The Victorian Treaty: prospects and strategies

 

This above all: to thine own self be true,

 And it must follow, as the night the day,

 Thou can’st not then be false to any man.

Hamlet, Act one, Scene three.

 

The Victorian Treaty process has had a long gestation and is slowly coming into being. For background on the years’ long process, see the document titled Journey to Gellung Warl (link here) published by the First Peoples' Assembly of Victoria in 2025. Here is the summary of the Report:

Since 2019, the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria has been yarning with Community across the state. This report outlines how these ideas were brought to the negotiating table and ensured progress for communities by having self-determination at the heart of Australia’s first ever Treaty. The report presents the building of the First Peoples' Assembly of Victoria, the treatymaking ecosystem, working with community to identify priorities for the first statewide treaty, negotiating treaty and getting treaty done. It concludes with an outline of what is in the statewide Treaty.

Following the unsuccessful national referendum proposing the establishment of a Voice to Parliament, it is unsurprising that the issue of a Victorian Treaty and the recent election to establish the First Peoples’ Assembly and its two subsidiary bodies is both contentious in some quarters and the subject of political debate and conflict. This political debate and tensions are likely to become more prominent in the lead up to the November Victorian election.

Wikipedia (link here) suggests that the two-party preferred vote between the Labor and Liberal parties is currently vacillating around 50%, making predictions of the ultimate winner of the November election difficult. For a deeper dive, Roy Morgan polling at the end of April (link here) provides a four-way split but also suggests that on current polling results a hung parliament is likely. Ominously for Labor, the Liberal Opposition Leader Jess Wilson has a higher approval rating than Premier Allan by a sizeable margin. Not being a psephologist, I don’t propose to chance my arm on predicting the ultimate result but mention these figures to make the point that a change of Government is possible, and that underlying shifts in sentiment across the wider electorate may mean there could be significant shifts in policy going forward whichever party emerges as the government after the November election.

This recent ABC news article (link here) provides a good assessment of the state of play and the current positioning of both the Victorian Labor Government and the Opposition in relation to the future of the Treaty.

My blog post from July 2025 on the Yoorrook Commission (link here) explores some of the strategic issues confronting both the Victorian and Commonwealth Governments as well as First Nations interests in Victoria. I recommend readers refer to it for an analysis of the deeper context in relation to the road ahead in Victoria.

With six months to the state election, the performance of the First Peoples’ Assembly and its two subsidiary bodies, Nyerna Yoorrook Telkuna and Nginma Ngainga Wara will be both closely scrutinised and may well shape future policy choices of the incoming government.

Nyerna Yoorrook Telkuna is designed to facilitate ongoing truth telling and healing regarding the history of Victoria’s First Peoples. Nginma Ngainga Wara is an accountability and oversight body which will be able to hold hearings and conduct inquiries in relation to the performance of government programs’ It will also have a role in monitoring Victoria's performance in relation to Closing the Gap.

What then are the prospects for the Victorian Treaty arrangements going forward?

My assessment is that whichever Government emerges in Victoria post the November election, the challenges and risks for First Nations interests are considerable.

If Labor wins, the risk is that the First Peoples Assembly and its subsidiary bodies get bogged down in process and micromanagement. The Closing the Gap process is fundamentally problematic from a range of perspectives (link here and link here). The reality that mainstream programs are key determinants of Indigenous well-being and interact with Indigenous specific institutions and policies in complex ways suggests that access to professional expertise and a focus on a wide range of mainstream programs will be crucial in ensuring that interactions with government and its bureaucracy are effective in driving positive outcomes for First Nations interests.

If a Liberal Government emerges, the risk is that the institutional framework negotiated meticulously over an extended period will be either dismantled or progressively degraded so as to take First Nations interests back to their starting point seven years ago.

What then is the appropriate strategy for First Nations interests?

In my view, the flaw in the strategy adopted to date by both the Victorian Labor Government and First Nations interests has been to emulate the strategies adopted by most mainstream interest groups which see governments as the source of virtually all power and authority. Consequently, the aim has (ostensibly on the part of the government) been to build a strategy around creating institutional mechanisms which facilitate the transfer or delegation of power, influence and control from government to First Peoples.

While there is always a place for a focus on persuading government to meet their commitments and act consistently with their rhetoric, for First Peoples, a more hardheaded approach is more likely to be effective in the long term. The approach I would suggest involves at a minimum (a) building internal capability and cohesion; (b) accessing non-government sources of financial and other assistance including internal resources; (c) building alliances with like-minded mainstream community interests; and (d) getting on with building a mosaic of overlapping and inter-woven Indigenous institutions focussed on providing community benefits and operating outside the direct reach of government influence.

In other words, building institutions and organisations that are based on community control, or self-determination, independently of governments, and the insidious influence they can exert through control of funding and policy. The stronger and more self-sufficient community controlled and self-determining organizations can become, the more effective they will be in advocating for and protecting First Peoples interests, and as a side-effect, the more capacity they will have to bend governments to their will rather than the reverse as is the case at present.

