A note on motive: incompetence, malice, and the cost of not knowing

 

 

… modest doubt is call'd

The beacon of the wise, the tent that searches

To the bottom of the worst.

Troilus and Cressida, Act 2, Scene 2

 

This is a short postscript to my last post, Traversing the Indigenous policy FOI Labyrinth: high level implications (link here). It was prompted by some commentary I received from regular readers.

I normally don’t elaborate on the quotes I have chosen as the epigraph to a post as Shakespeare’s language is generally clear albeit sometimes requiring close reading. I describe my purpose in including quotations from Shakespeare in my early post A Walking Shadow: rationale and declaration of prior interests from January 2016 (link here). The quote above, and in particular the use of the word ‘tent’ is unusual in that it is quite obtuse to most modern readers. ‘Tent’ refers to a surgical probe or instrument for keeping a wound open while the deeper flesh heals. It describes healthy, cautious scepticism as a wise guiding light and a method for deeply investigating difficult problems and suggests digging into the worst-case scenarios to uncover the true, underlying issues.

This post, based on some commentary from readers, is also an opportunity which I shouldn’t miss, namely, to thank all the readers of this blog, and particularly those who take the trouble to email their thoughts and responses. Some are lodged as public comments, many are private words of encouragement. I sometimes receive constructive critique usually aimed at identifying issues I have missed. I appreciate all feedback, take it seriously, and as is the case below, seek to remedy my mistakes or errors of judgment when they surface.

In relation to my previous post, one reader noted, inter alia:

There are other reasons for delay and obfuscation on such matters that you kindly do not mention: like protecting incompetent politicians and their compliant bureaucrats…

While this hypothetical possibility had crossed my mind, I had deliberately not gone there as I didn’t have the evidence required to make the assertion. Though on reflection, I don't think it is a genuinely rival hypothesis to the one I develop below. An officer's instinct to shield a minister, or a department, from embarrassment is just as plausibly self-preservation reaching upward as the self-preservation reaching sideways that I describe later — the same path-of-least-resistance drift, not a separate, more orchestrated explanation requiring anyone to have planned anything. I return to that pattern, on firmer evidentiary ground, later in this post

A second reader — a former Commonwealth lawyer with substantial experience overseeing FOI decision-making — emailed me in response to argue that my efforts to generalise from the two cases in the concluding section was over-reach insofar as I had not provided the evidence required to draw the conclusion I did.

I take all feedback I receive seriously, and upon reflection and deeper consideration, I think the second reader’s argument was in substance correct. It is worth explaining why, and what I think survives it.

The claim in question was this: that the conduct I documented at ORIC and NIAA ‘emanate[s] from the antipathy of the Executive arm of government to transparency,’ and that the resulting labyrinth is, in some sense, ‘designed to minimise transparency.’ The reader’s objection, stripped to its core, was that two case studies cannot carry a claim that large, and that there is a more familiar and more parsimonious explanation sitting in plain sight, namely, Hanlon's razor — never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by neglect, ignorance or incompetence. Notwithstanding the litany of administrative shortcomings — decision-makers on leave; deadlines missed under time pressure; the wrong subsection cited by someone who hasn't read the Act closely enough; and officers who would rather not make a controversial call and so default to the cautious, restrictive one — there is nothing that demonstrates that anyone, anywhere, is executing a strategy along the lines I alleged.

I think this is correct, and I will concede it plainly: the language of ‘design’ and ‘emanation’ claimed more than the evidence available to me could support. I have no insight into what any individual decision-maker at ORIC or NIAA actually intended. Indeed, I said as much in places — I described the ORIC sequence as "an unfortunate and almost comical accumulation of administrative misadventures," which is Hanlon's-razor language, not conspiracy language. Having written that, it was inconsistent of me to then reach, in the conclusion, for language implying deliberate top-down design. The reader identified a real defect in my claim. The reader’s acuity and experience inside the APS gives the argument for an alternative explanation substantial weight, and without adequate evidence, it outweighs my speculation about executive intent.

Nevertheless, conceding the individual-motive question (which is important and which I am happy to do) does not detract from the existence of real problems within the administration of the FOI regime. I normally try to see things from alternative vantage points, and in this case through a bottom-up lens of individual instances and decisions, and through a top down systemic lens which views the entire set of decisions made on the issues around Groote and the ALC. What a top-down view reveals, and what Hanlon's razor doesn't explain, is that administrative errors only ever run in one direction.

Over a couple of years’ worth of FOI applications, I have not once seen an agency accidentally over-disclose, accidentally publish something it wasn't required to, or accidentally err on the side of the applicant. Misaddressed emails, missed deadlines, incomplete searches, wrongly cited subsections, decisions made without engaging fully the statutory public interest factors — every one of these failures, however innocently arrived at, lands on the side of less access, not more. Individually, each is plausibly just accident or neglect. Yet as a pattern, the errors or failures are not randomly distributed. That asymmetry doesn't require anyone to have planned it. It only requires that the path of least resistance, for a busy or under-trained or risk-averse officer, points one way — and that nothing in the system corrects for that drift. That is a claim about incentives and institutional culture, not about what is in anyone's head, and it is, in my reconsidered opinion, the claim my original post should have made instead of the one it did.

There is a further point worth separating out, because I think it is actually the more important one, and it survives the motive question entirely. When an agency declines to explain itself — or explains itself badly, or explains itself in terms that doesn’t withstand scrutiny, as happened with ORIC's non-publication rationale — it leaves the person on the other side of the request with an evidentiary vacuum. People do not sit comfortably in vacuums. In the absence of a credible account of what happened and why, the least charitable available explanation tends to fill the space, particularly where there is already a power asymmetry between the party withholding information and the party seeking it. This is true whether or not the least charitable explanation happens to be correct. Put differently: opacity has a trust cost that is independent of the truth of the matter being concealed. A government that cannot or will not distinguish its own incompetence from bad faith, in the accounts it gives of its own decisions, should not be surprised when the wider public narrative stops making that distinction on its behalf.

I am not seeking to use a back door to reinstate the error I made. I am not trying to be too clever by half, and to suggest "I'm not claiming malice, but look how opacity makes malice look plausible" as a way of undermining my admission of error. I genuinely don't know whether what I've documented reflects incompetence, self-preservation, institutional risk-aversion, something closer to the second reader’s account, or some combination that varies by agency and by officer. My point is narrower and, I think, harder to refute: a system opaque enough that a reasonably well-informed applicant cannot tell the difference between neglect and bad faith is a system that has already failed, on its own terms, whichever explanation turns out to be true. The objects of the FOI Act — set out in section 3 and quoted in my last post — are about promoting better-informed public participation and scrutiny. A process that leaves a diligent applicant unable to distinguish incompetence from concealment is not achieving those objects, regardless of which one it is.

Trust in democratic institutions is not infinitely renewable. It is drawn down by exactly this kind of accumulated, unresolved ambiguity, and it is not obviously restored by an agency later proving, case by case, that any individual failure was merely incompetence rather than design. By the time that proof arrives, if it ever does, the applicant — and often the wider public — has already updated toward the worse explanation. Governments that want to be trusted with the benefit of the doubt need to stop generating situations in which the doubt is reasonable.

A final word, since a further post on the specific treatment of the late Mr T. Wurramarrba in the NIAA releases is still in preparation. Nothing in this post should be read as pre-loading that argument. Whatever I say there about patterns of omission and redaction concerning a particular individual will need to stand or fall on the evidence particular to that case — consistency, or its absence, across releases; whether the pattern tracks any coherent application of the claimed exemptions, or something else. The argument made here, about the impact on levels of trust of unresolved opacity in general, is a different and more modest one, and I have tried to keep the two apart.

