Blame shifting for remote housing provision in the NT

 

 

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,

How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,

Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you

From seasons such as these?

King Lear Act three, Scene four

 

This post focusses on three broad issues related to remote housing policy in the NT.

 

The first issue relates to Closing the Gap. Under the Closing the Gap Agreement, there are two housing related targets:

9A:  By 2031, increase the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in appropriately sized (not overcrowded) housing to 88%

According to the Productivity Commission Closing the Gap dashboard (link here) nationally in 2021, 81.4% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were living in appropriately sized (not overcrowded) housing (figure CtG9.1). This is an increase from 78.9% in 2016 (the baseline year). For mainstream citizens the comparative national rate is 93.5% in 2021.

In the NT, 90.7% of non-Indigenous people resided in appropriately sized housing. For Indigenous Territorians, the figure was 43.4% in 2021, up from 38.4% in 2016. In remote areas of the NT, Indigenous people residing in appropriate housing was around 50%, and in very remote areas was only around 25% in 2021.

In other words, nationally only around 6.5% of non-Indigenous people live in overcrowded housing. In the NT 56.6% of Indigenous people live in overcrowded housing, and in very remote areas, that figure rises to 74.5%. Overcrowded housing is a contributing factor in driving and maintaining social and economic disadvantage. It impacts health, family violence, education, employment, substance abuse, crime, and lifespans. While it involves numerous complexities, a significant constraint on addressing these issues is funding.

While this data analysis relates to the NT only, the same extreme issues of structural exclusion in relation to access to appropriate housing exist in remote areas of Western Australia, Queensland, South Australia, and even NSW.

The second housing related Closing the Gap target relates to community infrastructure:

9B: By 2031, all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander households:

1. within discrete Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander communities receive essential services that meet or exceed the relevant jurisdictional standard;
2. in or near to a town receive essential services that meet or exceed the same standard as applies generally within the town….

This target refers to the infrastructure conceptually adjacent to housing: the sewerage, power, water connections, green spaces and formed streets and lot boundaries that make housing a viable and cost-effective options in locations that involve increasing temperatures, and variable climatic conditions. These are normally NT Government and /or local government responsibilities, but the costs of provision are generally much higher than in urban areas, and the available funding much lower due to the absence of a rate base (due to tenure issues I won’t go into here); a systemic bias in mainstream national local government funding towards settled Australia; and the dominance of urban over rural and remote electorates in NT politics. These issues are known to but rarely acknowledged or discussed by either the NT Government or the Commonwealth. The result is that essential services (broadly defined) across remote NT (and indeed remote Australia) are of a substantially lower standard than in urban areas of the north (or indeed of southeastern Australia).

The second housing related issue relates to the NT Remote Federation Funding Housing Agreement (NTRHA). Between them, the Commonwealth and Northern Territory governments have committed just under $4.8 billion to remote Indigenous housing and services over the past two years, across two separate agreements. As of this month, on the Commonwealth Government's own figures, almost none of its contribution has been released.

The $3.98 billion NTRHA was announced in March 2024 (link here and link here), promising 2,700 new homes across 73 remote communities and 27 town camps over ten years.

The Commonwealth has made only one payment towards the NTRHA of $61.3 million, on the day it was signed. Nothing since. Independent Senator Lidia Thorpe forced these figures into the open through Orders for the Production of Documents (link here), after asking for progress reports that, the government's own response confirms, do not exist. In a speech to Parliament (link here), Senator Thorpe alleged that around $330m in Commonwealth funding under the Agreement had not been released

In response, Commonwealth Minister Malarndirri McCarthy argued the NT Government "wants to renegotiate an agreement", arguing it is "supposed to have 2,700 homes built" over the 10-year cycle, “270 a year. The Northern Territory Government wants to reduce that down to 1800 or maybe 1100 homes, if the Northern Territory is lucky," she said (link here). The NT Minister did not respond, but according to the ABC had previously argued for additional funding to cover ancillary infrastructure required to build the housing required under the Agreement (link here).

The third housing related issue relates to the lack of progress in relation to the six year, $842 million, Northern Territory Remote Aboriginal Investment Agreement (NTRAI), announced by the Prime Minister and NT Chief Minister in February 2025 (link here and link here and link here). According to the NT Government website (link here)

The new agreement will provide up to $842.6 million in total over six years until June 2031. The Partnership Agreement establishes overarching governance arrangements to facilitate shared-decision-making as well as joint accountability and oversight for the various funding agreements that will deliver the next six-years of NTRAI investment.

The agreement is aligned to the National Agreement on Closing the Gap and has a focus on continued investment for the remote parts of the Territory and making sure that the investment priorities continue critical services like remote policing, women’s safe houses, the Aboriginal Interpreter Service, early childhood programs and important preventative health programs.

A Joint Steering Committee has been established to provide governance and oversite of the investment, ensuring the funds are spent where they are most needed, and investment that is guided by tangible outcomes. The Joint Steering Committee appears to have only met once in March 2025 (link here).

I have included this agreement in a group I have listed as Housing related, because these services in remote communities provide adjacent services to remote community residents which make their communities safe and liveable.

In May 2026, the National Indigenous Times (NIT) published a story (link here) revealing extraordinary delays in the release of Commonwealth funds under the Agreement:

The documents, requested by Senator Lidia Thorpe, show none of the money allocated under the Northern Territory Remote Aboriginal Investment (NTRAI) agreement — due to begin in December last year — has been distributed.

The delay comes as service delivery challenges continue across remote NT communities, many of which already experience disadvantage, poverty and lower socio-economic outcomes. The Territory also records the worst Closing the Gap outcomes in the country…

…As part of the Senate order, Senator Thorpe sought publication of "the sum of all payments made by the Commonwealth under each schedule to the Northern Territory Remote Aboriginal Investment Agreement (NTRAI) 2025-31" as well as a "breakdown of each payment made against each associated performance milestone". In response, Senator McCarthy stated that "no payments have been made by the Commonwealth"…

…The parties have also been unable to finalise a Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning (MEAL) framework, which both governments had previously said would help align the NTRAI with Closing the Gap reforms.

The NIT article is worth reading in full.