Autonomy and real self-determination are not to be found in the benevolence and generosity of governments however well-intentioned they appear to be. Real influence and freedom of action require internal cohesion and the capability to engage over a sustained period with all and sundry (including governments) from a position of strength.

To be clear, I am not arguing that First Peoples in Victoria should walk away from the significant political and institutional gains they have made to date, but there is a very high risk that they will need a fallback strategy within a very few years, and perhaps sooner. In todays world, only a naïve optimist can adopt the Panglossian assumption that governments will invariably pursue the public interest and deliver on their rhetoric and commitments.

The strategy I am suggesting would, in a best-case scenario, strengthen the influence of Indigenous interests within the current treaty framework, and in the worst case, where the current framework is dismantled, provide a means to maximise their medium- and long-term interests even so.

My argument can perhaps be summarised as follows.

In discussions regarding self-determination, one often hears the slogan ‘Nothing about us without us’. The slogan’s internal echo is rhetorically and intuitively effective. However, in most cases its use implicitly assumes that governments are in the driver’s seat and are shaping and determining outcomes. Such an assumption is a concession that undermines real autonomy.

In my humble opinion, a better formulation of an appropriate slogan — to repurpose a classical Chinese saying on leadership (after Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 17) — would be:

Of a great achievement, people say, we did this ourselves.

The corollary of course is that if you wish to be certain of achieving self-determination, there is no point in relying on governments.

 

14 May 2026

 

 

Institutional mayhem: insights gleaned from the ALC Annual Report 2024-25

Away, and mock the time with fairest show;

False face must hide what the false heart doth know.

Macbeth, Act one, Scene seven

 

On 29 August 2024 Minister for Indigenous Australians Malarndirri McCathy issued an unprecedented media statement which among other things extolled the virtues and rationale of good governance (link here). She proclaimed:

Good governance is the cornerstone of trust and needs to be based on transparency, fairness, and accountability. Without the trust of the Anindilyakwa people and other key stakeholders, the ALC cannot properly represent its people and achieve its mission.

“I take governance at Land Councils seriously - poor governance and decision making can have a significant and detrimental impact on social, cultural and economic wellbeing.

This post provides a summary of the ALC’s most recent Annual Report (link here). I previously posted on the topic of delays in reporting to the Parliament and the public (link here) where I mentioned that the normal deadline for tabling annual reports of Commonwealth entities was before the supplementary Budget Estimates Hearings which are normally held after October each year.

In this post, I cover a wider set of issues than I would normally, essentially because they are all raised one way or another by the most recent ALC annual report. Significant issues covered include the basis for land councils assisting local corporations, education outcomes on Groote Eylandt and remote Australia generally, criminal justice outcomes, the status of the Winchelsea mine proposal, and the Ministers decisions on land council funding across the NT. I apologise for any induced indigestion!  

The Delay in Tabling

The ALC Chair’s cover letter to the Minister is dated 18 February 2026. The financial statements were signed by the members constituting the accountable authority on 13 February 2026. The ANAO signed off the audited financial statements on 17 February without qualification. No explanation was provided by the ALC nor the ANO for the delays in finalising the audit.

The Minister tabled the annual report on 16 April 2026. The Report was initially due to be tabled around the end of October 2025, a deadline that had been extended to end of February by the Minister. There does not appear to have been any explanation provided for the delays of five and a half months beyond the due date specified in the PGPA Act rules, and which includes a period of almost two months after it had been provided to the Minister. I find it problematic that a Minister who espouses the highest standards of transparency and good governance for agencies within her portfolio appears to allow lapses in such standards in matters within her control to occur without explanation or apology. It raises the question: what is it that is being hidden and downplayed, and why is that?

The CEO

On page 13, the Report states:

During the reporting period the Chair of the ALC was Ms Cherelle Wurrawilya. The CEO position was held by Mr Mark Hewitt until 16 October 2024. Mr Colin Wakefield held the position of Interim CEO from 17 October 2024 to 28 April 2025. Mr Matthew Bonson was CEO from 29 April 2025 and resigned on 17 July 2025. Michael Trainor was appointed Interim CEO on 22 August 2025 (emphasis added).

This is one of the few references to Mr Hewitt in the Annual Report. The section on the ALC CEO (page 17) focusses entirely on Mr Bonson who was CEO for only two of the 12 months in the reporting period. There is no mention of Mr Hewitt’s termination, nor the reasons or circumstances that led to it. See my blog post The Angels Weep (link here) for the partial details of these events on the public record.

Performance Reporting

The ALC performance reporting is linked to its corporate plan. See pages 48-50 for the explanation. In relation to the community and economic development objectives of the corporate plan, there are performance measures relating to school attendance, employment, law and justice outcomes and housing.