 

This post has been produced with research assistance from Claude Sonnet 5

 

19 July 2026

 

Traversing the Indigenous policy FOI Labyrinth: high level implications

 

 

This is as strange a maze as e'er men trod,

And there is in this business more than nature

Was ever conduct of. Some oracle

 Must rectify our knowledge.

The Tempest, Act five, Scene one

 

 

Readers of this Blog will know that several of my posts, especially those related to Groote Eylandt, are based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (FOI Act). However, I usually pass over the details of the efforts required to obtain them. This post is a brief corrective: not an argument about what the documents show, but an account of the processes by which they arrive or don't, or arrive late, or arrive redacted, often for reasons that are flimsy and don’t stand up under closer scrutiny.

 

To enhance readability, I have kept this post reasonably brief and mostly free of legal argument. A second post, to follow shortly, will address the substantive implications of the emergence of a wider pattern of systemic opacity and often unnecessary secrecy. This post is intended to lay the groundwork for that further post currently in preparation.

 

Two agencies, same texture

 

Over the past several months I have had live FOI matters running simultaneously with the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) and the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations (ORIC). Both related to aspects of the administrative and accountability crisis that has engulfed the ALC and the distribution of royalty equivalents on Groote Eylandt. The two are different agencies handling different requests, with no reason to expect their conduct to resemble one another. And yet….

 

With ORIC, a decision on my request for documents relating to an examination of Groote Holdings Aboriginal Corporation (GHAC) was made on 21 May 2026. I did not receive it. I chased it seven weeks later, on 13 July, and was told the email had simply been erroneously misaddressed. Fair enough; mistakes happen. What doesn't simply happen is a second failure sitting behind the first: under section 11C of the FOI Act, agencies are required to publish released documents to a public Disclosure Log within ten business days of giving access. That hadn't happened either. When seven weeks on I asked why, the answer I was given that the decisionmaker had decided to not publish the released documents based on her view that ‘they contain business information of third parties that would be unreasonable to publish’. Coincidentally, she had omitted to include the standard paragraph used by ORIC in statements of reasons relating to the publication (or not) on the Disclosure Log. To its credit, ORIC apologised for this oversight. More seriously, the response cited the wrong subsection of the Act to explain it, and even had they cited the correct section, the facts are not consistent with the rationale communicated to me. The only information released relating to the business information of a third party was the business address of GHAC, which is in fact published on the ORIC website.

 

So, in addition to missing the statutory timeframe for responding to my request, my queries unearthed two further apparent administrative mistakes, namely the failure to publish the released document and to inform me of their decision, and the apparent decision to base it on a reason that doesn’t stand up.  I say apparent decision because notwithstanding seeking confirmation that there is written evidence of the decision maker's decision, the response received has consistently pointed me to the internal review processes applicable under the Act. To be fair, ORIC's most recent correspondence was accommodating on one point: rather than treating the misaddressed email as having started the clock on 21 May, it confirmed I could use my actual date of receipt, 13 July, as the start date for seeking internal review. That is a reasonable position, and I record it as such. The broader problem remains, however, that an internal review deals with the decision's correctness under the Act and is not directed at the quality of the processes used to make that decision.

 

There are issues with the substantive correctness of the decision to withhold the entirety of the investigation report totalling around 90 pages. The decision maker decided to redact the entire document on the basis that section 47E(d) of the FOI Act conditionally exempts documents where disclosure would, or could reasonably be expected to, have a substantial adverse effect on the proper and efficient conduct of the operations of an agency (namely ORIC). The FOI Act provides that conditionally exempt documents  should be released ‘unless (in the circumstances) access to the document at that time would, on balance, be contrary to the public interest’. The decision maker is required to balance the factors for and against release. To assist decision makers, the Act lists a range of factors that favour access including whether access to the document would do any of the following:

(a) promote the objects of this Act… ;

            (b) inform debate on a matter of public importance;

(c) promote effective oversight of public expenditure;

The decision maker made no direct mention of these factors in making her decision, but it is a balancing process and will need to be determined through a future review process if access is to be made available. Such a process or processes would inevitably involve significant further delays.

 

With NIAA, the sequence has been longer and, in its way, more instructive.

 

On 23 December 2025, NIAA issued its decision on my request FOI/2526/013 which I made on 24 September 2025, and which focussed on the ministerial approvals underpinning the Winchelsea mine. The initial decision on FOI/2526/031 was released on 16 March 2026. I previously published two posts based on these documents (link here and link here).  The material released in the first request comprised a lengthy set of documents, redacted in multiple places. On 13 January 2026 I lodged a detailed request for internal review, running across five separate grounds: missing documents, and three different exemption claims I considered wrongly applied. I noted that the documents released referenced two documents that had not been included in the original release and appeared to come within the terms of my request. NIAA agreed and for technical reasons suggested that I agree to them being considered as a new request for access. This became FOI/2526/031.

 

Nothing happened, at least not visibly, for some time. I later learned why. Both the original decision-maker and the internal reviewer were on leave for the first fortnight after I lodged my request. The FOI team's first substantive discussion of my contentions took place on 27 January 2026, more than a fortnight after I'd made them, and only days before the statutory deadline for a decision. That deadline was, in the event, missed. NIAA applied for, and was granted, an extension and, to its credit, told me so directly and apologetically.

 

What happened next is worth focussing on. NIAA's Chief Lawyer emailed to explain that the internal reviewer had tentatively formed the view that some of the original redactions should be lifted, but before finalising that view, wanted to give the Anindilyakwa Land Council (ALC) a further opportunity to comment. The ALC is not a disinterested bystander in this material; it is the entity whose own conduct much of it describes. It was given eight days to respond to an 83-page document package. I had made my own submissions three weeks earlier and would get no further opportunity to respond to whatever the ALC put forward in reply. And once the internal reviewer's decision was made, it would then go to a briefing for NIAA's senior executive committee described to me by the Chief Lawyer as a chance "to review the documents and ask any questions" before the internal review was finalised and sent to me.

 

To be clear, NIAA was not obliged, under the FOI Act, to consult the ALC again at this stage at all. It did so, I was told, only to honour an earlier undertaking to the ALC. I have no basis for concluding that any of this changed the outcome, and I am not alleging that it did. What I am saying is more circumspect, but difficult to refute: a process that builds in a further hearing for the party under scrutiny, and none at all for the person who asked the question, is not a process most people would recognise as evenly balanced regardless of how the individual officers involved conducted themselves.

 

Nor is it wise in my view for an independent internal reviewer to share her proposed decision (based on her interpretation of the FOI Act) with the agency’s senior management and expect that the agency’s reputation for independent administration of the legislation would not be harmed. As the OAIC website states:

As a merits review process, an internal review is a new decision-making process in which an independent internal review decision-maker remakes the original access refusal or access grant decision (link here, para 9.2).

I responded to the Chief Lawyer and expressed my reservations about this proposed approach and requested a response to my concerns but heard nothing. It is not clear if the Executive Committee were in fact provided with prior access to the internal review decisions.

 

A related and separate issue particularly with more complex FOI matters is that the agency legal unit provides support for both the initial decision maker and the internal reviewer. This too is a potential conflict and also opens the possibility of agencies pursuing strategic behaviour to slow down access, on the basis that more restrictive (and perhaps less justifiable) decisions to refuse access will often not be pursued, and if they are they can be adjusted at a later time.

 

The final agency decisions taken in these two NIAA matters are now before the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC). The OAIC is facing considerable delays in processing outstanding FOI issues, especially comparatively complex matters, so I am not expecting a response until early next year.