The systemic failures

In relation to the Closing the Gap housing targets, the Commonwealth Closing the Gap 2025 Annual Report and 2026 Implementation Plan was released in February 2026. It fails to mention the issues with the two Federation Funding Agreements identified above, and in Appendix E (link here), a document summarising the state of play on each of the many partnership agreements related to closing the gap the relevant summaries of the two housing related issues discussed above (see pages 47/48) provide no indication of any issues whatsoever. Nor is there any discussion of the more substantive problem with target 9B related to community infrastructure, which the Productivity Commission notes on the dashboard itself, is unable to be measured due to lack of a relevant data source. The dashboard indicates that the target 9B was added in 2022, but there is no update on when an appropriate data source will be identified. While the aspirations implicit in the ‘target’ are obviously commendable, the whole point of the Closing the Gap process is to provide a series of measurable metrics to assess progress against the high-level objectives. We don’t play test cricket without a set of stumps, or a World Cup football match without goal posts; why is it acceptable to engage in ‘Closing the Gap’ without a measurable target?

What is absent from the thousands of words produced each year dedicated to describing what the government is doing on Closing the Gap is any concise and clear analysis which links the size and nature of the problem to the quantum and focus of the policies and programs ostensibly designed to address the identified gaps.

In relation to the Remote Housing Agreement, the documents released to Senator Thorpe show that the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework — the document that was supposed to define what "progress" even means, and trigger reporting against it — was still being drafted through the first half of 2025, nearly a year after the agreement took effect. Its own timeline shows the working group only circulating a draft to the Joint Steering Committee in June 2025, with formal approval not scheduled until September. A program meant to deliver up to 270 houses a year had, for its first twelve months, no agreed mechanism for anyone to check whether it was doing so.

The NIAA was, according to the documents, still building the ruler while the thing it was meant to measure was already supposed to be under way. Accountability infrastructure arrived roughly a year late to a program with a strict annual delivery target.

In Senate Question Time on 12 August, Minister Malarndirri McCarthy, told Parliament the Northern Territory government was pushing to cut it the original 2700 home target to somewhere between 1,100 and 1,800. Separately, in comments to the ABC (link here) Steve Edgington, the NT Housing Minister, has pointed to escalating headworks costs — power, water, sewage connections running $300,000 to $600,000 a block — as the pressure driving that renegotiation.

What neither government is prepared to provide are regular progress reports on housing completions. The absence of regularly updated and current data merely serves to feed frustration for communities on the ground, to hide under-performance by governments, and to facilitate the emergence of a blame game between the NT and the Commonwealth. The losers are the remote community members in the NT who reside in appallingly overcrowded conditions compared to most Australians. The fact that governments, and especially the Commonwealth, claim that they are committed to transparency when their behaviour and actions demonstrate that they are not, is not only hypocritical but insidiously leaches the trust necessary to sustain democratic norms, and ‘bells the cat’ on their other commitments included in the numerous partnership agreements with First Nations interests that they comply with in name and not substance.

Finally, the tabled statement of the Aboriginal members of the NTRHA provides an exemplar of a different systemic failure related to the appearance of engagement and joint decision making through inclusion in a process rather than in shaping outcomes. T The Remote Housing Agreement gives the four NT land councils and Aboriginal Housing NT formal seats on a Joint Steering Committee alongside both governments. A joint statement from the Aboriginal members of the JSC, tabled alongside the funding figures, records "diminishing confidence" in the Territory government's willingness to change how it operates, cites a lack of data-sharing, and asks the federal minister to intervene.

Read against the M&E timeline, the complaint reads less like deliberate obstruction and more like the predictable result of being seated at a table before the table has anything on it. The committee members are, on this evidence, being asked to oversee a program that was established and set in action before there was agreement on the data that would be collected and assessed. The JSC were given their pilot’s uniforms, and took their seats in the cabin, but suddenly realised they were in a drone operated from Canberra or Darwin.

The $842 million NTRAI tells a blunter version of the same story. Zero dollars disbursed as of May 2026, more than a year after the agreement's intended start. A Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning framework still unfinished. According to the National Indigenous Times, workforce data included in the released documents show an 84 per cent vacancy rate for oral health therapist positions in public clinics. Arguably more revealing than any funding spreadsheet, this tangible example demonstrates what "services not yet delivered" means for people waiting on the ground (link here).

Each of these three issues provides evidence of deep-seated capability deficits within the Commonwealth for which ministers should be held responsible and accountable. They also provide evidence of a sustained antipathy toward substantive transparency, accompanied by proactive efforts to both claim and demonstrate the opposite. In April, the NIT published an article on the NTRAI which reported claims by the Commonwealth that transparency was ‘at the foundation’ of the program (link here). Yet five months later the NIT (link here)  reported:

When Senator Thorpe initially requested the documents, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher described the request as a "waste of the Senate's time" that was "not needed".

In the light of the documents subsequently released, the Finance Minister’s reported comments appear both tendentious and disingenuous.

The third systemic failure embedded within the publicly available (but rarely read) documentation describing their architecture is an endemic propensity on the part of governments with responsibilities to act in the public interest to privilege appearance and process over substantive outcomes.

Finally, the overarching institutional architecture responsible for addressing remote housing shortfalls is fractured across multiple jurisdictions (commonwealth and Territory; differing local government; varying land tenures) and operating in locations where the residents have fundamentally different worldviews about how society (at all levels) operates and should operate. In terms of effective program delivery, perhaps the most salient characteristic of the current architecture is that nobody — not the NT Government, not the Commonwealth, not the Productivity Commission, not the land councils, and not AHNT — has both the capacity to raise and allocate the funds required and the obligation to report against outcomes in the same place. Authority for finance, responsibility for implementation, and accountability for outcomes sit in different institutional locations, each of which has an incentive to shift blame when asked why nothing has been built. The institutional architecture is clearly ineffective and its design sub-optimal.

What then is the way forward?

There are clearly multiple options available to policymakers and First Nations interests to consider. I have decided that I should revisit a number of my previous suggestions and conclusions. Re-reading them, what strikes me is how little appetite our current policymakers have for innovative and visionary thinking.

An obvious starting point would be to commission an independent review. The last major review was undertaken in 2017, and while claimed to have been independent it was clearly compromised. I wrote a post explaining how and why (link here). In a follow up post (link here) I laid out four specific options for a pathway forward (bearing in mind that my comments were premised on a national program whereas today in 2026, the Commonwealth has narrowed its Indigenous specific engagement to the NT only). These included the importance of focussing on expanding access to private capital available for investment in remote communities, supporting the introduction of three or four new community housing providers across remote Australia; an expanded Commonwealth focus on oversighting or monitoring the provision of Property and Tenancy Management services (which extends asset lifespans); and injecting more overt financial incentives into the provision of Commonwealth resources to states and territories. Rereading that post today, the proposals therein strike me as still worth considering, albeit within the narrower institutional framework of the NT.

