FNEEA that they see potential for the considerable financial assets of the ILSC’s associated Land Fund and the IBA’s very healthy balance sheet to be made more accessible for commercial investment across the Indigenous estate.

For those who wish to dig even deeper, the NIAA FOI log (link here) includes a series of detailed policy recommendations prepared in 2019 by the Indigenous Reference Group to the Ministerial Forum of Northern Australia which canvass the issues of access to capital, land tenure reform, and NAIF reform in considerable detail. In 2019, the IRG was chaired by Professor Peter Yu. I would merely note that the devil is in the detail on these types of suggestions.

In terms of financial announcements, the Prime Minister announced an intention to make available $75m in additional funding for Prescribed Bodies Corporate (PBCs), the entities that are established to legally hold native title. I have long been an advocate of the Commonwealth moving to provide universal core funding for these bodies (link here), yet again it is unclear if the funding will be made available immediately or be delayed while the new Partnership decides on the scope of the reform of the funding model. According to data sourced from the NNTT, in August 2024 there were 280 PBCs (link here). Assuming the $75m is appropriated over three years there will be less than $90k available for each PBC each year in additional funding. This suggests that the prospect of allocating the funds equally across all PBCs will not be feasible, but the deeper take out is that the proposed funding allocation is entirely inadequate. Even were the $75m an annual appropriation, this would remain the case. The Treasurer’s comment (attached to the Prime Minister’s media release) that ‘we’re investing to equip Traditional Owners to leverage their land and sea assets to get better deals and bring jobs and wealth to First Nations communities’ is arguably factually accurate, but simultaneously an over-exaggeration of what is being provided. It will no doubt provide significant and welcome assistance to some native title groups but is not the wide-ranging reform that the Commonwealth’s media spin meisters would have us believe.

On closer examination, the Prime Minister’s announcement of $70m in Clean Energy funding refers to an Expression of Interest process which will feed into the development of a series of funding allocations to yet to be determined Clean Energy projects. The first step initiated on 4 August is to seek expressions of interest from potential project proponents. The available $70m will be allocated over three years (ie around $23m per annum) and the process by which the expressions of interest will be transformed into funding appears quite opaque (link here). What seems most likely is that the Department will allocate the available funds to projects which are already planned or underway. While the amount appears significant, and no doubt the successful applicants will appreciate the assistance, the reality is that this is a sophisticated form of virtue signalling rather than a developed strategy to drive significant impetus to expand existing energy provision frameworks.

The inarguable modesty of the Government’s funding announcements belie the Prime Minster’s rhetoric. Speaking of the significance of Garma, and framing his speech with the gravitas and aspiration accorded to the rites of serious policy contributions, the Prime Minister extolled:

this is a place for ideas, ambition – and accountability. Where we learn from the past, are honest about the present and ‘look up to the future’.

Given this ceremonial tone and rhetorical over-reach, what are we to make of this Prime Ministerial ritual at Garma? What is its purpose? What does it mean?

Perhaps the first point to make is that I am far from alone in expressing a degree of scepticism regarding whether to take the Prime Minister’s announcements at face value. The National Indigenous Times has reported critical comments from a number of prominent Indigenous individuals. As well as Senator Lidia Thorpe, Megan Davis (link here), Wayne Bergman (link here), Katie Kiss (link here), Denise Bowden (link here), all expressed either explicit or implicit reservations about aspects of the Prime Minister’s Indigenous empowerment strategy.

My own scepticism derives from the combination of four quite separate arguments. However, before listing those arguments, it needs to be stated up front that creating the conditions that facilitate improved economic security for Indigenous citizens, especially those who reside in remote Australia must be a key policy objective of Australian Governments.

Economic security is multifaceted and can not be encompasses by focussing solely on metrics such as income, or wealth, or employment status, or wellbeing. These are all useful measures but have complex causation and varying levels of durability and utility. Absolute measures are important, but so too are comparative measures as these play into complex issues such as relative status, degrees of social and political inclusion or exclusion. Further, both absolute and comparative measures of economic wellbeing or status are impacted by the social, political and economic environment within which thy exist. To make an extreme point, a healthy bank balance is no help in a famine. Or to make the same point in a more relevant way, for so long as there is an alcohol and drug epidemic across remote Australia (and I am not referring only to Indigenous people), then the underpinnings of Indigenous economic security will be unachievable (link here).