 

Why this is worth a post on its own

 

None of this, on its own, focusses on what the documents contain. That's deliberate; this post is about the nature of the journey — the conditions of the road, its challenges and mis-directions, its byways and highways — not the destination. But the nature of the journey matters. What is clear from the two cases considered in this post is that the journey has become encapsulated in an administrative labyrinth, designed to minimise transparency, pre-emptively constrain potential criticism, promote secrecy and to disincentive citizens keen to understand the workings of their government.

 

These are issues that are broader than any one agency and emanate from the antipathy of the Executive arm of government to transparency, and its all-encompassing focus on managing the daily news cycle. In today’s public sector, agencies understand this and act accordingly.

 

In relation to the ORIC request, the unfortunate and almost comical accumulation of what I term administrative misadventures points to potential broader issues related to the agency’s capability and commitment to monitoring the governance standards of the corporations in receipt of so-called royalty equivalents under the NT land rights legislation. The Act provides for the payment of ‘affected community’ monies arising from mining on ALRA titled land to be paid to corporations established under the Corporations (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Act 2006 (CATSI Act) which establishes the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations and ORIC. There is thus an implicit expectation in the ALRA legislation that these corporations will be appropriately governed and that there will be capable (and culturally sensitive) regulatory oversight.

 

It is patently clear that there have been serious corporate governance and accountability issues in relation to the governance of some of the CATSI corporations on Groote, including GHAC, for most of the last decade (link here and link here). This in turn raises the question: how has this been allowed to both occur and persist.

 

Transparency in relation to the adequacy and effectiveness of the regulatory oversight of these corporations (and others elsewhere in the NT in receipt of s64(3) payments) has been minimal. In these circumstances, the defensive and unnerving approach of ORIC to my comparatively simple FOI request suggests that there are underlying issues within ORIC that surely demand attention. This conclusion is reinforced by the matters discussed in my recent post related to the problematic nature of ORIC’s more general regulatory performance (link here).

 

In relation to the NIAA, a request that evolves into two separate requests, that together take the better part of two months to progress past a first internal meeting, that takes seven months to process from initial request to finalisation of internal review, that gives the subject of the documents who have a vested interest in avoiding embarrassing disclosures more opportunity to be heard than the person asking to see them, and that runs a final check past the very executives whose agency's earlier decision is under review, is not a process that inspires confidence in the commitment of the Executive arm of Government to the principles and objects of the FOI Act.

 

Conclusion

 

What these two matters have in common is not just delay and discretion exercised against disclosure, but a recurring willingness to withhold or redact the specific — names, findings, factual detail — in favour of the general. A further post will explore the systemic erasure of the recent history of what has transpired on Groote Eylandt over the past decade and consider how this contributes to making this history unintelligible and thus able to be reframed in ways that shift responsibility and shape the publicly available narrative going forward. A key focus will be to examine one instance of that pattern of erasure in more detail: the treatment, across the NIAA FOI releases discussed here, of the role of the former ALC Chair, the late Mr T. Wurramarrba.

 

At a higher level, both case studies raise the same issue: the public interest is systemically made subservient to the pressures for secrecy, avoiding accountability, and the erection of barriers to the access of information concerning the ways in which governments seek to manage what is, admittedly, an increasingly complex public policy environment. The risk however is that these broader trends increase the risks of corruption arising and spreading. It is no coincidence that the electorates demand for better public governance had been met with the establishment of anti-corruption institutions across most Australian jurisdictions. Unfortunately, nor is it surprising that in doing so, governments have in various ways constrained their remit and hobbled their operations. The experience of the National Anti-Corruption Commission at the Commonwealth level over recent years is a case in point.

 

 In this context, it is worth reminding ourselves of the principles underlying the establishment of the Freedom of Information regime and contemplating whether they have been in any substantive sense achieved.

 

Section 3 of the legislation states (emphasis added):

 

3. Objects—general

 

 (1) The objects of this Act are to give the Australian community access to information held by the Government of the Commonwealth, by:

 (a) requiring agencies to publish the information; and

 (b) providing for a right of access to documents.

 (2) The Parliament intends, by these objects, to promote Australia’s representative democracy by contributing towards the following:

(a) increasing public participation in Government processes, with a view to promoting better‑informed decision‑making;

(b) increasing scrutiny, discussion, comment and review of the Government’s activities.

 (3) The Parliament also intends, by these objects, to increase recognition that information held by the Government is to be managed for public purposes, and is a national resource.

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

 

 16 July 2026

 Addendum

Please see the subsequent post (link here) for an update and reconsideration of the way that some matters in this post were experessed.

 19 July 2026

This post has been produced with research assistance from Claude Sonnet 5

 

A strengthened Indigenous Procurement Policy: but uncertainties remain

The web of our life is a mingled yarn,

good and ill together.

All's Well That Ends Well, Act four, Scene three.

 

All that glisters is not gold ...

Gilded tombs do worms enfold.

The Merchant of Venice, Act two, Scene seven.

 

From today, 1 July 2026, the Indigenous Procurement Policy operates under tightened eligibility rules. To access Commonwealth contracts, a business must now be 51 per cent or more First Nations owned and controlled or registered as being Indigenous owned by the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations (ORIC). This raises the threshold for access to the scheme, up from the original 50 per cent ownership threshold that has applied since 2015. A transition year allows firms sitting on the old criteria to adjust. The Commonwealth's purchasing target also steps up, from 3 to 3.25 per cent, on its way to 4 per cent by 2029–30. Minister McCarthy's announcement (link here) leans on a decade of headline numbers: more than 91,000 contracts, over $14.2 billion, some 4,900 First Nations businesses.

On its face, this is the continuation of a policy success story I have followed, on and off, since its early years (link here and link here). The IPP has consistently exceeded its own targets, attracted bipartisan support, and — as I noted when the Indonesia-Australia trade agreement was being negotiated in 2019 (link here)  — proven durable enough that Australian negotiators went out of their way to carve out explicit protection for Indigenous policy measures in an international trade agreement. That is not nothing.

But the reform arrives alongside two bodies of evidence that should temper the optimistic tone of the Minister's release, and that between them go some way to explaining why the ownership threshold, rather than the systemic changes I would argue are necessary, is where this round of incremental policy adjustment has landed.

The first is the ANAO's 2025 follow-up audit of the Mandatory Minimum Requirements, which I wrote about on this blog in some detail last year (link here). I urge interested readers to have a look at that post. The ANAO found that between July 2016 and September 2024, 63 per cent of contracts subject to mandatory minimum requirements (MMR) targets — worth $69.3 billion — were exempted from them, often for reasons NIAA could not adequately explain or assure. NIAA had also quietly cancelled a promised evaluation of whether the MMRs work at all, with no record of who made that decision or why. When the ANAO recommended NIAA assure itself that exemptions were legitimate, NIAA declined, arguing this was a matter for the individual Commonwealth agencies issuing contracts under the devolved procurement framework — an odd position for the agency legislatively tasked with monitoring the effectiveness of Indigenous programs across government, including those delivered by other agencies.

The second is Christian Eva's recent analysis (link here and link here) in the Australian Journal of Public Administration, the first substantial quantitative study of who actually receives IPP contracts. Using FOI data spanning 2015–16 to 2022–23, Eva finds that the policy's aggregate success conceals a striking concentration: half of all contracts over $10,000 went to just 11 firms, and half the dollar value to 18 firms, out of roughly 3,900 businesses cited as beneficiaries. Forty-one per cent of contracts and 30 per cent of value went to firms based in the ACT, where only one per cent of the national Indigenous population reside; firms in the 50–51 per cent Indigenous ownership band — precisely the group the new eligibility rule targets — received the largest single share of contract value, while ownership status for 64 per cent of suppliers could not be verified at all. Eva's broader argument is that the IPP measures itself against volume and value targets that are relatively easy to meet, while leaving largely unexamined whether contracts translate into Indigenous employment, community benefit, or anything resembling Indigenous-defined success.