In a February 2018 post (link here) that somewhat eerily paralleled the structure of this post, I concluded in the following terms:

The bottom line on this issue is that despite the ongoing failure to Close the Gap due to lack of an effective strategy tying resources to objectives, and the evidence of the Commonwealth’s own statistics that the most intensive disadvantage is in remote regions, the Commonwealth continues to dance around the crucial issue of funding social housing in remote communities…

… We appear to be heading back to where we came from, with every prospect that housing conditions in remote Australia will worsen, overcrowding will worsen, and as a result so too will the associated consequences for health and economic participation. The already deep levels of disadvantage amongst our most disadvantaged citizens will only get worse...

In 2022, I wrote a critical post on the ANAO Performance Audit of the NT Remote Housing programs (link here), where issues of funding delays, and poorly designed program architecture were explicitly documented but either downplayed or not fully analysed. The Performance Audit and my post provide a clear line of sight to ongoing policy and program underperformance that aligns remarkably closely with the systemic issues identified above.

Finally in March 2023, I published a post titled The Ongoing Remote Housing Debacle (link here). That post lists four concrete proposals for moving forward in the remote housing space (both nationally and in the NT). They retain their validity, so I will summarise them here (I recommend interested readers read the post in full). First, I proposed the establishment of a new Government owned corporation that could invest in expanding the quantum of remote housing based on commercial sources of finance. This is an option that AINT (which was still being established when I wrote that) might conceivably consider. Second, I suggested that the Commonwealth explicitly link mainstream and Indigenous specific sources of housing and target them towards remote regions where the levels of need are the highest in the Nation. Third, I raised the need for a comprehensive independent review; and fourth I pointed to issues with the infrastructure targets some of which are discussed above.

Finally, in February 2025, I published a post (link here) commenting on a draft AHURI report focussed on national Indigenous housing system reform. In that post, I outlined my own vision for the sector:

... A needs-based mainstream policy framework for allocating resources for social housing. A stronger Commonwealth role in shaping the national social housing policy system. A mainstream policy focus addressing rental stress as part of a wider strategy to address economic exclusion and inequality in society generally. Prioritising addressing overcrowding and inadequate housing over rental stress. Prioritising the needs of disabled citizens in both social housing design and management. A push to considerably expand the use of community housing organisations (whether Indigenous controlled or not) which both own and manage housing stock across both remote and non-remote Australia at a scale that makes them commercially viable. A recognition that there is market failure present in the provision of private housing in remote communities and this requires the use of innovative leasing solutions and/or community trusts which sit between the private and public systems….  A renewed focus on infrastructure provision in remote contexts, including by expanding the remit of the NAIF in financing social infrastructure (link here). A much stronger focus on equitable access to renewable sourced power in remote communities (link here). A stronger role for strengthened Indigenous advocacy within high level mainstream policy forums for the housing system (noting that part of the process of strengthening capability is to strengthen internal transparency and governance).

The risk for policymakers and analysts such as myself, focussed on data, program design, process, and strategic opportunities, is that we lose sight of the fact that issues such as housing have tangible and real-world consequences on the quality and duration of people’s lives. That too is worth keeping in mind as we consider these issues.

 

17 August 2026

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Parliaments and Indigenous languages

 

…. a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more…

                                                Macbeth, Act five, Scene 5

In Permission to speak: Who controls Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language use in Australia's Parliaments?,  a recent article by Alexandra Grey in the University of New South Wales Law Journal (vol49(2):489 – 523), Grey provides a comprehensive overview of the history and use of Indigenous languages in Australian Parliaments. She usefully compares the various approaches of each Parliament to allowing and / or constraining its use, thereby raising deeper questions about the reasons for the differing approaches. Unfortunately, the article is not available without a subscription and thus exists behind a paywall.

At my request, Claude Sonnet 5 summarised Grey’s article, as follows:

Alexandra Grey's article, published in the UNSW Law Journal, examines a policy question that has received little scholarly attention: who controls the use of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages in Australia's nine parliaments, and on what legal basis? Drawing on a systematic Hansard review from 1981 to 2023 (86 instances of language use identified), Grey maps how each parliament's Standing Orders — the formal procedural rules governing debate — either restrict, tolerate, or actively encourage the use of these languages, and argues that restrictive regimes represent an ongoing form of colonial control that should be reformed.

The central finding is that no parliament has a Standing Order explicitly banning Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander languages, but several achieve the same effect through general rules against "unparliamentary" or "inappropriate" language, interpreted by the Speaker or President as requiring prior leave before a language other than English can be used. Western Australia is identified as the most controlling jurisdiction: its Speaker has repeatedly required individual MPs to seek permission each time they wish to speak in language, even within the same debate, and even after permission had ostensibly already been granted — a pattern Grey reads as reinforcing rather than equalising power relations in the chamber.

The Northern Territory presents a case study in regulatory drift. Aboriginal language use was unregulated there from 1981 into the 2000s, but by 2015 the Speaker began ruling interjections in language "disorderly" under the general unparliamentary-language rule. This prompted a formal Standing Order (23A) in 2016 requiring advance written translation before language could be used — a rule MPs and advocates argued suppressed spontaneous, reactive use of language in debate. Sustained advocacy led to that order's repeal in 2019, replaced by a Continuing Order that still requires notice but allows for funded interpreting. Grey notes the underlying general order against unparliamentary language remains on the books and could still be invoked.

Victoria and NSW take a different approach: they don't directly police language choice, but achieve a similar gatekeeping effect by bundling permission to speak a language with the separate requirement that non-member guests obtain leave simply to address the chamber at all. NSW is highlighted as a positive outlier, having developed a proactive "message stick" protocol since 2018 that formally invites First Nations language use into ceremonial parliamentary occasions.

By contrast, the Commonwealth and Queensland parliaments emerge as the most permissive: neither has ever applied its general unparliamentary-language rule to Indigenous language use, and Queensland's rule is narrower still, applying only to the language used in formal questions. Grey documents a substantial and growing record of Aboriginal language use in the Commonwealth Parliament under this permissive regime, alongside the first-ever parliamentary use of a Torres Strait Islander language, in Queensland in 2018.