In turn, it becomes clear that ‘economic empowerment’ may well be a useful shorthand to describe a particular policy agenda, but unless carefully defined, it runs the risk of being utilised for essentially ideological reasons. In particular, there are indications in the FNEEA publications that the implicit policy agenda being developed under this terminological carapace is designed to shift policy priorities away from so called ‘welfare’ or ‘social’ sectors and towards institutional reforms and government funding allocations designed to support and benefit Indigenous access to revenue or profits-based wealth creation activities (commercial projects). Clearly there is a place for a focus on wealth creation and enterprise in any economic strategy, but in my view not at the expense of more basic economic foundations.

The arguments which suggest that the Prime Minister’s policy pivot to Indigenous economic empowerment should not be taken entirely seriously encompass both inherent shortcomings in the strategy itself and importantly what is not there or is under-emphasised.

First, the strategy represents a shift away from focussing on improving and reforming the foundations of economic security (which I would list as comprising education, employment, health / ableness, housing and community order). Each of these five elements are under enormous pressure in remote Australia and as I have argued for almost two decades (link here) these government shortfalls mean remote Australia is approaching a point of systemic breakdown or failure. Shifting policy attention to wealth creation (or economic empowerment) while ignoring essential reforms addressing deep-seated and ongoing government failure in the underlying elements of economic security would be fundamentally flawed policy.

Second, the strategy represents a pathway which can be utilised to reframe the public debate around the closing the gap agenda (yet again) in ways that allow governments to escape the annual reminders of their unwillingness and incapacity to allocate the intellectual and political resources as well as the funding necessary to successfully and substantively close the gap. Short term tactics work in the short term but ultimately don’t deliver strategic reform. The economic empowerment agenda sounds plausible and will buy the government time, and if Treasury can find an acceptable political path forward, it may buy time for another decade. However, eventually such a policy approach will fail because it is not based on rigorous policy analysis, ignores the fundamental drivers of economic security, and is not based on a transparent dialogue with all affected interests.

Third, the strategy creates the preconditions for the systemic co-option of the Indigenous leadership. Negotiations in private, combined with the increasingly parsimonious approach to transparency by the Commonwealth and other governments means that the temptation to ‘buy’ support from the Indigenous leadership for sub-optimal policies will be difficult to resist going forward. While the FNEEA Charter (link here) includes apparently robust individual conflict of interest provisions (see clause 10.5) related to the business of the Alliance, and the Partnership Agreement (link here) similarly includes sections on managing individual conflicts of interest and transparency (see sections 66 to 70), the inherent ‘commercial’ confidentiality involved in some aspects of the Partners’ discussions, the deep-seated reluctance of the Commonwealth to engage the wider public in policy issues, and the ultimate power imbalance between the Commonwealth and the First Nations partners means that there will inevitably be a heightened risk of inappropriate influence being applied either to individuals or to the Partners as a whole. The only effective protection against this is much greater commitment to transparency. For example, all funding to the First Nations Partners should be automatically made public, and the responsible Ministers should be required to make an annual statement to Parliament detailing all significant communications with, and funding decisions taken relating to, the First Nations Economic Empowerment Partnership.

Fourth and finally, the elephant in this policy room is the failure of the Commonwealth to address in any meaningful way the existing and ongoing use, and in some cases misuse, of financial benefits flowing from resource development on Indigenous land. The challenges involved are extraordinarily complex and raise difficult ethical and philosophical questions that cannot be addressed by unilateral government fiat. At a minimum, there is a need for much more robust regulatory oversight, and much more proactive financial literacy education. Most importantly however, there is an urgent need for an ongoing and open discussion around the overarching policy frameworks guiding the use, allocation and distribution of negotiated financial benefits by Indigenous landowners, and the potential alternatives which might be considered to ensure more equitable distributions overall, and greater savings and investment by beneficiaries rather than immediate consumption. The current free-for-all around the distribution and use of financial benefits reflects extremely poorly on the Commonwealth governments of the last thirty years. Any attempt to ‘empower’ Indigenous landowners without addressing the underlying rationales and impacts of these substantial and essentially unregulated financial flows is akin to using a fuel bowser to fight a fire.