Read together, these two pieces of evidence point to the same gap: a policy whose headline metrics are exceeded almost by design, sitting on top of compliance and verification infrastructure that neither NIAA nor the available data can currently vouch for. Raising the ownership threshold to 51 per cent addresses the most legible version of "black cladding" — but Eva's own account of the practice describes far more sophisticated arrangements than a bare ownership percentage. Moreover, the announced reform does nothing to address the MMR exemption problem, the absence of an evaluation strategy, or the concentration of contracts among a small, capital-city-based cohort of repeat winners.

There is also a wider governance backdrop worth noting. My recent post on ORIC's regulatory performance (link here) — CATSI corporation reporting compliance has fallen from over 75 per cent to under 30 per cent since 2015–16 — suggests a portfolio-wide pattern of declining regulatory capacity, not something confined to procurement. The NIAA web page describing the current changes (link here) reveals that the NIAA will be outsourcing the verification process, or to use the jargon of bureaucratese:

To implement the strengthened IPP eligibility criteria, the NIAA will soon approach the market to identify a provider to deliver the verification services.

A strengthened eligibility test is only as good as the verification and assurance work sitting behind it, and on current evidence that work is thin.

None of this is an argument against the announced sensible but modest changes, aimed at strengthening the leverage of Indigenous business owners vis a vis potential partners in joint ventures seeking to win government contracts. It is however an argument against mistaking a tighter ownership threshold for a genuine answer to the questions Eva and the ANAO have both now put on the public record: who actually benefits from $14 billion in Indigenous procurement since 2015, and does anyone in government know whether the policy is achieving what it was designed to achieve?

A decade on, with the headline targets rising to 4 per cent, those remain open questions — and the ‘strengthened’ IPP, as currently designed, is not built to answer them. Commenting to the National Indigenous Times last December on the extraordinary expansion of Commonwealth procurement with Indigenous firms, Christian Eva commented (link here):

That's not nothing. But with any Indigenous program at a federal level, we really do need stronger transparency and stronger accountability.

I agree wholeheartedly. But I would sharpen those observations by noting that the announced changes appear to avoid the hard questions such as how to ensure that the Indigenous partners in joint ventures benefitting from the IPP — even when formally in control — are not co-opted or inappropriately induced to participate in business arrangements that allow mainstream businesses to access government contracting opportunities.

Removing these potentialities requires robust and coordinated regulatory oversight that to date has been absent, regular independent evaluations, and an acknowledgment that if the IPP is to be sustained, it must demonstrate that it is benefiting both the interests of First Nations business owners and the public interest more generally. The IPP if well designed and effectively implemented can be win/win; but without rigorous regulatory oversight, it can easily slide into lose/lose.

The record of the development of the IPP is a mingled yarn, good and ill together: the question the Minister’s announcement does not ask, let alone answer, is how much of the gold is real.

 

This post has been developed with the research assistance of Claude Sonnet 5

1 July 2026

 

 

 

The ANAO on the ALC and AINT Annual Report delays: the case for radical transparency

 

To thine own self be true,

 And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Hamlet, Act one, Scene three

 

Last week the ANAO released its Interim Report on Key Financial Controls of Major Entities (link here). In Chapter Five of the report, the ANAO provides for the first time an explanation of the delays in the finalisation and tabling of the Annual Reports of the Anindilyakwa Land Council (ALC) and Aboriginal Investment NT (AINT) and an associated Trust.

This Blog has covered these delays and the complete absence of any formal explanation in several previous posts (link here and link here). Given the technical details involved, before discussing the context and implications emerging form the explanations now provided, it is easiest if I reproduce an extract from the ANAO Report:

Anindilyakwa Land Council

5.3 The Anindilyakwa Land Council (ALC) was formed by the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (ALRA).

2024–25 audit results

5.4 The conclusion of the 2024–25 financial statements audit was delayed due to the impact of weaknesses in ALC’s financial statements preparation process and delays in receipt of supporting documentation. At the conclusion of the audit, one finding posing a significant business or financial risk and one minor finding remained unresolved

[Table 5.3 omitted]

Unresolved significant audit finding: Addressing previously reported governance findings

5.5 A significant audit finding that remained unresolved at the conclusion of the 2024–25 audit related to ALC’s progress in addressing 15 recommendations from the Auditor-General Report No.29 2022–23 Governance of the Anindilyakwa Land Council, which was tabled on 31 May 2023. The ANAO found that while the ALC had closed all high priority findings, five findings remained open, meaning the finding category remained unchanged for 2024–25.

 

Northern Territory Aboriginal Investment Corporation

5.6 The Northern Territory Aboriginal Investment Corporation (NTAIC) is a corporate commonwealth entity, established under section 65B of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976.

2024–25 audit results

5.7 The conclusion of the 2024–25 financial statements audit was delayed due to the late notification to the ANAO of the preparation of separate financial statements for the Aboriginal Investment NT Trust. As the Auditor-General is required under the Auditor-General Act 1997 to audit subsidiary financial statements, additional audit work was required to enable reliance on the component auditor, which extended the audit timeline.

5.8 At the conclusion of the audit, one new other legislative finding was reported, and two minor audit findings remained unresolved.

Audit findings

[Table 5.4 omitted]

New moderate legislative finding: Key Management Personnel incorrect payments

5.9 A new other legislative finding relating to incorrect payments to key management personnel was raised at the conclusion of the 2024–25 audit. The ANAO found three instances of incorrect payments (two overpayments and one underpayment) to key management personnel, in breach of the remuneration tribunal determination.

 

Aboriginal Investment NT Trust

5.10 The Aboriginal Investment NT Trust (the Trust) was established on 19 December 2024 as an unlisted, unregistered managed investment trust and is wholly owned and controlled by the Northern Territory Aboriginal Investment Corporation (NTAIC), a corporate Commonwealth entity. The Trust was established to invest funds to provide exposure to a diversified portfolio of asset classes through investments in underlying funds.

2024–25 audit results

5.11 The conclusion of the 2024–25 financial statements audit was delayed due to the late provision of signed financial statements and late identification by the entity that the Auditor General is the mandated auditor. At the conclusion of the 2024–25 audit, one new moderate finding was identified.

Audit findings

[Table 5.5 omitted]

New moderate audit finding : Financial reporting omissions and audit arrangements

5.12 During the 2024–25 financial statements audits, the ANAO identified issues relating to the financial reporting and audit arrangements for the Trust. The Trust prepared and approved its first financial statements for the period ended 30 June 2025, which were audited by another auditor prior to engagement with the ANAO. The ANAO subsequently identified the existence of the Trust’s financial statements and that, as a subsidiary of a corporate Commonwealth entity, its financial statements fell within the Auditor-General’s audit mandate.

5.13 The originally issued financial statements did not include all disclosures required by Australian Accounting Standards. In particular, disclosures relating to the Trust’s parent entity, significant related party transactions with NTAIC—including the provision of funding of approximately $305 million and auditor remuneration—were not included. These disclosures are fundamental to users’ understanding of the Trust’s ownership structure, governance arrangements and use of public funds. The omission of this information resulted in a material misstatement of the originally issued financial statements.