The article closes with three concrete Standing Order reforms: removing NT's advance-notice requirement; clarifying across all jurisdictions that using an Indigenous language is not itself "unparliamentary"; and mandating that Hansard always transcribe language use rather than recording it elliptically as "the member spoke in language." Grey also raises, without fully endorsing, the question of a stronger legislated right to use these languages in parliament — modelled on New Zealand's 1985 reform for te reo Māori — while explicitly cautioning against reviving 2012-era proposals to constitutionally recognise English as Australia's official language, which she argues would entrench the very monolingual hierarchy the article critiques.

Grey’s article is quite long, thorough in its analysis, and replete with examples that bring the narrative to life. It is clearly the product of an extraordinary amount of research and consideration and deserves substantial credit for both identifying and thinking through the issues raised when Indigenous members of parliament seek to use their own languages to make or reinforce deeply held views and perspectives. It provides the first comprehensive account of the extent to which Indigenous languages have been used across Australian parliaments. In doing so, it provides further evidence (not that we need it) that First Nations citizens have not lost their unique cultures and ways of seeing and being in modern Australia.

There is useful discussion in the article of the inter-relationship between Indigenous languages and policy more generally. I recommend it to interested readers.

My reservations, which are subsidiary to the vicarious pleasure and gratitude that I feel in seeing Indigenous MPs speak up for their country and culture, relate to a more general concern that too much of Australia’s mainstream culture revolves around performative positioning rather than substantive action and commitment.

While I do not underestimate the challenges facing any member of parliament, let alone Indigenous members (who must simultaneously represent their entire electorate while reassuring their Indigenous supporters that they are speaking up for their concerns too), the deeper and more challenging issue facing Indigenous parliamentarians revolves around navigating the lowest common denominator approaches that are structurally built into our parliamentary democracy through the dominance of political parties that increasingly exercise ironclad controls over individual MPs’ actions and stated views. In such a world, the temptation for an MP is to demonstrate (and perform) their underlying identity to their core constituencies (whether that identity is an environmentalist, a unionist, a commercial innovator, or an Indigenous person) while avoiding the hard-hitting issues and actions that drive substantive reform.

Cynics might observe that this is essentially how all politics works; I prefer to take the view that most MPs enter parliament seeking to drive change for the better but are progressively worn down by the exigencies of political life.

My takeout then is that the use of Indigenous languages in parliamentary contexts can be an assertion of strength, resilience and independence, but can also be a performative tactic designed to provide cover for a lack of substantive action. The use of Indigenous languages in Australian parliaments deserves to be supported and encouraged; but it is not an end in itself. It is a tool to break down structural or systemic exclusion but does not replace the responsibilities that fall on all members of parliament to pursue the public interest (not merely more limited partisan or vested interests) so as to benefit their constituents and the nation generally. That is a much harder ask than using language merely as a performative tool.

The issue of language usage within parliaments also provides a narrow chink through which to observe and consider the wider questions about the ongoing performance and effectiveness of our representative democracy (which is broader than just our parliaments and extends to the nature of our institutional frameworks). These are questions that are increasingly bubbling to the surface, only to evaporate into thin air before they can be ascertained let alone analysed and acted upon. In such a world, parliaments and their members have an increasingly important responsibility to focus on and protect the public interest, if necessary, over and above the narrow partisan interests of political parties and the machine apparatchiks that control them.

 

4 August 2026

Conjuring a pathway forward: truth telling and policy reform

… for in such business

Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ ignorant

 More learned than the ears…

Coriolanus Act three, Scene two

 

As a young man working in the bush, whenever I engaged in conversation with older Aboriginal men regarding ‘The Law’ or ceremony, there would almost always be a statement to the effect that if I could go to a particular site, or was to be present at a ceremony, or could see a particular object, I would immediately understand its immense importance and significance. In other words, the significance and importance of Aboriginal Law would be made manifest. It was an unquestionable truth that stood without the need for further explanation.

I respected these statements and had no doubt that they were made sincerely and believed unquestionably by those making them. Like my mother’s adherence to her Catholic faith.  In neither case did I see a reason or purpose in seeking to dissuade the individuals from their beliefs, a belief that I didn’t entirely understand in the case of Aboriginal customary law or share in the case of my mother’s faith. It was enough to know that these beliefs were important for the individuals that held them.

In his recent commentary titled The rejection of history in The Saturday Paper, Stan Grant writes (link here) perceptively on the issue of truth telling and the limitations that undermine its significance and perhaps utility as an element in the widely accepted and articulated Indigenous aspirational program or political agenda. The Uluru Statement from the Heart (link here) and the Yoorrook Justice Commission (link here) are just two of the most high-profile examples of this aspirational program.

I previously published two posts about Yoorrook (link here and link here) that deal with the issues of how to progress Indigenous aspirations within a potentially hostile mainstream community. I recommend interested readers re-read them. Neither post argued for greater reliance on truth telling.  Not because I don’t accept the existence of truth (though I do think that finding the truth is invariably more difficult and complex than most of us understand). My reasons had more to do with an assessment that the wider community do not find these processes manifestly persuasive. What might be manifestly true for Indigenous Australians is often for non-Indigenous Australians not only misunderstood, or beyond comprehension, but often — unthinkingly and disrespectfully — summarily rejected.

These ruminations were brought to the surface when I read Stan Grant’s essay.

The extracts from Stan Grant’s commentary below give a sense of his argument, though I don’t claim to have encompassed its full sophistication. He stated, inter alia:

Truth-telling has become a mantra. I wonder if we understand what we mean by truth. For Indigenous people, history has become a source of justice and healing. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people say that when we learn the truth, we will walk together….

What happens, though, when your history is here? Indigenous people breathe history every day. It is in our land. It haunts us…. Indigenous people are spooked by a history without end and a future out of reach….

History in the wrong hands, becomes ressentiment….

Historical resentment poisons the well of human goodness. It is the source of so many of our conflicts today. It powers the resurgence of political populism. It energises the worst of the political left and right.

We need to sever identity and politics from the past. Truth-telling has been a necessary corrective to the Great Australian Silence, yet it has its limit. For too long Indigenous people were written out of our national narrative. Not today. The books have been written, the films made, to some degree the curriculums changed. We may plead indifference but we surely cannot plead ignorance.