Taken together, these four arguments constitute an overwhelming case for a comprehensive reconsideration of the current policy pivot by the Commonwealth. Unfortunately, the short-term political calculus strongly favours what I would characterise as a cynical policy framework with enormous opportunity costs, substantial risks (which will be borne by current and future generations of remote Indigenous citizens) and a limited contribution to the longer term public interest.

For an alternative view, I recommend readers take a look at the submission to the upcoming Productivity Round Table by Indigenous Business Australia (IBA) (link here). IBA is a member of FNEEA.

Conclusion

The Albanese Government pivot to Indigenous economic empowerment is in my view deeply flawed policy. It is not based on the rigorous policy analysis necessary to underpin a major shift in policy and political focus. The pivot will raise expectations but not deliver except for a minority of commercially and politically astute Indigenous entrepreneurs. Because institutional reform is so hard, it risks devolving into a focus on picking a slew of individual projects where Indigenous involvement can be facilitated and subsidised. Picking winners is fine until you begin picking losers. The pivot will steal oxygen from the policy discussions necessary to reform the underlying policies constraining the sustainable delivery of the real elements of economic security and thereby avoid the hard discussions with the states and territories who control many of those policy levers. The substantive import of the flawed logic appears to be: why argue about reforming housing provision, education, disability reform, employment, alcohol harm or hyper incarceration when the prospect of universal wealth is within our grasp. Additionally, the pivot portends the overhaul of the closing the gap policy framework by creating a plausible and intuitively attractive alternative policy framework.

The fundamental problem with this policy pivot by the Albanese Government is its role in allowing the Commonwealth to avoid the fundamental and necessary reform challenges in those crucial policy sectors that ensure economic security especially in remote Australia where Australia’s most disadvantaged citizens reside. It is an economic policy in name only; like Rumpelstiltskin, it promises to spin straw into gold.

 

6 August 2025

                                                                                                                                                                

Remote crisis: déjà vu all over again and again and again and again …

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!

Macbeth, Act two, Scene three

I sat down to write a post that considered the recent media stories regarding the ongoing crime wave in the NT, NAPLAN, Closing the Gap, the extraordinary Indigenous unemployment levels in remote Australia and the ongoing and worsening incarceration crisis in the NT including the hyper-punitive response of the current NT Government. Then I realised that in doing so without the necessary contextualisation, I would be entering the perpetual motion machine that controls and shapes our media cycle and ensures that we never stop and ask how did we get here? I haven’t done the detailed research to write such a post, but my intuition told me that it was more important just now to remind readers of the underlying dynamics and forces which are shaping the outcomes that feed into daily life in remote communities, major towns like Katherine and Tennant Creek, and our daily media diet in south eastern Australia.

One way to do this is to list and link to the previous posts I have written on the theme of remote crisis. Below I list most (but perhaps not all) of the posts I have written on this topic since January 2022. I could have gone back further, but there is already more than enough material to digest. For each post, I have selected a short excerpt which illustrates some of the issues in play. The excerpts do not necessarily encompass the major argument of each post, and are not always the key point, but they do make in my view a contribution to providing the context that assists interested readers in forming a judgment of the underlying issues and causes in play when we read about the latest outrage or tragedy. I have left text bolded where I bolded it in the original post. I do recommend readers dip into at least some of these posts.

 

1.    Energy insecurity in remote Australia 13 January 2022 (link here)

The abstract of a recent academic article states:

Indigenous communities in remote Australia face dangerous temperature extremes. These extremes are associated with increased risk of mortality and ill health. For many households, temperature extremes increase both their reliance on those services that energy provides, and the risk of those services being disconnected. Poor quality housing, low incomes, poor health and energy insecurity associated with prepayment all exacerbate the risk of temperature-related harm … We find that nearly all households (91%) experienced a disconnection from electricity during the 2018–2019 financial year. Almost three quarters of households (74%) were disconnected more than ten times. … A broad suite of interrelated policy responses is required to reduce the frequency, duration and negative effects of disconnection from electricity for remote-living Indigenous residents.