Pages 59-61 deal with school attendance in a limited cohort of some 80 students supported by the ALC funded Groote Eylandt/ Bickerton Island Primary College Aboriginal Corporation (GEBIPCAC). Attendance rates are declining (and there are indications that wider attendance rates on Groote are similarly low and in decline). There is a long explanation of some of the local factors contributing to these outcomes, though it seems clear that more systemic factors are in play across the remote areas of the NT (link here) and probably beyond. What is demonstrably clear, and should be of critical concern to the NT Government and its Education Department, is that average attendance rates for the 80 students in the cohort being measured of less than 40 percent (see Figure 5c on page 61) are unlikely to deliver acceptable educational outcomes for the students. While the measure suggests that at least 4 out of 10 students are at school each day, the reality is that it is highly likely that virtually all students are missing some portion of each month’s schooling and thus missing key steps in their education. When this persists over time (just how long this period is I am not in a position to determine) the students reach a point where they cannot keep up with the standard curriculum…in turn this creates insurmountable gaps which make the standard curriculum inaccessible, leading either to disruptive behaviours in class, further non-attendance, and eventually permanent dropping out. This annual report is a micro window into a massive problem that is impacting remote communities across at least four jurisdictions. It should be acknowledged as a national tragedy, one that activates and enlivens the Commonwealth Minister for Indigenous Australians. Instead, the response is invariably to shift responsibility: to the states, to the education portfolio, to the parents…yes they all have responsibilities, but in the circumstances we currently face, they all need to be encouraged, and activated to take those responsibilities seriously. This is a role for the Commonwealth Minister. Invariably however, what is in fact a national tragedy is merely presented as a static statistic framed as ‘low school attendance’.

On page 62, it is revealed that the employment rate of traditional owners by local organisations on Groote has fallen over the past year. In 2023-4, 307 TOs were employed, whereas in 2024-5, this had fallen to 199 (see Fig.5d on page 63). Here local factors are the cause, and particularly the drop-off in s64(3) payments arising from the cyclone damage to the wharf. This points to the urgent need for the Groote community to focus much more attention on reducing the dependency and reliance on the flow of royalty equivalents for key organisations on Groote.

Pages 64-68 record a truly exceptional improvement in justice outcomes on the Island. The report describes a range of new initiatives in recent years, and documents (using police data) substantial falls in arrest rates:

Ø  Total recorded offences dropped by 75%, from 1,041 in 2019 to 261 in 2024 (Figure 5e)

Ø  Youth offending decreased by 90% since 2019, from 267 offences to just 28 in 2024 (Figure 5f)

Ø  Arrests have declined 85% from 427 in 2018 to 61 in 2024 (Source: NTG data supplied to the ALC) These reductions are particularly notable in property damage, theft, and public order offences.

The report claims this is the result of greater Anindilyakwa control over justice initiatives and there is undoubtedly merit in this. The youth offending statistics are extraordinary, identifying almost a vertical drop in the last year (from around 250 to 50 offences), and suggest to me that the reduction in discretionary incomes may also have had an impact. In turn this points to issues that should perhaps be taken into account in future benefits distributions. The ALC would be wise (in my humble opinion) to commission an independent research project into the drivers of these improvements, and how best to institutionalise them into the future.

Finally, the Report describes desultory progress on housing construction, but this is perhaps also in large measure a consequence of the Cyclone Megan. Hopefully progress will improve going forward, noting that much of this is out of the hands of the ALC.

Mine related activities

The performance statements include a useful section on mining, and particularly a detailed discussion of engagement with GEMCO. This seems largely on track, with the ALC engaging to ensure minor contract issues are resolved.

On the proposed Winchelsea mine, (as I have previously noted (link here) the ALC appears to have stepped back and is now treating the mine as it would any other third-party proposal. It does mention the Winchelsea exploration and mining agreements but makes no comment. There is no reference to the possibility that the agreements may be sub-optimal due to the possibility of conflicts of interest (a matter that is not acknowledged and which is arguably contested but see my previous analysis here and here). The Report notes (page 72) that

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.

On page 77, in a section reporting performance on cultural protection, one of the corporate plan priorities, the report states (emphasis added):

Secondly, cultural sites and burial sites on Winchelsea Island were documented during cultural surveys conducted in the context of mining exploration. The protection that has been afforded to the recorded cultural sites and burial sites identified during the cultural surveys are key to addressing Traditional Owner concerns about the impact of proposed mining activities. Additional cultural surveys are planned and may identify other burial sites for protection.

This is to my knowledge the first public acknowledgement of unaddressed traditional owner concerns regarding mining on Winchelsea. It may underpin the statement I drew attention to in my November 2025 post assessing the most recent ALC Corporate Plan (link here) that

The ALC will be reviewing arrangements with Winchelsea Mining to ensure Traditional Owner's interests are met and that the principles of free, prior and informed consent are adhered to.