I recommend reading Stan Grant’s short yet intellectually elaborate commentary in full. I was struck particularly by his use of the concept of ressentiment (link here). It strikes me that it serves as one (but not necessarily the only) explanator both of the vitriol that exudes from so much populist political ideology, but importantly, as an under-rated factor in explaining why First Nations and their leadership should reconsider their current approach to pursuing their high-level policy aspirations (while noting of course that the First Nations’ leadership is a heterogeneous and ill-defined notion and their policy prescriptions are diverse and variable in their framing and their targeting).  Invariably, these policy aspirations involve the pursuit of institutional reforms whose implementation relies on persuading the executive arm of government to both change their current policy trajectories, and therefore to intentionally disadvantage some interests who benefit from the status quo.

A widely under-rated element of modern Australian political life is the extent to which governments are beholden to or captured by powerful interests (link here). In these circumstances, advocacy strategies which merely rely on pointing out ‘the truth’ (however we define that), or which implicitly assume policy reform will emerge from some mysterious sense of beneficence on the part of governments will inevitably fail. The more significant the reform, the more likely that governments will find ways to evade investing the political, policy and financial resources necessary to develop a solution. As prima facie evidence, I might mention the long-standing and ongoing national crises in Indigenous incarceration, child removal policies, and domestic violence, the endemic failure of school education in remote Australia, the housing crisis across remote Australia, and the inability of governments to deal with the consequences of intergenerational trauma, especially drug and alcohol abuse (to name those issues that came to mind without any deep thought).   

My suggestion that First Nations and their leaders should reconsider their current strategies is not intended to exonerate governments and the wider Australian electorate but reflects what I would term a realist approach to public policy. We can assess the ethical and moral calibre of governments, politicians and indeed the current state of a particular policy domain, but policy reform will not emerge from beneficence, but from political elites and governments responding to substantive electoral pressure. For First Nations interests, this points to the necessity of building the civic institutions necessary for Indigenous unity and resilience; and developing high level political strategies and alliances that will deliver institutional reforms. In turn, this means in most circumstances resisting the temptation to focus on symbolism over substance. Truth telling into a void, where no-one is listening, helps no-one.

In seeking to understand the role of truth in public life, it is worth contemplating Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Conjuror (link here and link here). It portrays a trickster holding the attention of a group of observers as he engages a person watching intently in a sleight of hand trick related to a shining ball held between the trickster’s thumb and forefinger. Meanwhile, an accomplice, eyes skyward, is surreptitiously lifting the dupe’s purse. Just as there are multiple interpretations of its meaning (link here), there are always multiple interpretations of policy, its intentions, its meaning, and its effects.

The Conjuror provides insights (if not lessons) for governments, for First Nations interests and advocates, and for we mere observers of the policy process. On which side of the table are they, (or we), standing? Are they (or we) setting the agenda or being manipulated?  Are what we see, or know, manifestly true? To my mind, one lesson to draw from The Conjuror is that the reality is that too often we, as well as governments, the electorate at large, and First Nations interests, focus on the ephemeral while the issues that matter occur out of our line of sight and are much more consequential. It seems to me that this is a truth worth contemplating and telling.

 

28 July 2026

 

Obfuscation and Erasure in relation to Groote Eylandt: policy or happenstance?

 

                                             And be these juggling fiends no more believed,

That palter with us in a double sense,

That keep the word of promise to our ear,

And break it to our hope.

Macbeth Act five, Scene eight.

 

 

At the close of my previous post (link here) I mentioned Mr T. Wurramarrba — formerly a longstanding Chair of the Anindilyakwa Land Council (ALC) and, simultaneously, a director of Winchelsea Mining — who resigned as ALC Chair in May 2024 and died on 30 June 2024. The ALC issued a statement mourning his passing which is available on its website (link here).

 

The primary focus of this post are the documents released by NIAA in relation to my requests for documents related to the approval of the various agreements negotiated by the ALC to facilitate the development of the proposed Winchelsea mine. They are available on the NIAA FOI Disclosure log (link here) and are listed as FOI/2526 013 and FOI/2526/031.

 

To provide context for the argument and case study below, it is worth considering the change in tone between the two most recent ALC Annual reports on the issue of the ALC’s engagement with the Winchelsea mine proposal and ALC accountability issues generally.

 

The ALC 2023-24 Annual Report (link here) was finalised in late September and provided to the Minister on 14 October 2024 including a letter of transmittal signed by the new Chair and then CEO Mark Hewitt. In a section titled ‘Message from the CEO’ Mr Hewitt wrote inter alia (see pages 5-10):

 

The reporting period saw significant progress for the ALC across the strategic plan, amidst challenging times with the passing of the ALC’s long standing former Chair, the late Mr T Wurramarrba AO in June 2024….

 

Groote Holdings Aboriginal Corporation has completed the workers accommodation and kitchen at Pole 7A, adjacent to the Alyangula township. The kitchen facilities will provide meals to support the larger developments at Little Paradise. [Little Paradise was intended as the base for operations of the adjacent Winchelsea mine].

 

Significant progress has been achieved in the past year in the development of the Winchelsea Island (Akwamburrkba) resource. A key industry standard report indicating the size of the resource was achieved (Measured JORC report) as well as the completion of a Definitive Bankable Feasibility Study. The environmental approvals process for the Winchelsea resource development is now at an advanced stage.

 

In a section providing a short profile of the CEO (page 19), the Annual Report states inter alia:

 

Mark Hewitt started in the role as CEO of the ALC in September 2011. One of his first tasks as CEO was to work with TOs to develop a strategic plan. …. Mark is an advocate for creating structural change to the way services and businesses operate on the Groote Archipelago to increase TOs ownership, decision-making and participation.

 

During the reporting period Mark held positions as the Co-CEO of Winchelsea Mining and as the Executive Director of Groote Holdings Aboriginal Corporation…

 

Mark has previously held roles with the Australian Government Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (2005-2011) including as Acting Branch Manager Indigenous Programs Branch (Native Title Representative Bodies and the Aboriginals Benefit Account)…

 

A summary of determinations (see pages 80-81) under section 35(3) relating to section 64(3) allocations reveals that GHAC received $15.4m and the majority owner of the Winchelsea mine, Anindilyakwa Advancement Aboriginal Corporation (AAAC) was allocated $2m from a total annual allocation of $38.28m. In other words, in 2023-24, the ALC allocated 46 percent of its available s.64(3) funds to Winchelsea mine-related projects.