 

2.    See How We Roll 24 January 2022 (link here):

It strikes me that this is, more than any other I have come across recently, an important book for policymakers engaged in shaping policy in the Indigenous domain. It shatters preconceptions regarding the distinction between remote and urban contexts, and makes clear the parallels between disadvantaged Indigenous people and other disadvantaged citizens. Most importantly, it should make policymakers question their assumptions and preconceptions regarding Indigenous life choices, and the potential for policy instruments and measures of various kinds to articulate or engage with the altogether different world views and approaches to living of many Indigenous people.

 

3.    The ongoing social and governance catastrophe in remote Australia 8 May 2022 (link here):

In October 2009, Nicolas Rothwell, writing in The Australian, published a scathing analysis under the title ’The failed state’… Rothwell’s opening sentence sums up his argument: ‘The Northern Territory is a lost cause’. He goes on:

There is, though, a failed state in our midst. That state is not Aboriginal north Australia, where the social fabric is in shreds and tatters. No: it is the jurisdiction largely responsible for entrenching this degree of Indigenous disadvantage: the modern-seeming, self-governing Northern Territory.

I quoted these observations in an earlier post in August 2016 (link here)… I would add however that the responsibility for entrenching Indigenous disadvantage is shared with the Commonwealth.

 

4.    Systemic myopia: Public investment challenges in remote Australia.19 December 2022 (link here):

To sum up, over the past two decades at least, public funding in core capital investments related to essential services, social housing, and community infrastructure has been severely deficient. This has undoubtedly reduced the levels of recurrent funding by governments in remote settings, and also limited the opportunities for local employment, and stronger economic development and progress. It is undoubtedly one of the key contributors to limiting the opportunities available to the rapidly growing youth cohort within communities. While reversing the sustained under-investment is not sufficient to address all the challenges facing residents of remote communities, it is a necessary element in any viable transition to a more stable future for remote communities. The onset of climate change is making addressing these challenges even more urgent.

 

5.    Cataclysm and Crisis 10 December 2022 (link here):

The inability of governments to envisage, understand and put in place effective strategies to address the multiple facets of the economic and social cataclysm facing remote communities amounts to a massive and fundamental failure. This failure is in and of itself a crisis; a crisis of governance capability, a crisis of will power, and ultimately a crisis of government legitimacy.

 

6.    Alice Springs crisis: observations on remote policy. 25 January 2023 (link here):

The Alice Springs hospital has 16 beds in its Intensive Care Unit. Minister Burney mentioned that she was shocked to learn that last night, 14 of those beds were taken by women who had been the victims of violent assaults. This window into the lived experience of too many remote women and their families is more than a warning of the seriousness of the rolling crisis across remote Australia. It is more than a prompt for governments to take action. It is more than an indictment on the quality and legitimacy of our systems of governance across northern Australia. It is damning evidence of the complicity and responsibility for these outcomes of those Australians (myself included) who take an interest in public policy. 

 

7.    The ongoing remote housing debacle 5 March 2023 (link here).  

In conclusion, the policy choices made over the past five years in relation to remote housing are retrograde and will have very real consequences: for taxpayers, for the population of remote Australia, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, and most importantly for the residents of these overcrowded and under-maintained houses across remote Australia. Over fifty percent of those individuals are under 25 and the overcrowding will have lifelong consequences for the opportunities that are within their reach.

 

8.    The structural underpinnings of the tragedy in Yuendumu 10 March 2023 (link here):

Yes, at the micro level, individuals on both sides of the cultural divide, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, have and had agency. But they were and are operating within an overarching set of institutional structures which have been in place for decades and were either explicitly designed to constrain and control Aboriginal people’s lives, or reflect longstanding and entrenched structures of underfunding that were oblivious to, and independent of the level of need. If we wish to prevent further micro level tragedies, we as a nation must move beyond allocating blame or responsibility at the micro level and also address the macro level issues. Micro and macro are both part of a single social system, one that is responsible for both extensive social and cultural harm, and ongoing mainstream governance failure.