Ministerial Directions

The report notes at page 78 that there were no ministerial directions issued during the year.

This was notwithstanding the ostensible Ministerial displeasure with the speed of progress in implementing the ANAO /Bellchambers report which led her to deferring approval of the ALC estimates in late August 2024. In a media release dated 29 August 2024, she stated (inter alia):

I have taken the unusual decision to withhold approval for the ALC’s 2024/25 budget, instead approving an operational budget until 1 December 2024. 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.  (link here)

She provided the following direct quotation:

The steps I have taken today put the ALC Board and management on notice. Their failure to sufficiently respond to the recommendations of the independent review and ANAO must not continue, and they need to demonstrate their progress to the NIAA.

This may not have been a formal ministerial direction (there is no provision in the ALRA for such formal directions) but strikes me as being in effect equivalent to a substantive direction. It also strikes me as being significant enough to warrant a mention in a Commonwealth agency’s annual report, perhaps in the section on significant actions and changes (see page 78) or in relation to ANAO reports (see pages 46-47 and 79-80). Given the Minister’s public statement calling on the ALC to engage more transparently, this seems like it might have been a good place to start!

Consultants (pages 85-87).

Note the quite high legal costs, which are on top of the in-house legal expertise on the ALC payroll. Yet there is absolutely no explanation in the report nor in the ALC’s media statements on what these legal costs are for (but see the section on contingent liabilities below).

Financial Statements 2024-25.

Note: Page numbering for the financial statements begins afresh.

Employee costs used

On page 5 in the Cash Flow statement, it is revealed that employee cash used has almost halved from the 2023-24 year, down from ($13,515,798) to ($7,725,279). No reason is provided.

Audit committee costs

On page 9, audit committee costs have almost halved, from $100,241 to $52,354. This suggests that the poor value for money practices that were adopted by the ALC over the past decade in relation to its Audit Committee costs (as identified by the ANAO in 2023) has finally been addressed.

Reimbursement of Expenses.

On page 11, wages and salaries, on-charged to local corporations (funded under 64(3)) reduced in 24/25, down from $6,874,714 to $3,818,802. Superannuation costs on-charged were down from $721,462 to $423,938.

Thus, total reimbursement of expenses fell from $8,599,473 to $4,959,070. The implications of this reduction in employment totalling over $3.5m is not clearly explained in the financial statement’s notes, nor as far as I can see in the Annual Report itself. This strikes me as a noteworthy omission in reporting significant events in the Land Council’s operations over the financial year.

The note explaining this states:

The Anindilyakwa Land Council sometimes pays for services and goods on behalf of other Aboriginal Corporations to support the Corporations in pricing and availability. Under Section 27 of the Aboriginal Lands Rights (NT) Act 1976 the Land Council can supply such support when requested. The Anindilyakwa Land Council charges this on to the Corporations with no further benefit. This note reports the substance of the transaction of the goods and services and ensures a clear ability to understand the true income and expense of the financial statements by all users.

Section 27 of the ALRA states inter alia:

(1)  Subject to this Act, a Land Council may do all things necessary or convenient to be done for or in connexion with the performance of its functions and, without limiting the generality of the foregoing, may:

 (a)  employ staff; …

 (1A) A Land Council may, on the request of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander corporation that has received an amount of money from the Council under this Act, provide administrative or other assistance to the corporation.

There is no mention of reimbursement in this provision. The risk of utilising a reimbursement mechanism is that it creates a danger that a land council might use the mechanism to in effect fund itself especially if it can exercise influence or control over the local corporations being ‘assisted’. I have previously argued (and the ANAO pointed to the elements that allow this in its 2023 performance report) that the ALC exercises such influence over several corporations it has funded under section 64(3).

Also relevant to the rationale for the provision of ‘assistance’ is s.23(1)(ea) of the ALRA which deals with assistance for commercial activities of the corporations, and which states:

(1)  The functions of a Land Council are [inter alia]:

(ea)  to assist Aboriginals in the area of the Land Council to carry out commercial activities (including resource development, the provision of tourist facilities and agricultural activities), in any manner that will not cause the Land Council to incur financial liability or enable it to receive financial benefit; …

In my view, the reimbursement of expenses mechanism as it has been utilised by the ALC can easily slide into arrangements that would be in breach of the terms of the legislation, and create opportunities for maladministration (and in a worst case fraud) that require much greater transparency than has been the case to date. The NIAA (including its Audit and Risk Committee) in my view also has responsibilities to advise the Minister of the risks involved in these processes. The fact that these arrangements have been in place for an extended period without any public indication that such warnings have been raised should be a major concern to oversight agencies such as the ANAO and ORIC. See my previous discussion of these issues in my November 2025 analysis of the ALC Corporate Plan (link here).