 

Note 9 to the financial statements (see page 130) list Mr T. Wurramarrba’s various Directorships including as a Director of Anindilyakwa Royalties Aboriginal Corporation (ARAC), Anindilyakwa Mining Trust (AMT), … Winchelsea Mining Pty Ltd, and Groote Holdings Aboriginal Corporation (GHAC). The report notes that ARAC, AMT, and GHAC receive Section 64(3) royalty distributions under Section 35 determinations by the Anindilyakwa Land Council as outlined in Note 10. The Note also states that the spouse of the late Chair of the ALC is an elected member of the ALC and receives sitting fees. In relation to Mr Hewitt, the Note confirms that he is also a Director of Groote Holdings Aboriginal Corporation (GHAC) and Winchelsea Mining Pty Ltd, and that his spouse was employed by the Royalties Development Unit of the ALC on a part time basis.

 

I have included these extracts from the 2023-24 report to provide a sense of the extent to which the ALC (and not just its CEO) was embedded either directly or indirectly, in the development of the Winchelsea mine proposal. Moreover, this was in plain sight.

 

In the 2024-25 Annual Report (link here), reporting on the proposed Winchelsea mine is much more muted.

 

There is a detailed chapter (pages 37ff) on governance practices including sections on risk management, on the PGPA fraud and corruption rule, related entity transactions and conflicts of interest policy, all framed as upgraded responses to the 2023 ANAO Audit and the subsequent BellChambers review. But the elephant in the room, the Winchelsea mine proposal, is largely absent.  

 

The only substantive references to the Winchelsea mine are at pages 71 and 72 within a section on Mine Monitoring and Mine Closure where, embedded within a larger discussion of the GEMCO mine, the report discusses the Winchelsea Island Lease Mining Agreement, and Winchelsea Island Lease Exploration Agreement:

 

In each agreement there are numerous contractual obligations that the mining companies need to meet. These compliance requirements can be split into three groups: • payment requirements – which covers the payment obligations • operational requirements – which deals with how the companies operate, and • administrative requirements - which covers the documentation/ reporting requirements. …

 

Winchelsea Mining is yet to commence production and during the period was, in ALC’s opinion, dormant. There were no activities on Winchelsea during the reporting period.

 

It is worth remembering that these two agreements are the core of the FOI requests considered in my two most recent previous posts (link here and link here), and in the two posts published in March this year (link here and link here).

 

What is apparent in the contrast between these two annual reports is that there has been both a significant change in tone, but also in strategic direction since Mr Hewitt was terminated without explanation by the ALC. This was a decision literally made in the shadow of a National Anti-Corruption Commission visit to Groote to investigate as yet unspecified allegations. More generally, there has been no explanation for that change in direction, no admission that mistakes may have been made or alternatively that the change arises from some other factor.

 

Given this, it is worth asking a broader question: are these silences (about the reasons for the termination of the CEO, about the change in the ALC’s strategic direction regarding the proposed Winchelsea mine) merely isolated events, or part of a wider pattern? And if it is a pattern, how far does it extend and what is its purpose?

 

A pattern, not an incident

 

Consider what has happened, entirely separately from any FOI process, since Mark Hewitt's termination as ALC CEO in October 2024. Virtually every reference to Hewitt, multiple videos about the proposed mine and other ongoing matters on Groote Eylandt were quietly removed from the ALC's website. No public announcement of the CEO’s termination was made — not by the Board, not by the Minister. As I have previously pointed out, the Board's own minutes record no reasons for the decision. And on the substantive question of where the Winchelsea mine project stands today, there has been near total silence: no public statement of continued ALC support, no public statement of withdrawal of support, simply an absence — this notwithstanding that, as recently as a few years ago, the mine was being promoted by the ALC in its formal strategic documents as the mechanism for ensuring economic independence for Groote subsequent to the closure of the GEMCO mine. An ASIC extract dated 22 July 2026 shows no filings beyond routine officeholder changes since November 2024, consistent with the Annual Report's own description of the project as dormant.

 

My own reading of this silence, and the passive comment cited above assessing the Winchelsea project as being ‘dormant’ is that the Council is distancing itself from the proposed mine and thus its proponents while leaving the door open for AAAC and its partners to pursue their future involvement and assess the proposed mine’s commercial viability independently of the ALC. In this context, it is worth noting that there are multiple overlaps in Directorships between the ALC, AAAC and GHAC.

 

An ASIC search confirms that the current AAAC nominated Directors are Bradley Bara and Lionel Jaragba, both appointed in November 2024. The AUS China International Mining Pty Ltd Directors remain unchanged since 2018. Interestingly, the formerly high quality and informative Winchelsea mining website (wmining.com.au) is no longer operational.

 

In relation to the documents released by NIAA in relation to the Winchelsea mine approvals processes (FOI/2526/013 and FOI/2526/031) there have been multiple seemingly arbitrary redactions and obstructions that on their face serve little purpose.

 

First, AAAC's changing ownership stake in Winchelsea Mining — reported elsewhere as rising from 60 to 70 percent — has been redacted in multiple places even though the figures are publicly available from multiple sources. They have been provided in evidence to Senate Estimates and are published by ORIC. The ASIC Current Company Extract, a public document, confirms that AAAC owns 70 percent of the shares in Winchelsea Mining.

 

Second, from a 2018 ALC submission to the Minister recording a previously agreed determinative secret ballot of senior Traditional Owners on the proposed Exploration Agreement, the tallies have been redacted: we know the ballot favoured approving exploration, but not by how many votes, against how many, or how many voted at all. It is hard to identify a privacy interest in a numerical tally that attaches to no individual name. The same dynamic has played out previously in at least three other instances:

 

·         at ORIC over its decision to redact the entirety of the Cor Cordis GHAC examination report (link here); and

·         in earlier FOI decisions to impose fees which have the effect of deterring further use of the FOI legislation in relation to matters which were subsequently provided to the Senate by the ALC (link here); and

·         with the case study below regarding the multiple redactions of the names of deceased persons ostensibly for privacy reasons, and likely a decision without precedent in the administration of FOI, and arguably without legal justification.