5.14 The late identification of the Trust and its financial statements also affected the audit process. The ANAO was required to undertake audit procedures after the financial statements had been approved and an auditor’s report issued by another auditor, which limited the opportunity for timely audit planning and coordination with the audit of NTAIC and contributed to delays in completing both audits.

5.15 Following ANAO engagement with the Trust, the originally issued financial statements were withdrawn and replaced with revised financial statements that included the omitted disclosures. The ANAO completed the audit of the revised financial statements and issued an unmodified audit opinion, including an emphasis of matter drawing attention to the withdrawal and reissue of the financial statements. The matter highlights the importance of early identification of new subsidiary arrangements and timely engagement with the ANAO to support effective financial reporting and audit processes.

 

While the issues raised by the ANAO are not earth shattering in themselves, they do point to failures of process within both the ALC and AINT and, I would suggest, in the standards of ministerial decision-making and regulatory oversight being applied to the administration of entities established by the ALRA.

In relation to the ALC, it is difficult not to suspect that the ‘weaknesses in ALC’s financial statements preparation process and delays in receipt of supporting documentation’ identified as the reasons for the delays in finalising the audits and tabling the annual report were linked to the sudden termination of the former CEO Mr Hewitt. While the public narrative is that the ALC decided to unilaterally terminate Mr Hewitt’s services, the context surrounding the decision strongly suggests otherwise. As I documented previously (link here) ALC staff were excluded from the Council’s discussion and the only non-Council member present while the ALC considered the matter was a senior NIAA officer. Subsequently, the Minister lifted her unprecedented moratorium on approving a full year budget for the ALC and later approved (alone amongst the four NT Land Councils) a budget increase of around $2m for operational expenses over the ALC’s previous annual budget (link here). The Minister’s rationale for withholding budget approval in her media release of 29 August 2024 (link here) was that:

The full budget will only be considered when ALC has demonstrated to the NIAA that it is sufficiently prioritising and implementing the recommendations of the review and the ANAO audit.

Yet the ANAO now tell us that there are still (as of May 2026) five outstanding findings from the ANAO’s 2023 audit of the ALC.

My own hypothesis is that the Minister intervened directly in the ALC’s internal affairs to ensure that the former CEO was removed from his position (link here). Her agency had previously referred unspecified matters related to the management of the ALC for investigation by the National Anti-Corruption Commission. The Minister has never provided a full explanation for this referral. If my hypothesis is correct, then the administrative issues that caused the delay in the finalisation of the audit and the tabling of the annual report were the result, at least in part, of her actions.

The obvious avenue for sorting out these issues is in Senate Estimates Committee Hearings, yet for a range of reasons which I do not claim to fully comprehend, neither the Government, the Opposition nor the Greens and independents appear keen to ask the obvious questions nor even to have the ALC appear at Estimates Hearings. At the most recent Estimates Hearings, only three of the four NT Land Councils were listed on the agenda, the exception being the ALC, the only Land Council whose annual report had not been tabled in time or the previous hearings. As it transpired, the Committee decided to not take evidence from any of the NT Land Councils. In my view, the Senate Estimates processes have comprehensively failed to adequately oversight the performance failures of the ALC and the regulatory failures of the NIAA and its minister. For a related discussion, see this recent post on regulatory oversight (link here).

In relation to the AINT and its associated Trust, the failure to disclose over $300m in related party transactions, while perhaps merely an administrative error rather than an indication of misfeasance, should have set the alarm bells ringing. Again, the fact that the Minister has seen fit to provide no information or explanation for these problems, and that the Senate Estimates processes appear entirely disinterested in following them up, does not bode well for the maintenance of appropriate standards of administration and probity across the complex array of financial activities undertaken under the ALRA.

I recall sitting in a Senate Estimates hearing in the early 1980s when an Opposition Senator gained national headlines and almost brought down both the then Minister and his agenda of establishing ATSIC with unsubstantiated allegations that a ‘black mafia’ existed. Anyone who thinks that this might not happen again, and that the times are now different is, in my humble option, deeply mistaken.

In a context where the political opponents of land rights and Aboriginal aspirations more generally are gaining greater traction in political debate, the apparent Government strategy of sitting on their hands and hoping that issues of maladministration or mere incompetence will eventually evaporate is in my view deeply misguided. Obfuscation merely serves to deplete the waning levels of trust in government. The better strategy is to pursue policies of radical transparency complemented by the provision of explanations for government decisions. If governments and ministers are acting in the public interest, there is no reason not to provide explanations for their decisions. Good policy is good politics.

 

29 June 2026

The institutional drivers of remote disadvantage

 

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will.

Hamlet, Act five, Scene two

 

We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape till custom make it
Their perch and not their terror.

Measure for Measure, Act two, Scene one.

 

In a recent article published in Pearls and Irritations (link here), political strategist and pollster Kos Samaras provides an insightful analysis of the reasons behind the rise of One Nation, and the structural bifurcation embedded within its base. As he says

There is an old cohort that came to Hanson on identity and a new one that came on grievance, and they do not want the same things. 

I found his argument to be persuasive, but my aim here is to repurpose his analysis to explore one element of an issue that I have previously articulated in a number of contexts (link here and link here), namely the importance of leveraging and reforming mainstream policy frameworks in seeking to address Indigenous disadvantage. More pointedly, I emphasise the risks of not engaging with mainstream policy and relying solely on the fiction that the solutions to Indigenous disadvantage can be found in greater utilisation of Indigenous specific policy approaches and/or are solely the domain of Indigenous interests.

The element of this mainstream/Indigenous specific tension that I focus on here is the related but conceptually distinct divide between remote Australia (and its remote communities) and urban and regional Australia.

In his article on One Nation, Samaras has this to say about the origins of the cohort of voters that are focussed on identity. They were people who while they owned their homes in the towns that range right across Australia’s hinterlands:

In the narrow, cash-flow sense this voter was not poor. The mortgage was gone. What had gone with it was a sense that the world they grew up in, and raised families in, had gone too: not replaced, but declined.

The paid-off home sits in a part of Australia that has been quietly stripped of institutions, industry and services. Since 2017 around 37 per cent of the country’s bank branches have closed, and in the space of three years more than 600 towns were left with no banking service at all. In the Riverina alone, 22 towns have lost their last bank, and Grenfell lost all four of the majors.

The hospital tells the same story. More than 130 rural birthing units have shut their doors, so an expectant mother now drives hours to deliver. There are about 437 full-time-equivalent doctors per 100,000 people in the big cities and roughly 264 in the very remote. Close to one in five remote Australians cannot see a local GP, around 60 per cent have no specialist within reach, and life expectancy runs up to seven years shorter than in the capitals.

And the people are leaving. The young go first, to the capitals for work and study, which has pushed the median age in the regions to 42 against 36 in the cities, with only about 30 per cent of residents outside the capitals now in the prime 20-to-44 band. Whole districts are contracting: wheatbelt towns like Northampton and Morawa shedding three and four per cent in a single year, the old mining centres of Broken Hill, Mount Isa and Port Augusta bleeding numbers, and in a growing list of places the deaths now outnumber the births.

Samaras documents, in a highly revealing graph showing the level of voter support for One Nation, that in September 2025, that support was just above 10% nationally (essentially the Party’s original identity based cohort) and grew over the succeeding four months to over 25% and in the subsequent four months to the present rate of 31% support nationally. This later growth is due to the second of Samaras cohorts, younger voters with cost-of-living grievances.

In analysing the implications of his analysis, Samaras explains why One Nation's place based cohort support base is so resilient:

If the vote is anchored in a place-formed identity rather than in the world the iPhone made, two things follow.

