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

 

Integrity in public policy

 

Alas, ’tis true I have gone here and there,
And made myself a motley to the view,
Gor’d mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new;
Most true it is that I have look’d on truth
Askance and strangely:

Sonnet 110

 

I am in the process of preparing for a month-long break and am unlikely to post much (or anything) until October.

My posts have become slightly more irregular as I have been finding it increasingly challenging to find issues across the Indigenous policy domain which I felt were significant enough to invest the time necessary to write a post. I generally try not to replicate analysis which is available in the media. It is not that there are not issues playing out, or developments occurring, but I find myself unconvinced that they will have serious systemic impact or that I have not already written about them either directly or tangentially.

As an aside, it is worth mentioning that this is the 350^th post on A Walking Shadow since December 2015, and there is much that is worth exploring should readers feel inclined to use the search function or scroll through the Blog Archive on the right hand side of each post.

I came across the quote below from a blog post (link here)  by Scott Sumner (link here), a libertarian or classical liberal economist from the US. It struck me that his analysis applies as much to Australia, and to the Indigenous public policy domain, as to the US, and because it goes to fundamental values which in turn shape the norms that underpin our formal institutions, it is worth amplifying. It particularly applies to the remote Indigenous policy domain where the interface of traditional Indigenous cultural values, regional and highly parochial mainstream political cultures, and a deep-seated reluctance by national political leaders — and the institutions they effectively control — to address policy issues on their merits, have created and sustained what I have previously described as a social and governance catastrophe (link here).

Sumner states, inter alia:

In my view, people focus far too much on individual issues and far too little on the essential role of integrity in the political process.  We should demand that politicians tell the truth.  We should demand that politicians refrain from corrupt practices.  We should demand that politicians adhere strictly to not just the letter of the law, but also its intent.  If we need to pay much higher salaries to attract the best people, then we should do so.  History has shown that a lack of integrity in the public realm leads to very bad outcomes in the long run.  In the end, integrity is the only way to prevent a country from becoming a failed state.

Sumner’s quote struck a chord with me both because it points to a fundamental value necessary for public policy to be effective (beyond meeting the short-term interests of politicians). But it also hints at the existence of other values that we normally consider as relevant to interpersonal relations, but which have under-appreciated potential systemic or structural implications in policy contexts. For example, values such as respect, transparency, inquisitiveness, innovation, persistence, trust, and patience.

Each of these values are important in shaping effective public policy yet are undervalued and under-acknowledged in public discourse around policy issues. They seem to me to be particularly worth emphasising in cross-cultural policy contexts such as obtain in the Indigenous policy domain where the risks of miscommunication and misunderstanding are heightened. To provide just one example of how a commitment to substantive truth telling is important, I was pleased to see the Australian Financial Review publish yesterday an oped article (link here) by an economist, Cathal Leslie, who had previously worked for the Productivity Commission on Closing the Gap issues, and who made the point that the institutional framework for closing the gap fails to focus on or address a crucial determinant of Indigenous wellbeing while focussing of other issues of marginal significance.

Finally, it is perhaps worth mentioning the relationship between the quotes from Shakespeare and this blog again. I provided a brief explanation in a post dated January 2016 (link here) and refer interested readers there for that explanation. That post also laid out a rationale for the Blog which may be of interest to some readers. Whether I met the aspirations laid out there is for you, the reader, to determine.

 

27 August 2025

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