The sign in the window: Lessons from Davos?

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Julius Caesar Act one, Scene two.

 

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie

Which we ascribe to heaven

Alls Well that Ends Well, Act one, Scene one.

 

The speech by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on 20 January 2026 (link here)  reverberated globally. I recommend reading it in full, or even better, watching it (link here).

David French, writing in the New York Times (link here) suggested that Carney:

delivered what might be the most important address of Trump’s second term so far. To enthusiastic applause in Davos, he articulated a vision of how the “middle powers” — nations like Canada — should respond to the great powers.

For middle powers, according to French:

Carney sees this reality clearly. “Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons,” he said. “Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” Integration, he said, has become the source of their “subordination.”

And then

Carney’s conclusion was clear: “The powerful have their power. But we have something, too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together.”

In a complementary opinion piece, Ezra Klein (link here) focussed on Trump’s transactionalism [transnationalism], and explored the implications of Carney’s reference to Vaclav Havel’s example of the fruit shop owner under communist rule who posts a sign in his window proclaiming ‘workers of the world unite’:

“Havel called this ‘living within a lie,’” said Carney. “The system’s power comes not from its truth but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true.

There has been a considerable reaction within Australian policy circles to the Carney speech as one of our Five Eyes partners has in effect taken down the sign in the window, and is prepared to both tell the truth about key issues that go to the security relations and has indicated that it is already moving to decrease its reliance on what Carney calls the hegemon. The Treasurer made clear (link here) that the Carney speech was being taken very seriously at the highest levels of the Australian Government, and the implications of the current US administration’s foreign and domestic policy approaches are increasingly making it clear to Australian policymakers that Australia too will have to adjust its policy settings, reduce its reliance on the US as the single source of its security guarantee, and ultimately that Australia must adopt a more self-reliant stance. The discussion of these issues in the mainstream media has been muted, but  it is clear that momentum is building (link here and link here and link here).

The issue I wish to explore however is to ask the somewhat sensitive question: what lessons for Australian policy opportunities, if any, might Indigenous interests and their allies take from Mark Carney’s analysis of the rupture in the post war international order under the Trump administration? Or to put this another way, what is the best strategy for Indigenous interests and for Governments to adopt in dealing with the outcomes of what is almost universally recognised to have been a violent and unjust process of colonial subordination of Indigenous peoples in a process that has been ongoing for two and a half centuries.

My short answer is as follows: it is time for Australian policymakers, the advocates that seek to influence them, and the critics that seek to criticise them, to focus on substantive policy reforms instead of ephemeral performative announcements raising unrealistic expectations and potentially harming community cohesion both within Indigenous Australia and beyond. Here are my reasons.

My analysis of the performance of governments in broad terms is that the election of the Whitlam Labor Government in 1972 initiated a decades long project of incremental reform policies grounded in social justice and aimed at progressively including Indigenous Australians under the carapace of the nation’s protective and facilitative institutions. One might list numerous examples of the substantive reforms put in place between 1972 and 2015.

However, over the past decade governments have reversed course, and are no longer serious about pursuing structural or systemic reforms. I would struggle to list any substantive reforms in this period, and see little prospect of any for the decade ahead. Instead, they have resorted to a broad policy framework of articulating the rhetoric of reform and social justice, while not investing the political capital required to drive substantive reform. This has become a feasible and viable strategy through the adoption of two symbiotic strategies.

The first strategy is public relations management aimed at neutralising difficult issues with the appearance of action, the allocation of ad hoc funding to silence squeaky wheels, and using the considerable heft and footprint of government to throw dust in the air and evade responsibility wherever possible. The rapid acceleration of the media news cycle and the considerable investment of government in hiring media staff to engage with journalists and media outlets including social media has the ability to overwhelm all but the largest and most sophisticated corporations and organisations.

The second strategy derives from a poorly understood dynamic in political behaviour across the political spectrum, and one which is deeply embedded within high level interest group competition and dynamics; that dynamic can be summed up in one word: transactionalism. In my experience politicians are not only transactional in their approach to politics and policy, but they also assume that virtually all their interlocutors both inside and outside the political domain, are themselves transactional. And mostly they are right, because interest group activities are heavily professionalised and interest groups have been trained (like Pavlov’s dog) to be transactional. Moreover, the reality is that no-one ever gets everything they want, so the process of giving and taking becomes the de facto default for policy engagement. Given this dynamic, the way is open for governments to engage transactionally with both bona fide advocates and potential critics in ways which in effect buy their silence. Board appointments, privileged access to government processes, denial of access, selectively overlooking administrative or other flaws, and of course the use of funding and the implicit threat of cessation or cuts to existing funding are all tactics that governments resort to almost as an everyday practice.

I understand only too well that interest groups have no choice but to engage with governments on policy matters, but if you are a less powerful interest group, you will face much greater challenges in gaining access, in being heard, in persuading governments to act, and if devising the most effective strategies to achieve your ends. If an interest group is divided or worse, incoherent due to multiple voices, the inevitable result is that none will be heard and no action will result. If an interest group is not strategic in building alliances and building networks within the policy domain in advance of seeking some action, or not strategic in focussing its human and financial capital on issues that make a difference, then it is effectively daydreaming. The problem is that daydreamers are often susceptible to self-delusion, and this risk is exacerbated when governments use their considerable armoury of tactics to persuade individuals or organisations that they are being listened to when they are not.

Of course, we elect governments to govern under the implicit contract and assumption that they will act in the public interest broadly defined. Unfortunately, government and politicians too are vulnerable to being captured by powerful interests and the result is that they do not always act in the public interest, but rather in favour of private interests. We cannot assume that government, and the bureaucracy that no longer understands how to provide policy advice without fear or favour, are altruistic. In these circumstances, there is much to be said in favour of citizens minimising their engagement with governments, and devising ways to build mechanisms to provide support within local communities and engaging with NGOs and philanthropists. This applies as much in the Indigenous policy domain as to the wider domain. Arguably Australians expect too much of governments yet invest too little to holding them to account.

If indigenous interests wish to see governments at all levels shift away from performance politics and towards driving substantive policy reform, they should in my humble opinion begin to invest much more in building their own policy and political capability. This will mean building policy and political alliances both within and beyond the Indigenous policy domain. It will take time. And most importantly, it will mean focussing on what is real and feasible rather than on ideological slogans that may have conceptual merit but have no relevance in the real politik of modern Australia.

Non-Indigenous Australians would do both Indigenous interests and the nation a service if they were prepared to look behind the rhetoric of governments, assess policy on its substantive coherence rather than the rhetorical and ideological flim flam thrown up by those engaged in performance politics, and express their views on the basis that all Australians have a stake in ensuring that all policy is truly inclusive, is effective and is making a difference.

We should all take the signs in our windows down and stop living within the lies that underpin the ongoing blot on the Australian political landscape.

 

26 January 2026

Avoiding responsibility: the ANAO Performance Audit of childhood development

O, what may man within him hide,

Though angel on the outward side!

Measure for Measure, Act three, Scene two

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In para. 19, the ANAO note:

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

In para. 22, the ANAO note:

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

ANAO Recommendations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet, as noted in para 4.29:

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

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

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

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

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

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

National Indigenous Australians Agency response: Noted

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

Commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

 

 

23 January 2026

ANAO financial audits and the case for ALRA reform

 

Come, I have learned that fearful commenting

Is leaden servitor to dull delay;

Delay leads impotent and snail-paced beggary

Richard III, Act four, Scene four

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anindilyakwa Land Council

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further details can be found at paragraphs 4.14.71 to 4.14.78.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

 

5 January 2026