The first is that it will not be bought off. A budget measure can ease a mortgage. It cannot return a voter to a country that feels like the one they grew up in, because that country was partly a function of being younger in a smaller, more legible world. The grievance is real, but at root it is not fiscal, which is why fiscal answers keep sailing past it. [I don’t explore the second factor here].

I’ve quoted the Samaras analysis here, because it resonates strongly with and even parallels my own analysis of the reasons Indigenous residents of remote Australia over the past five decades have had their world upended.

If the decline of a pre-existing institutional footprint of government and the economic impacts of modern capitalism (or neoliberalism) is such that small towns become economically and socially unviable, and this in turn leads to the political earthquake of national significance we are seeing today with the rise of One Nation, is it surprising then that the failure of successive governments to invest in and establish these institutions in remote Indigenous communities for the past half century would also have major, extensive and cumulative impacts on the social and economic viability of remote communities? And is it also surprising that the subsequent demographic shifts, which have seen an increasing exodus from communities and influx into regional centres like Kununurra, Halls Creek, Tennant Creek and Alice Springs, would also bring with them the mayhem and despair of their prior world turned upside down? My point is not that the processes of remote community displacement and the hollowing of the local economies of regional Australia are equivalent, but rather to point to the fact that the loss of institutional frameworks by citizens structurally included within the Australian political settlement while earthshattering, is nevertheless overshadowed by the ongoing impact on citizens excluded from the Australian political settlement because they have never had access to the benefits of the institutional frameworks most Australians take for granted.

While colonisation and the expansion of settlement across the nation was violent, and extremely traumatic for Indigenous societies, with the establishment of the pastoral industry across the northern savannahs, missions in the most geographically remote areas, and various Aboriginal reserves in desert and other non-pastoral areas, a social and economic equilibrium was established that created widespread stability within remote communities. It was an equilibrium built on access to rations, seasonal employment on pastoral stations for both men and women, and in many respects was an accommodation which averted the ongoing violence and economic cost for both sides of continuing frontier violence, but also had embedded within it mutual misunderstanding of what the accommodation involved and where it might lead in the future. See my brief discussion of Tim Rowse’s insightful book White Flour, White Power in this earlier post (link here). Historian Shannyn Palmer has also written persuasively on the reasons for the demographic shift from the deserts to remote communities in central Australia prior to World War Two, emphasising the role of Indigenous agency in the choices Aboriginal people made.

In my assessment, the equilibrium established was neither just nor institutionally inclusive. This led in turn to a decades long project by progressive Australians and increasingly Aboriginal advocates for civil rights, human rights and land rights. On one metric, the extent of legally acknowledged Aboriginal land ownership, that struggle has been extraordinarily successful. The land rights movement has seen the establishment of a complex array of institutional reforms leading to acknowledged Aboriginal land ownership of one form or another rising from effectively zero to some 58% of the Australian land mass being either owned, managed or subject to special rights (link here) in 2024.

Yet despite those successes, and the associated policy shifts away from assimilation, and towards self-management, and later self-determination, the social and economic equilibrium in place across remote Australia in the 1970s has seriously fractured. Perhaps the most significant shift was the well-intentioned decision in 1967 to force the pastoral industry to pay Aboriginal workers equal wages. It led to an immediate and significant loss of Aboriginal pastoral employment, which in turn led in many cases to the eviction of Aboriginal people from access to their country. Simultaneously, Government ration stations were closed, mission funding began to dry up and most closed or took a back seat as the Commonwealth stepped in to fund self-managing communities. These settlements were in locations where state government and local government services were not provided since they were structured around servicing ratepayers (who often were paying only nominal fees). Over subsequent decades, the Commonwealth (through DAA first, and later ATSIC) put significant pressure on states and territories to lift their game and support Indigenous citizens. In recent years, the Commonwealth has pre-emptively pulled away from the provision of comprehensive support to remote communities even in circumstances where the states and territories were not locked into the provision of sustained funding arrangements.

The situation of First Nations citizens in urban and regional Australia is also fraught but has different manifestations and thus requires different policy approaches (in my view). I do not address those issues here.

The drivers of the political shifts that underlie the accelerating loss of political and social equilibrium across remote Australia are not well understood. My own diagnosis is that the dominant coalition of the most influential economic and social interests in Australian society is itself in a perpetual process of internal bargaining and ongoing pressure on governments over the institutional frameworks which comprise the national political settlement, and that these interest-focussed processes structurally ignore, and where feasible exclude, weaker interests, including remote Indigenous interests. For a detailed discussion, see the Policy Insights Paper titled Overcoming Indigenous Exclusion which I co-authored with Neil Westbury in 2019 (link here).

Whatever the reasons, the reality of the breakdown of the social equilibrium that was established in the 1970s across remote Indigenous communities is beyond question. I have written extensively about social and economic dysfunction in remote communities in this blog. For example, I list 16 former posts in this omnibus post from August 2025 (link here). This is why the Samaras analysis of the disenchantment of mainstream voters across regional towns struck a chord with me,  and why his account of the economic and social decline due to the withdrawal of private and public sector services reminded me of the argument I made (with Neil Westbury) in our 2007 book Beyond Humbug (link here).

We argued not that key institutions had been present and were now being withdrawn across remote communities, but rather that governments had failed to pursue policies that ensured that the institutional footprint of government was ever established in those communities. That missing institutional footprint includes not just economic frameworks that encourage and incentivize commercial activity (e.g. banks, surveyed residential land titles, and the like) but the public sector footprint that ensures there are effective properly funded and staffed schools, access to specialist health care such as dentists and optometrists, aged persons care, disability services aligned with the service delivery models being pursued at state and federal levels, properly regulated social housing systems, and so on.

From time to time, it is argued that geographic remoteness goes hand in glove with the absence of economic viability, and that this undercuts the rationale for any support for remote communities. Indeed, a decade of so ago, the West Australian Government openly canvassed options for closing some or all remote communities. Ultimately, they backed down in the face of sustained outrage and opposition from Indigenous land councils and wider interests and the Commonwealth.

My own view is that framing policy reform opportunities in terms of remoteness/viability issues quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Long term under-investment erodes the institutional viability of communities, and the residents ultimately vote with their feet (albeit in directions that governments do not anticipate). Yet, for example, governments do not decide where to locate military infrastructure across the north based on an assessment of the economic viability of the locations under consideration. They determine that the defence of the nation is in the national interest and then invest accordingly. While an under-appreciated proposition, I take the view that keeping people on country across the north is a key component of the national interest, is also in the public interest, as well as being something that the Aboriginal people of the north see as important. With land ownership goes responsibilities for land management. Without land and coastal management, important biosecurity issues will be ignored and will create risks for the nation that extend beyond the lands in question. There are strategic benefits in ensuring the north remains populated not just along the coast, but inland.  If I am correct, then policies that incentivise residents of remote communities to leave their communities and move to regional urban centres are ultimately counterproductive to advancing that national interest.

It is incontrovertible that there are economic costs to the budget of building social and economic footprint of government in remote and northern Australia. Similarly, there are costs to building infrastructure designed to contribute to the defence of the nation. While governments do have fiscal constraints, if something is in the national interest, it deserves to be funded at some level over a sustained period.

Moreover, there are strong arguments in support of strengthening the institutional footprint in remote Australia, ranging from normative/ethical ones to more practical arguments based on the benefits of not creating a permanent class of citizens that are structurally excluded from the benefits (and responsibilities) of effective citizenship. The economic and social costs of the current levels of community dysfunction across remote Australia are not listed in the annual budget papers, but they are substantial and growing. More importantly, the opportunity costs of that ongoing dysfunction on communities and families, but also on the nation are considerable.