 

9.    Dodge dip and dive: eight ‘data points’ on remote policy 1 May 2023 (link here):

What is clear however is that given the synergistic interactions of multiple policy domains, the current model of policy design and implementation has not worked. This raises the potentially unsettling prospect that, at a fundamental systemic level, governments and policymakers are not incentivised to take the policy decisions that are required to make a substantive difference to the policy challenges that exist. Instead they are incentivised to manage difficult issues, oil squeaky wheels, and engage in a performative ritual designed merely to persuade an electorally significant non-Indigenous constituency (and a less electorally significant, but more animated, Indigenous constituency) that they are doing what is required to address the policy challenges that surface periodically in the public consciousness.

A recent review of a book on Boris Johnson (link here) described his motto for governing as ‘dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge’. As it turns out, this is an extraordinarily apt description of the systemic approach of Australian governments to remote policy challenges.

 

10. The remote community education scandal in the NT 24 September 2023 (link here):

It is time that the Commonwealth accepted that the NT Government is incapable of delivering remote education in a manner consistent with the public and national interest, and in such a way that it actually delivers outcomes. These poor outcomes are feeding directly into the social dysfunction that is endemic in parts of remote Australia, and which I have previously argued is a slow burn catastrophe (link here).

 

11. Looking ahead: the architecture of Indigenous policy in 2050 1 March 2024 (link here)

My advice to First Nations and progressive mainstream interests, and in particular their peak advocacy groups, would be to invest as much as possible in building their capabilities to advocate for Indigenous interests, to focus squarely on the absolute deficits in remote policy outcomes, including education, employment, housing and essential infrastructure, and to pursue a strategy of simultaneously protecting the institutional frameworks that presently exist, while pursing incremental change across the breadth of the public sector. In particular, Indigenous advocacy interests should explore avenues to gain much greater independence from Government funding as it comes with a hidden cost; the silence it implicitly requires reduces the necessary pressure on governments to fix the extraordinary policy problems that exist across the board, and the social and economic catastrophe that exists in remote Australia.

 

12. The ongoing attendance crisis in remote schools 10 September 2024 (link here):

In relation to remote attendance, there is a need for the Commonwealth to step up and acknowledge it for the national crisis it is…. The Commonwealth should work with the states cooperatively on these issues, but devise incentive-based payments to the states and territories rather than indulging in the politically driven negotiation that currently predominate. Robust support to Indigenous community leaders aimed at encouraging and assisting them to raise expectations of parental involvement within their communities are essential. But so too are getting financial resource allocations for schools better targeted, and if necessary increased. Rewarding effective teachers much better and ensuring that the curriculum is focussed on the needs of the least capable cohort of students are both — to use a colloquial expression — ‘no brainers’. This suggests that the adoption of curriculum methodologies (such as Direct Learning) that do not allow any student to fall behind must be a priority.

 

13. Infrastructure shortfalls in Alices Springs town camps 24 December 2024 (link here).

What is particularly clear from the Guide is how exclusionary institutional complacency emerges in myriad instances of quite prosaic neglect: the absence of footpaths, of surveyed lots, of safe play grounds for children, of street signs, of shade and community shelters; in short, this neglect reflects the longstanding and widespread refusal of mainstream institutions such a local governments to see their roles as universal rather than sectional. The details vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but the impacts are longstanding and have a certain consistency….

The authors and publishers of the Guide to Housing and Infrastructure Standards in Town Camps have made an extraordinarily significant contribution to laying the groundwork for better advocacy for remote Indigenous communities on essential services reform both in Alice Springs, but importantly across northern Australia. They deserve wider recognition and indeed acclamation. What is also clear is that without the efforts of Tangentyere and its community leadership over almost 50 years, the progress made to date on the town camps would not have been possible. Their historically significant work is not yet complete; I only hope that it will not be another fifty years before Aboriginal people in town camps in Alice Springs and beyond are included as fully entitled citizens in the provision of essential services.