Contingent Liabilities

On page 29, there is mention of the litigation between the ALC and GEAT. It is not mentioned elsewhere in any ALC public documents. Nor has there been an explanation of the issues in play.

Note 11: Contingent Assets and Liabilities. On 19 June 2024, Groote Eylandt Mining Company Pty Ltd (GEMCO) served a writ to commence legal proceedings and seek a determination in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory concerning a dispute as to the proper division of mining royalties as between ALC and the Groote Eylandt Aboriginal Trust in respect of the 2016 Eastern Leases Mining Agreement signed under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. The matter was listed for mention on 1 May 2025 was vacated and relisted for 12 June 2025. The matter remains 'on foot' in the court until the position between Groote Eylandt Aboriginal Trust (GEAT) and GEMCO is resolved. The parties through formal negotiation are close to finalising a 'Variation Agreement'. Legal costs are unknown at this moment.

Assets held in Trust

Within Note 15 on page 34, there is a table showing the financial flows through the Royalty Shoppa card system. Some $14m was lodged on Royalty shoppa cards in 2025, and $12m of that was spent. See this post (link here) where I discussed a range of concerns with the operation of the Royalty Shoppa card system. It seems clear that the scheme is still operational and widely used. Its current effectiveness and fitness for purpose is unknown.

ALC Income for operating costs under s.64(1)

The Minister approves operational costs for land councils under section 64(1) of the ALRA. It is the source of core operational funding for all four land councils in the NT.

In 2024-25, the Tiwi Land Council s.64(1) funding dropped by around 20 percent and the CLC funding dropped by around 5 percent. The NLC received an increase in funding of some $38.7m, with section 64(1) funding rising from $69.5m in 2023-24 to $108.2m in 2024-25 or just over 50 percent (see page 116 of the NLC Annual report 2024-25). A footnote on page 120 identifies capital expenditure of $39.5m for ongoing costs of the construction of office precincts in Darwin and Katherine. When adjusted to take account of this, the operational funding for the NLC fell from $69.55m in 2023-24 to $68.7m.

[Short digression: there is a slight discrepancy between the section 64(1) allocations for the NLC in the ABA financial statements appended to the NIAA Annual report (see page 178) and the NLC Annual Report financial statements (see page 116). It is a comparatively small amount, and I don’t consider it materially affects the substance of the argument I am making here. The same ANAO delegate signed both audit statements two days apart in September 2025.]

Thus, in 2024-25, the Minister approved funding providing for reductions in operational funding for three of the four land councils in the NT.

In contrast to the TLC, the CLC and the NLC, the ALC financial statements disclose an annual increase in section 64(1) funding of $2.59m, representing a 20 percent increase over the previous year’s approved allocation of section 64(1) funding. See Note 3F on page 15 which discloses that Section 64(1) revenue in 2024-25 was $13,702,683 and in 2023-24 was $11,105,777.

Somewhat extraordinarily, in a year when, and in which she had issued a media release on 29 August of the financial year announcing an unprecedented decision to publicly withhold approval of funding until December based on generic and unspecified concerns that the ALC was not ‘sufficiently prioritising and implementing the recommendations of the review and the ANAO audit’, the only land council to be granted an increased section 64(1) operational budget by the Minister was the ALC.

Any suggestion that the ALC had somehow demonstrated that it was suddenly ‘sufficiently prioritising the implementation of these reviews and audits is undercut by the ANAO Financial Statements Audit Report issued on 6 February 2025 (link here) which noted in relation to the ALC, inter alia:

4.14.58 The status of the recommendations made by the ANAO, and the minister’s action to withhold funding, have heightened concerns about the ALC’s progress in addressing the governance findings. 

4.14.59 In view of the reduced available funding highlighted above, further audit work was required by the ANAO to understand ALC’s ongoing financial feasibility….

….

4.14.62 The ANAO concluded that there is sufficient evidence to support the preparation of the 2023–24 financial statements on a going concern basis, and the action taken by ALC to address the performance audit recommendations will be revisited by the ANAO in the 2024–25 audit. (emphasis added)

In other words, the ANAO would not be able to formally conclude that the ALC was sufficiently implementing its recommendations until the finalisation of the 2024-25 Financial Audit. While this assessment may not have been published before the Minister approved the full year budget, it does raise questions as to how the Minister might have reached a view that increased funding was warranted.

It is perhaps worth asking the question, what changed for the ALC between 29 August 2024 when the Minister announced the funding freeze and December 2024 when she likely approved the full year budget? The answer of course is the information that neither the Minister nor the ALC wishes to discuss.  