 

Taken together, these amount to an emerging pattern of employing barriers and redactions which have the effect of undermining the capacity of those seeking to follow events to understand what has occurred, and in the case of the Winchelsea mine proposal, of obstructing the line of sight from:

 

·         on the ground consultations with TOs; to

·         negotiations between Winchelsea Mining and the ALC over the exploration agreement; to

·         the ALC’s largely invisible role in (a) directly and indirectly funding and (b) monitoring the activities of the mining company as it pursued both detailed environmental approvals and sought to identify the extent and potential value of the manganese resource able to be extracted, and on to

·         submissions to the NT Government seeking relevant environmental and other approvals; and then to

·         submissions to Ministers from the ALC and Winchelsea seeking necessary legislative approvals under ALRA.

 

 The case of a name

 

Return to Mr Wurramarrba. He died in June 2024. The ALC's own death notice at the time referred to him, in keeping with ordinary practice, as "Mr T Wurramarrba" — replacing his first name with an initial, not a blank. As the longstanding Chair of the ALC, his name also continues to appear, entirely unredacted, in ALC governance documents published on the Department of Finance's Transparency Portal. Both facts sit awkwardly beside what has happened inside the NIAA's own FOI releases, where due to the redaction of the names of deceased individuals his name (and likely only his name) has been repeatedly redacted. I calculate that his name may have been redacted on around 60 occasions in a cache of documents comprised of around 140 pages. Moreover, these redactions survived an internal review process to which I specifically pointed out the flaws in the assumptions related to cultural sensitivity that appeared to underpin it and proposed alternative ways of referring to Mr Wurramarrba such as using initials without using his first English name. In addition to these instances, there were numerous other s47F redactions that appeared to relate to other persons, to the identification of clans being consulted, and to other ALC staff.

 

The justification offered by the NIAA decision makers rested on the application of the privacy exemption in the FOI legislation (s.47F), which is conditional and requires a balancing to determine that such a redaction is in the public interest. In turn, the context of applying this to a remote Aboriginal community with strong cultural attachments to country and culture, combined with the consultations with the ALC, created an implicit and putative rationale for redacting the names of deceased individuals in the cache of released documents. In fact, there was (to the best of my knowledge) only one deceased person whose name was redacted: Mr Wurramarrba. The decision makers did not explicitly base their decisions on a cultural rationale, but left it implicit, reinforced presumably by the views of the ALC (sought on both occasions).

 

In my arguments supporting my request for an internal review I directly addressed the issue of cultural sensitivity — specifically, that Anindilyakwa custom counsels against naming the recently deceased. I don’t question the existence nor the legitimacy of Anindilyakwa customs. But as I put it to NIAA in my own submissions: Aboriginal societies generally do not erase all reference to a deceased person: they cease using the name and substitute an indirect reference — a kinship term, or a coded reference such as "the former Chair," or initials — usually for a finite period. Indeed, I subsequently learned that the ALC explicitly did this in its notice mentioned at the beginning of this post announcing Mr Wurramarrba’s death in June 2024.

 

Moreover, Mr Wurramarrba was the Chair of a Commonwealth statutory entity, responsible for spending and allocating millions of dollars, and with important statutory responsibilities for protecting the interests of traditional owners. It is clearly in the public interest that statutory officeholders are able to be held accountable for their actions. I cannot imagine any Australian parliamentarian arguing that as a general principle this is not important and not in the public interest. The application of a blanket privacy redaction, more than two years subsequent to Mr Wurramarrba’s death, when the ALC's own practice and the Commonwealth Transparency Portal's own published record do neither, is not obviously an act of cultural respect, and nor is it obviously in the public interest.  

 

A review that reviewed itself

 

There is a second, more structural form of obfuscation at work here: not what has been redacted from documents, but how the review of those redactions has itself been conducted.

 

The FOI Act's internal review mechanism exists to provide a genuinely independent, merits-based second look at a refusal — undertaken by an officer who was not the original decision-maker (s.54C(2)), consistent with the OAIC's own guidance that such reviews be conducted independently of the original decision (FOI Guidelines, paragraphs 9.34 and 9.37). In this case, NIAA advised me that the internal review would involve a meeting between the original decision-maker, the internal reviewer, and the agency's legal team — and that the internal review decision would be the subject of a briefing to senior NIAA executives before it was finalised.

 

Raised directly with NIAA at the time, and in the absence of a response to my concern, the concern remains and is straightforward: a review conducted in the same room as the original decision-maker, and briefed to senior executives before it is finalised, creates at least the appearance — whatever the actual outcome — that the reviewing officer's independence could be compromised.

 

The public interest the Commonwealth set aside

 

The personal-privacy exemption used to justify most of these redactions is meant to protect against the ‘unreasonable’ disclosure of personal information — and ‘unreasonable’, under the OAIC's own Guidelines (paragraphs 6.133–6.134, drawing on the Chandra formulation), requires weighing the public interest in disclosure against the private interest in an individual's privacy. It is not an automatic blanket protection.

 

Weighed against what, exactly? A mining agreement related to a proposal to develop an ore deposit likely worth in excess of $1bn, whose negotiated royalty arrangements are not public, but which has benefited from the commitment of some $80 million in community royalty-equivalent funds in mine related infrastructure (normally funded by the mine owners) and with an associated opportunity cost to alternative and arguably high priority community priorities. Consultations undertaken and oversighted, and an agreement negotiated, on the ALC's side, by individuals — Wurramarrba and Hewitt among them — who simultaneously sat as directors of the company on the other side of the table. A subsequent referral of unspecified matters concerning Mr Hewitt (likely related to media reports of his attempt to be granted a significant equity stake in the proposed project) to the National Anti-Corruption Commission. A petition to Parliament signed by more than 200 Groote Eylandt residents concerned about the ALC's management during exactly this period. And a community of roughly 1,200 residents facing enormous socio-economic challenges.