 

14. Indigenous hyper-incarceration: a remote problem? 24 January 2025 (link here):

One data point quoted stood out:

As of January, the Northern Territory hit a grim milestone. More than 1% of the territory’s total population is now incarcerated in adult prison.

….

It is the case that the process of colonisation turned the world upside down for Indigenous people across the nation, and the people of remote Australia are generations closer to that social cataclysm.

Mainstream Australia cannot undo those social processes, and the world has moved on for all Australians. However, given the clear evidence of deep dysfunction arising from those social processes that were neither chosen nor desired by Indigenous people, and the impacts those changes inevitably imposed and continues to impose, the nation and its policy elites must be prepared to consider policy options that turn established modes of policy formulation upside down. Not to do so would amount to an extraordinary admission of national policy failure. Indigenous incarceration is just one of the impacts that arise from widespread social and economic dysfunction across remote Australia and woven through pockets of urban and regional Australia.

 

15. Misdirected focus: the case for institutional policy reforms to alcohol supply 18 March 2025 (link here):

The subliminal message from the NIAA then is don’t look to the Commonwealth to drive institutional policy reform, its someone else’s responsibility. See this page on their website too (link here). For what it’s worth, I just don’t buy that argument.

The appendix to the NIAA submission ( #140 at this link) which I strongly recommend readers seek out and read very usefully provides a comprehensive and powerful snapshot of the impacts of alcohol on various sectors. Here are a few data points I have cherry picked from the NIAA submission appendix:

… First Nations people were 4.2 times as likely to die from alcohol-related causes as non-Indigenous Australians. They were also 3.8 times as likely to die from alcoholic liver disease, and 4.7 times as likely to die from mental and behavioural disorders due to alcohol use….

AOD are involved in more than half of all police-reported family and domestic violence incidents in Australia, and are likely to be involved in a substantially greater proportion of all family and domestic violence…. For homicides in the period from 1989–90 to 2016–17, 72% of First Nations offenders were under the influence of alcohol at the time of the incident, as were 71% of First Nations victims…

If Australia was serious about reducing Indigenous incarceration,…  reducing family violence within Indigenous contexts, … improving Indigenous health status, … [and] improving socio-economic status within the Indigenous community, we would implement significant policy reforms in relation to alcohol advertising, taxation and retail availability.

If Australia was serious about closing the gap, the Commonwealth would step up and lead, and one of its first steps would be to implement significant policy reforms in relation to alcohol advertising, taxation and retail availability.

Unfortunately, it is quite clear from a close reading of this report that neither the Government nor the Opposition are serious about any of these issues.

 

16. The Domestic and Family Violence crisis in the NT: a symptom of wider chaos 29 April 2025 (link here):

The Northern Territory is in a state of perpetual governance crisis, where underfunded schools are no longer fit for purpose, jobs are not within reach of young Aboriginal kids, alcohol and drug abuse is rife, as is domestic and family violence, and where violence and mayhem are increasingly spilling into the major towns and cities….

The problems in the NT have been decades in the making and have their roots in the failures of governments at all levels to adequately support the maintenance of a viable social and economic institutional infrastructure in remote communities. Reversing this longstanding policy neglect is not susceptible to some quick fix. In recent years however the systemic dysfunction in remote communities that governments have been prepared to tolerate for decades because they were metaphorically ‘out of sight’ has begun to colonise mainstream Territory cities and towns….

One way or another, remote Australia requires more serious policy attention (as opposed to political froth) from national policymakers. A good first step would be to progressively and incrementally strengthen controls across the board (ie mainstream and Indigenous) over the availability and price of alcohol. But much more than this will be needed to reverse the progressive decline in governance and its silent handmaiden, economic security, that is currently underway and gathering momentum. The alternative to serious reform is progressive decline into systemic chaos not just in remote communities, but across the NT and potentially elsewhere in remote Australia. Unfortunately, it seems things will have to get much worse before the political willpower to reform will emerge either in Canberra or Darwin.

 

1 August 2025