A key implication of this analysis is that it is for governments to expand the footprint of mainstream institutional frameworks to remote regions and communities. That is not to say that the mode of implementation ought not to take into account local and cultural concerns and aspirations, but fundamentally it is not an Indigenous specific responsibility, but a task that falls to mainstream government.  Moreover, it is both intellectually (and politically) lazy and fundamentally incorrect to ‘blame the victim’ for persistent social dysfunction. Just as the planning and construction of roads and highways is governed by generalised algorithms and policy approaches, other institutional frameworks should also be provided nationally and not be artificially constrained in their application by structural and systemic biases that are built upon the structural exclusion of Indigenous interests. The risk of seeing the challenges of remote Indigenous communities solely through the lens of Indigenous specific policy frameworks is that it can contribute to leaving longstanding and enduring structural exclusion in place and ultimately may lead to the premature or unnecessary depopulation of those communities, and the concomitant influx of remote migrants into regional towns.

The bigger risk is that by not investing in the institutional frameworks necessary to include remote populations within the mainstream institutional architecture of the nation, thus ensuring that these places and populations are governed as part of the nation, we are creating the conditions where systemic exclusion metastasises beyond remote communities and ultimately in ways that both rebound on Indigenous people and corrupt the wider body politic.

The bottom line is that remote disadvantage is primarily a function of systemic exclusion, and as Kos Samaras points out (in the context of analysing the grievances underpinning the rise of One Nation) the solution is not merely one of allocating more funding (however necessary that might be) but expanding the governance and institutional footprint (both public and private) of the nation’s governance to the whole expanse of the nation.

 

15 June 2026

ERRATUM

Contrary to my statment above, the Equal Wages decision for Aboriginal pastoral workers was handed down in 1966, but the Commission agreed to a phased implementation timetable which meant it was not implemented in the NT until December 1968. There were some variations in this timetable in the other states. See this informative talk by Sally Skyring from 2009 at the National Museum focussed on the Kimberley implementation of equal wages (link here).

 16 June 2026

Regulatory oversight: the missing element in effective public policy

 

O, it is excellent to have a giant's strength,

but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.

Measure for Measure, Act two, Scene two

 

Two weeks ago, the Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee held estimates Hearings where inter alia the NIAA, the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations (ORIC) and three of the four NT land councils were called to give evidence. The ALC was not called to appear (for reasons that seem difficult to comprehend given the extraordinary delay in the tabling of its annual report (link here) and other unresolved issues that I will endeavour to address in the coming weeks).

However, the high-level issue I wish to explore here relates to the comparative effectiveness of the two primary mechanisms in our system of democratic accountability which are designed to keep the Executive arm of government up to the mark. The first is the Parliament, and in particular the system of Senate Estimates Committee hearings which convene three times a year. The second mechanism is the performance audit function of the ANAO.  The case study which has presented itself to us relates to the effectiveness of NIAA’s and ORIC’s regulatory oversight of the obligations of corporations established and incorporated under the CATSI Act.

These corporations are a major conduit for the delivery of many government programs across the Indigenous policy domain, and are also mandated entities under the NT land rights Act for the distribution of royalty equivalents (under s.64(3), and are the mandated incorporation mechanism for Prescribed Bodies Corporate, the land holding entities which must be established to hold native title on behalf of native title holders. The implicit rationale for these mandates to is to ensure that oversight and regulation is both culturally informed and able to be fine-tuned to meet emerging contingencies and policy needs.

The ORIC website (link here) provides an accessible overview of the numbers and financial significance of CATSI corporations nationally in the regularly updated State of the Sector reports.

Senate Estimates and ORIC

The following extracts are taken from the transcript of the Hearings held by the Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee on 26 May 2026 (pages 40 to 44) (link here). I have added bold text and cut out irrelevant material indicated by ellipses. Ms Tricia Stroud is the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations, a statutory officeholder within the NIAA portfolio.

Senator NAMPIJINPA PRICE: Given that there are obviously large sums involved when it comes to royalties and compensation, do you think that governance risks are significant in this space? Do you think the act captures all the risk that is involved?

Ms Stroud: I think the basis of our regulatory posture is that corporations, including PBCs, are member owned and controlled. … The two fundamental accountability requirements which we have a focus on and have gone hard on is annual general meetings and annual reporting. That is because the annual reporting is the opportunity each year for members to ask questions, hold their directors to account and understand the finances of their corporation. They can make their own member informed decision about whether they still have trust and confidence in those directors or whether they wish to remove them. That is why we have gone hard on prosecuting corporations that don't hold AGMs and do not lodge reports. Financial reports is where members and common law holders can understand the health of their corporation and how their money is being managed.

….

Senator NAMPIJINPA PRICE: I will go back to you, Tricia. If a corporation does not meet its AGM and annual reporting obligations, which you say you've gone hard on, is it still eligible to receive Commonwealth grants or be successful in tendering for Commonwealth contracts?

Ms Stroud: That would be a question for each of the individual funding agencies. Under the C(ATSI) Act, there's not a direct relationship between non-lodgement of annual reports and non-holding of AGMs with funding. Some funding bodies would have requirements or conditions in their funding contracts that a corporation has to be compliant with its regulator, be it ASIC or ORIC. We encourage funding bodies to always look at the public register when undertaking due diligence of corporations. We publish corporations that have been prosecuted for failing to hold AGMs. There have been two of them in recent years. And there are corporations that have failed to lodge their reports. There have been over 60 of them in the last couple of years. They are published on the website. Funders and donors as well as members and the general public are encouraged to look for those corporation details to see signs that things are not well with corporations that they might fund as well as corporations that we are deregistering. We've recently deregistered 25. This week, we issued notices to over 600 corporations that we intend to deregister them. Again, funding bodies are constantly reminded that the public register of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander corporations is the single source of truth in terms of regulatory action and the standards and compliance of a corporation when they are making decisions about funding them.

Senator NAMPIJINPA PRICE: What powers exist for ORIC or the Commonwealth to intervene where there are allegations of serious governance failures, misuse of funds, conflicts of interest, breaches of director duties or failure to comply with C(ATSI) Act obligations?

Ms Stroud: There are a number of powers available to us under the C(ATSI) Act and which we use regularly. They are just basic lines of inquiry when we get a report or concern from a member, a funding body or a member of the public about suspected breaches of the C(ATSI) Act or failings in a corporation. We might make lines of inquiry, noting that we rely on some level of evidence when those sorts of allegations are levelled. Second, we can issue a corporation a notice to produce in which they are required to provide us with documents that might help inform our inquiries around allegations. We can conduct examinations. The final one before there might be regulatory action taken, including special administration, is an examination of the corporation. That is an examination of the corporation's books, which is examining the governance standards and health as well as the financial standards and health of a corporation. There are other powers. There are compliance notices, which isn't always out of an examination. It might be where we have significant evidence that a corporation is not doing the right thing. We issue them with a compliance notice. There is also a power used to call a general meeting. It is a registrar initiated general meeting, where I use my own initiative and powers under the C(ATSI) Act to call a meeting of the members to pass resolutions or to resolve particular issues in a corporation. They are usually around the board and instability or minimum numbers of directors where a corporation is not being governed appropriately.

……

Senator NAMPIJINPA PRICE: Thank you. What safeguards exist to ensure royalty and compensation funds are being used consistently with community developed and economic participation objectives?