My June 2025 post ‘FOI Updates on ALC and Groote Eylandt’ (link here) confirms that in July 2024 the NIAA (undoubtedly with the Ministers knowledge) referred the ALC CEO to the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC). Within a month, the Minister issued her media release announcing a funding halt for the ALC. In October, the ALC Board met with no staff present and a single NIAA senior officer in attendance and decided to terminate on notice the former CEO (i.e. with a termination payment) with immediate effect. Within months, the full year funding for the ALC had been restored, and we now learn (alone among the four NT Land Councils) with additional funding of $2.5m, a 20 percent increase in operational funding. No public announcement was made notwithstanding the previous announcement of the funding halt. While a replacement CEO was not appointed until 29 April 2025, the appointee Mr Bonson resigned some months later. A new CEO has only recently taken up duty.

Readers and this author alike are left with the conundrum: what involvement did the Minister have in deciding it was time for the former CEO of the ALC to depart? Was there any effort made to encourage the ALC to terminate the CEO? Why might the Minister have thought it useful or necessary to provide the ALC with an unexplained 20 percent increase in the Land Council’s operational budget in the months after the CEO’s departure and before a permanent CEO had been recruited? And what does the Minister know about the causes of the institutional mayhem on Groote over the last decade that she is not telling us?

At the beginning of this post, I quoted the Minister’s statement that:

Good governance is the cornerstone of trust and needs to be based on transparency, fairness, and accountability…

For my part, I would reverse the order and suggest that trust and transparency are the indispensable prerequisite of good governance. Unfortunately, trust and transparency are in short supply in both Groote Eylandt and Canberra.

 

4 May 2026

The 2026 Report of the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee: implications for Indigenous disadvantage and exclusion

 

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt."

Measure for Measure, Act one, Scene four

 

The Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee: 2026 report to Government has been published on the DSS website (link here). The separate Appendix is of particular salience in relation to the consideration of reform priorities and options in the Indigenous policy domain as it includes a letter to the Treasurer and Minister for Finance (link here) signed by Jenny Macklin (Chair of the Advisory Committee) and Pat Turner (Lead Convenor of the Coalition of Peaks) summarising the outcomes of a December 2025 roundtable convened by the Advisory Committee on Indigenous economic inclusion.

In 2024, I published a post on this Blog in relation to that year’s Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee Report (link here). There is a direct line of sight from the recommendations in that report to this most recent one. The Committee (and its Chair) is nothing if not persistent!

Writing recently in The Conversation, Advisory Committee member Peter Whiteford, and economists Jenny Gordon and Roger Wilkins, provide a highly useful and accessible summary of the Advisory Committee Report (link here). I recommend interested readers of the report begin with this overview which provides a useful contextual background to the impressively comprehensive span of the Report. Here is a short extract from their article:

Disadvantage is a concept that goes beyond income poverty to encompass people’s outcomes, including deprivation and social exclusion….

… By far the highest rates of deep social exclusion in 2022 were experienced by people who are unemployed (38.8%), public housing tenants (36.5%), people receiving income support (20.5%), people with long-term health conditions or a disability (16.3%), people with low educational attainment (16.3%), lone parents (15.7%), and Indigenous Australians (15.5%).

For public housing tenants, people who are unemployed, people receiving income support and those with low educational attainment, rates of deep disadvantage have increased significantly.

For Indigenous Australians, rates of deep disadvantage nearly doubled between 2010 and 2014, but then fell back, although still higher than in 2010.

Turning to the issue of the salience and significance of exclusion (or low levels of economic inclusion) for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander citizens, the Report is an extraordinary resource, filled with insightful, analytically valuable and policy relevant data. However, (and this is not a criticism) the Report mirrors the reality of mainstream politics and policy insofar as the bulk of its analyses and discussion relates to the broad span of mainstream policy issues relevant to poverty, deep disadvantage and economic exclusion. There is a focus on programs and policies that deliver benefits to individuals either universally or based on needs-based criteria of one sort or another. This leads to an implicit bias against policies and programs for corporate interests (eg the diesel tax rebate) and/or focussed on capital investments such as infrastructure of defence investments. This is a function of the Committee’s terms of reference but does mean that there is a potential blind spot in terms of the incidence or impacts of these latter policies on citizens. For example, defence or infrastructure expenditures create employment ― and opportunity costs ― which have an impact (for better or worse) on equity and inclusion. While the Report’s analysis only occasionally mentions or utilises Indigenous specific data points, the focus of the analysis is invariably on issues where Indigenous citizens are over-represented amongst those most disadvantaged.

An important, but unstated element of the Report’s analysis arises from the reality that the most significant drivers of deep disadvantage for Indigenous citizens are primarily reflected within the statistics cited in the Report on mainstream unemployment, mainstream health, mainstream education, and mainstream housing. This would also be the case with the extent of economic exclusion of disabled citizens or any other group of citizens (though these are not generally mentioned as a separate category unlike the treatment of the category ‘Indigenous Australians’). My point is that Indigeneity per se is not a driver of disadvantage or poverty, but rather, that the drivers of poverty and disadvantage affect Indigenous people disproportionality. The Report (and the extract above from The Conversation) is potentially confusing on this issue. This is not merely an academic argument; it has real world consequences. The solutions to addressing Indigenous disadvantage (in the main) lie in applying needs based (or means tested) reforms to mainstream drivers of disadvantage (while of course not being blind to the incentives we might be creating in doing so).