 

Against that, the NIAA decision-makers’ own reasons record factors such as a concern that disclosure might discourage the flow of information to government, and a general assertion of unfairness to third parties — neither, on close reading, well supported by evidence or particular to this case. A public interest test conducted in the abstract, without weighing the scale of public money involved, the fundamental conflict of interest at the heart of the agreement, the referral to the NACC, or the rights of more than a thousand Groote residents to understand just what has transpired in relation to the proposed project, is patently unbalanced and incomplete in its method. You cannot properly balance interests you have not identified

 

 Conclusion

 

None of this, taken redaction by redaction, looks dramatic. A name here, a percentage there, a set of vote tallies, a review conducted alongside the people whose decision it was meant to test. But taken together, the effect is cumulative: it becomes genuinely difficult — for an interested member of the public, and even for someone who has tracked the issues surrounding the Winchelsea project closely — to reconstruct a clear account of what happened, when, and why in relation to this narrow sliver of the ALC engagement in developing a mine on Winchelsea Island, and ultimately, more generally. That difficulty is not an accident of bureaucratic process. It is, functionally, a form of policy — achieved not through any single decision but through the accumulation of many small ones, each individually arguable even if not entirely defensible, none of which invites scrutiny on its own.

 

What this decision does bring about however, both in its own right due to the number of redactions encompassed in the decision, and in combination with other redactions whether justified or not, is the creation of apparent transparency and compliance with due process which nevertheless obscures and makes impenetrable to all but the most determined readers, the decision-making processes that were actually undertaken by ministers and public servants. Notwithstanding the volume of unclearly organised documents released, replete with technical legal and policy advice, an assiduous reader can discern emerging from the obfuscatory textual mists a set of different, and more awkward facts, which lead to the following uncomfortable conclusions.

 

First, it was not only the former CEO who sat on both sides of the negotiating table, but also the longstanding and highly influential ALC Chair. Second, the ALC itself was aware of this prima facie conflict and nonetheless gave its formal consent to the two agreements needed for the mine to proceed — consent obtained through a mix of strategies that created the appearance, rather than the substance, of conflicts being managed. Third, and most significant: two successive ministers were explicitly advised that Hewitt and Wurramarrba sat on both sides of the negotiation, and both decided in writing that this conflict — one fundamentally at odds with the land council's statutory functions — could be set aside on the strength of a light-touch process that left the conflicted individuals and the land council to manage themselves. Each minister then gave formal approval to the agreements, the final step in the checks and balances the ALRA mining regime exists to provide, precisely so that Aboriginal interests are not manipulated or coerced into unfair arrangements on their own land.

 

These submissions, their assessment by the DPMC and NIAA, and the terms of the decisions have lain quiescent in the files, describing events that were neither hidden nor revealed. It was only when I asked to see them that the reality of the consideration given these matters came to the surface.

 

As I pointed out in my previous posts on these matters, NIAA’s advice to the relevant Ministers in relation to their approvals for the Winchelsea project was in my view inexplicably and seriously deficient, but it is the Minister who makes the decision and who must take responsibility.

 

A further inexplicable element in this story is that NIAA and ORIC do not appear to have raised this fundamental conflict of interest issue with subsequent ministers (though I cannot rule this out absolutely), and nor did they take adequate action to increase the level and intensity of the regulatory oversight of the ALC’s engagement with the owners of the mine and other related corporations such as GHAC so as to prevent adverse outcomes. The revelations in the 2023 ANAO Performance Audit report (link here) makes this quite clear. While there is no way of knowing whether the subsequent ministers understood what had transpired and that there was a fundamental structural conflict of interest in place, my own policy experience suggests that their ignorance of the reality (if that was the case) is almost as problematic as being aware and doing nothing; it would reflect a substantive lapse in the quality of the advice available to them from both the agency and their private Offices.

 

It is worth noting that the two most recent ALC Annual Reports discussed above, which are normally approved by the Minister prior to tabling in Parliament, include within their financial statements explicit Notes on Related Party Disclosures by Board members and staff identifying these potential conflicts. See the extracts for the 2024 Annual report quoted above and Note 10 to the Financial Statements in the 2025 Annual report (link here).

 

What is clear is not only that the ALC Board and its members dropped the ball, but so did NIAA and its predecessor DPMC, and arguably ORIC, and most importantly, so did successive ministers.

 

The elephant in the room for ministers is not the history of the approvals for the Winchelsea mine, but the impending publication of the NACC investigation into matters related to Groote and the ALC. It is not clear whether the NACC briefs the Government on its progress with individual investigations. Given what I have documented over the course of more than 20 Groote related posts based solely on publicly available information, the public record alone raises multiple questions an anti-corruption body would have reason to pursue. My interpretation is that the Winchelsea mine will be at the centre of the NACC investigation, but it may also extend beyond to other issues.

 

In the event that the NACC finds administrative deficiencies, fraud or corruption, there will inevitably be a desire within the government and perhaps even the opposition to cauterise the political wound and minimise the reach of responsibility and blame. If I can think ahead to such an eventuality, then it is not beyond the wit of politicians to do so also.

 

What a close reading of the documents released relating the approvals of the Winchelsea agreements tell us is that in the event that serious maladministration and misfeasance is uncovered, the responsibility should be shared. Individual perpetrators are clearly responsible. So too are those who may have formally agreed to the actions that contribute to any such misfeasance. And so too would be the ministers who turned a blind eye to any such misfeasance or negligently overlooked its possibility. In my view, even if the NACC focusses its findings on a small number of individuals, under the rarely mentioned these days doctrine of ministerial responsibility, successive ministers are at risk of being criticised and held to account either by the Parliament, the media or perhaps even the electorate.  

 

Searching for a single word that best describes the FOI processes applicants face in matters like these, I eventually landed on one of two terms: equivocation, or prevarication. Take your pick. Whether intentional or not, the pattern points to a public sector ill-disposed to scrutiny of its own decisions.

 

But the redactions are, in the end, a symptom rather than the disease. They merely leave an impression that there is something untoward worth dissembling and obscuring. The documents that survive the redactions still show two ministers approving agreements they knew were negotiated by structurally conflicted parties, and two regulators — NIAA and ORIC — who neither escalated the existence of this structural reality to those ministers' successors nor lifted their oversight of the ALC and its associated corporations in response.

 

If the NACC's findings, when they finally emerge, focus narrowly on individual conduct, that account will be incomplete. The doctrine of ministerial responsibility exists precisely for cases like this — where a structural conflict was disclosed, understood, and left in place by the public officials whose job was to manage it. In such an eventuality, whether Parliament, the media, or the electorate chooses to take action is a separate question. But the record, once assembled, and placed into the sunlight of publication, no longer permits the claim that no one knew.

 

 24 July 2026

 

This post was prepared with research assistance from Claude Sonnet 5