Ms Stroud: There's a line between what is a C(ATSI) Act matter and what is a matter under the Native Title Act. Not all native titleholders are members of their PBC. Not being a member of a PBC does not remove your native titleholder rights and interests and obligations on the PBC to make native title decisions largely around compensation funds and your country. A PBC has obligations to native titleholders regardless of whether they are members. Native title consultation and consent processes and native title decisions are not matters which are regulated under the C(ATSI) Act.

The fundamental message here is that ORIC is ‘going hard’ and that by and large, everything is under control. The Registrar has issued notices to over 600 corporations threatening deregistration. We should all sleep soundly at night.

The ANAO and ORIC

This week, the ANAO published Auditor-General Report No.37 2025–26 Performance Audit: Support and Regulation of Indigenous Corporations (link here).

I don’t propose to attempt a summary nor to delve into every detail and revelation in the audit report. Interested readers should peruse it at their leisure. 

One salient set of conclusions struck a chord with me, not just for what they say about ORIC and/or NIAA’s regulatory oversight of CATSI corporations, but for what the conclusions say about the regulatory performance overall of the Indigenous Australians portfolio, and the fact that successive ministers appear to have consistently failed to take their portfolio oversight and management responsibilities seriously.

Here are extracts from three paragraphs in the report dealing with the quality of regulatory oversight, and its obverse, the extraordinary levels of decline in compliance with reporting obligations under the CATSI Act by CATSI corporations since 2015.

To flesh out the text below, I recommend interested readers look at Figure 4.3 on page 74 (of the 76 page) audit report. The graph shows that since 2015/16, there has been a dramatic fall in compliance levels for all corporations from just over 75% to under 30% in 2024/25. For the subset of large corporations, the compliance levels have fallen from over 90% in 2015/16 to around an estimated 65% in 2024/25. This is an astounding decline in overall compliance with the core accountability requirements of the CATSI legislation; the substantial size and sustained trend line revealed within the data points to a systemic and sustained failure in regulatory performance by ORIC, NIAA and successive Ministers.

Below I have pasted an extract from the audit report where the ANAO discusses these shortfalls. As we have come to expect from the ANAO, it is succinct, neutral, anodyne and emotionless. More problematically (in my humble opinion) there is a brief mention, but no real sense of understanding of the real-world implications of the wider disadvantage to Indigenous individuals, families and communities that flow from poor corporate performance. Readers are expected to draw their own conclusions. In addition to the unquantified (and arguably unquantifiable) direct disadvantage to their members arising from poor governance and compliance by corporations, the absence of legislated reporting compliance presumably reflects to an extent the substantive capabilities of the corporations which are failing to comply.

I have deleted footnotes and added emphasis.

24. ORIC undertakes a range of activities that seek to deter non-compliance. Despite these activities, compliance with reporting requirements has steadily declined over ten years for small, medium and large corporations. Fewer than 30 per cent of corporations overall were compliant with requirements to lodge 2024–25 reports by 31 December 2025. Non-compliance with reporting requirements reduces transparency and information for corporation members, communities, creditors, investors and government agencies as well as for ORIC. There is a general lack of evaluation to identify the key drivers of non-compliance to inform risk-based targeted compliance activities and to understand harm caused by non-compliance. ORIC developed a project plan in January 2026 aimed at increasing small corporations’ compliance with reporting obligations. (See paragraphs 4.39 to 4.46)

….

4.41 …. Annual reporting compliance for all corporations when measured as the lodgement of all required reports by 31 December has been in decline since 2015–16 (Figure 4.3). In 2023, ORIC attributed declines in reporting compliance to the COVID-19 pandemic, with an expectation that as business returned to normal corporations would meet their reporting obligations.

4.42 ….. The ANAO estimated the ten-year trend in annual report lodgement rates by size. Figure 4.3 shows that the decline in lodgement has been greater for small and medium-sized corporations, however this occurs for all size types…

….

4.45 Failure to deregister inactive corporations, regardless of whether they hold assets, may create opportunity costs for Indigenous communities as assets are not available for repurposing or continued effective use or may be accruing debt. Failure to deregister may also create an uneven playing field for corporations that comply with CATSI Act requirements.

4.46 Resource Management Guide 128 Regulator Performance states that regulators should embed methodologies to understand the costs, impact and outcomes of regulation and collect evidence of this at a system-wide level, using insights to support and drive improved outcomes. ORIC does not have an evaluation strategy or program to understand whether the appropriate interventions are being used effectively or to understand the relative impact of its activities.

 

Concluding comments

The contrast in the two narratives is striking. The Registrar’s response to the ANAO audit report (see pages 79-82) was unusually robust, pushing back against myriad assessments embedded within the report. Interestingly, it was signed the same day as the Estimates Hearing. While there may be merit in some of the points made, I do not think that the Registrar’s argument that the ANAO assessment based on a ‘linear or formulaic approach to compliance’ is not the appropriate basis for assessing regulatory performance because ORIC ‘considers the unique circumstances of each corporation to determine the appropriate regulatory action’ … I would argue that the Registrar’s argument is flawed insofar as it implicitly ignores the wider impacts such as the signals being sent to other corporations, the expectations in other corporations that are lowered; the precedents set which lower the bar on corporate performance, and the impacts on the regulatory culture within ORIC which makes taking tough decisions harder.

It must be said that the Registrar came into the role in 2022, and clearly inherited responsibility for a regulatory system under serious challenge. While ORIC clearly faces serious problems, they are not all down to the current Registrar.

But at the end of the day, when only 30 percent of corporations are submitting statutorily required reports on time, and the trendline (see Figure 4.3 in the ANAO Report) continues to be downward, the regulator has a problem. In a world where ministerial responsibility means something, so too would the NIAA and the Minister have a problem. Yet apart from a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, ORIC emerged from the latest Estimates hearing largely unscathed. This says more about the effectiveness of the Senate Estimates process than the effectiveness of ORIC.

Of course, regulatory failure is ubiquitous in modern societies. Think of the numbers of speeding drivers who drive irresponsibly and seemingly without an incentive to comply with the road laws. Or the lack of enforcement and low penalties that apply to the sale of black-market tobacco. But over time, without effective regulation, the adverse impacts accumulate and undermine trust in government generally. Arguably, across remote Australia at least, we are approaching a point where the footprint of government is seen as either non-existent or ineffective, or both. I have previously pointed to the low levels of electoral engagement in the NT (link here), another signpost along the highway to a democratic implosion that continues apace across northern and remote Australia, and which perhaps we are now seeing nationally.   

At the end of the day, and notwithstanding its reticence and reluctance to draw conclusions in its reports, the ANAO is far and away a better mechanism for holding agencies (and indirectly ministers) to account. The structural problem with Estimates in my view is that the Government controls the agenda both formally and informally through a range of mechanisms (timetables, a government chair, the ability to distract attention, the ability to hide behind the bureaucracy, and the intellectual chaos that pervades each hearing). If I wasn’t an optimist, my diagnosis would be that Senate Estimates as a mechanism to hold governments to account is in terminal decline and should be put down.

There is an urgent need for a reform agenda focussed on strengthening the arm of the Parliament vis avis the Executive, and as part of this, for a rejuvenation and revamping of Senate Estimates. This would involve, at a minimum, tighter agendas focussed on a smaller number of high-profile issues, the preparation of position papers by a new parliamentary research office, and perhaps even the adoption of a ‘counsel assisting’ to ensure that agencies are truly tested as to their priorities, and the substance of their performance. Institutions such as the ANAO and the NACC should be brought within the ambit of parliamentary control rather than executive control, and funding for such institutions should similarly be proposed and determined by the Parliament and not the Executive.

The fact that ideas such as these have a snowflakes chance in hell of coming to fruition anytime soon tells us all we need to know about the true state of our democracy.

 

10 June 2026