The point I am making was recognised by the Indigenous negotiators of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap when they insisted on the inclusion of the Priority Reforms in the Agreement, and in particular Priority Reform One directed to reforming mainstream institutions to make then more inclusive.

The major exception to this point is where mainstream institutions (policies / programs) have, for one reason or another, been supplemented or replaced by Indigenous specific programs. These are a comparatively small proportion of Commonwealth outlays and are generally (but not always) utilised in remote regions where mainstream institutions have not been developed, or where the rights of Indigenous peoples are sui generis such as cultural heritage protection and native title. The classic example combining both remoteness and cultural rights relates to communal and inalienable land tenure which make individualised ownership difficult (but not impossible) in many remote communities.

The import of this discussion is that Indigenous interests and their peak bodies should be focussed not just on those elements of the report which identify an Indigenous aspect, but they have a strong imperative to support and advocate for the entirety of the Advisory Committee Report’s reform recommendations. Improving the effectiveness and needs basis of mainstream policies and programs will inevitably benefit disadvantaged Indigenous citizens, because Indigenous citizens are over-represented amongst the poorest and most in need clients and beneficiaries of mainstream policies and programs.

Bearing in mind the lengthy caveat above, I now turn to several issues identified in the Report as being of specific interest to Indigenous interests.

The Remote Area Allowance

The first issue worth mentioning is the discussion on pages 11-12 and 37-39 of the Remote Area Allowance. The Committee notes that most RAA recipients are Indigenous Australians.

The Committee acknowledged the Government has moved to subsidise food in remote stores where grocery prices are some 40 % higher than in urban and regional Australia, but points to a continuing gap in the cost of living in remote regions. Recommendation 4 states:

Substantially lift the Remote Area Allowance: • Substantially lift the Remote Area Allowance by indexing it in line with Consumer Price Index growth since its introduction in 1984, lifting the single rate to $54.20 per fortnight. • Fund the Australian Bureau of Statistics to develop a remote area index that will guide ongoing indexation of the Remote Area Allowance, in partnership with remote communities and informed by remote area costs data. Once developed, the payment should be benchmarked at a rate that reflects remote area costs and regular ongoing indexation to this new index applied. • Review and adjust the payment’s geographic boundaries to ensure it is available to people living in remote and very remote areas.

Second, the Committee makes a sustained and detailed argument in favour of Employment Services Reform (pages 16-19 and 39-40). It states, inter alia,

Effective employment services can be a powerful policy lever for creating a more inclusive society. But Australia’s employment services system has become harmful and punitive. It has been badly underperforming for some time and major reform is needed. Delayed for far too long, employment services reform must now become a national priority. The system needs to be made fit for the future and must be regarded as a necessary component of national economic reform.

While this discussion is focussed on mainstream Employment Services, the NIAA remote employment programs, the Remote Jobs and Economic Development (RJED) program and the Remote Australia Employment Service (RAES) which have their own issues not considered by the Committee (link here) are effectively a subsidiary element of the mainstream programs. They too require reform.

Third the potential for reform of the Indigenous Housing sector

On page 52, the Report reproduces an extract from a letter arising from a roundtable with the Coalition of Peaks and other Indigenous (published in full in Appendix 3). This argues, inter alia, for the ring fencing of a dedicated allocation from within all mainstream social housing allocations by the Commonwealth for Indigenous housing. The Committee limits its recommendation in the housing area to arguing for increases in mainstream Commonwealth Rental Assistance (CRA). For my part, I have previously argued against ring fencing these programs and instead relying on needs-based allocations (link here).

Fourth: the analysis of nationwide Disadvantage

Chapter Six of the Report comprises a detailed and sophisticated analysis of the composition of disadvantage across the nation. The discussion at the beginning of this post is relevant here. The Report considers a range of analytic measures to measure disadvantage including income poverty, deprivation, social exclusion, but makes no specific recommendations. One salient point is that the Report notes (page 151) that the data in the HILDA survey utilised to compile the Report’s analysis of disadvantage is not reliable for remote and very remote regions, and this may lead to an undercount of the level of disadvantage among Indigenous Australians.

Fifth: the summary of the Roundtable with Indigenous interests

Appendix 3 to the Report comprises a letter sent to Ministers from the Chair, Jenny Macklin and the (then) Convenor of the Coalition of Peaks Pat Turner (link here). The summary of the outcomes of that Roundtable is as follows:

The Roundtable emphasised that economic inclusion for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is underpinned by four key interrelated enablers:

• Adequate and accessible social services and income support, so people can meet immediate material needs, address poverty, and safely access the right income support payments when they need.

• Stable, secure, appropriate and affordable housing, as a foundational requirement for participation in employment, education and community life.

• Affordable, accessible, high-quality and culturally safe early childhood education and care, to support children’s development and enable parents and carers to participate in work and study.

• Education, training and employment opportunities that empower people, support flexible employment participation and offer meaningful career pathways, including within the community-controlled sector.

I strongly agree that these priorities are crucial to addressing Indigenous economic inclusion. However, as is often the case, the devil is in the detail. Will the quantum of support underpinning these priorities be adequate, and will implementation be effective and target those most in need. These are matters beyond the scope of this post to address.

Discussion

At 178 pages plus appendices, this report covers an extraordinary amount of the policy landscape, in varying levels of detail. In Chapter Seven, the Report provides a high-level assessment of Government responses to the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee’s recommendations since its establishment in 2022. This makes clear that this Report is in fact merely one element of a much larger policy project. The headings of the cumulative recommendations made by the Committee which clearly reflect in very large measure the longstanding concerns and priorities of the Chair Jenny Macklin, make clear the extraordinary ambition of the policy project. I list them below:

7.1 Adequacy of working age payments and rent assistance

7.2 Full employment, and reducing barriers to employment and participation

7.3 Supporting children and families

7.4 Addressing disadvantage in the places where it is concentrated

7.5 The culture, purpose and intent of the social security system

7.6 Legislated measures on economic inclusion and poverty reduction

A key characteristic of this ambitious project is that it is, by virtue of its complexity, its combination of technical economic, demographic and statistical components, and its financial and economic significance for the nation’s public expenditures (an element that is barely mentioned in the Report) is in very large measure an insider’s agenda. I can think of very few comparable policy analysts in Australia who combine the technical mastery of their subject matter with the political skill and influence that Jenny Macklin brings to this project.

A careful and (dare I say) critical reading the responses by agencies to the six reform topics listed in Chapter Seven makes clear that the inertia and incrementalism of government is quite extraordinary. The Committee, clearly influenced by Macklin, is very selective in its recommendations, clearly cognisant that this Government (and indeed any recent Australian Government) is risk averse to major reforms that have virtually irreversible budgetary implications. The recent experience with the NDIS merely serves to reinforce the mindset that the key bureaucratic agencies will bring to considering such an ambitious agenda. It is to Macklin’s credit that she doesn’t give up, and as the Report notes at the beginning of Chapter Seven (page 158):

In its first three reports the Committee made a total of 40 recommendations, of which: • 6 have been implemented in full. • 23 are still live and have been implemented in part. • 11 have not yet been advanced.

Three substantial, still live recommendations from reports 1 to 3 are advanced and updated in this report:

 • In all three reports, the Committee has called for the Government to commit to a timeframe for full increases in JobSeeker and related payments. (R3 2023, R2 2024, R2 2025) …

• In all three reports, the Committee recommends the Government commit to a full-scale redesign of Australia’s employment services system to end harm caused by the compliance system. (R4 2023, R6 2024, R7 2025) …

• In reports 1 and 2 (2023, 2024) the Committee called for reform of the way FTB A interacts with the Child Support Scheme. (R33 2023, R15 2024) Recommendation 8 of this report calls for a comprehensive modernisation of the objectives of the Family Payments and Child Support Scheme to guide further reform – these include reducing child poverty and improving economic security for women.

The point I would make related to Indigenous disadvantage and why Closing the substantive Gap is so difficult is that each of the three dot points above where the Committee has made repeated recommendations, the implications for Indigenous Australians are substantial, while simultaneously, the absolute numbers of Indigenous citizens who would benefit are comparatively low. Indeed, Indigenous Australians would arguably be amongst the biggest winners were these reforms to be implemented because they are over-represented amongst those most adversely affected.

In turn, this raises the much larger question: are the current institutional arrangements, and particularly the targets and priorities set down in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap fit for purpose in laying out a pathway to close the substantive gap (as opposed to the rhetorical gap that governments invariably discuss). My intuition tells me that the answer is no, and that a more streamlined and focussed framework built around the high-level priorities identified in the letter to Ministers in Appendix 3 to the Report would be a much better way forward. This is a separate point to the argument I have made elsewhere (link here) that the current framework is not working. But taken together the argument for reform of the Closing the Gap framework is intellectually irrefutable.

Clearly the Committee sees its role as primarily seeking to influence the policy debate on the issues that matter from ‘inside the room’. It doesn’t criticise but merely keeps knocking on the door. When the stars align, the arguments in favour of reform will have been laid out. Ultimately though, it is up to the electorate to elect representatives who are prepared to pick up the baton and run with it.

For both broader mainstream interests advocating for greater equity and inclusion in Australian society, and for Indigenous interests such as the Coalition of Peaks, the Advisory Committee’s cumulative reports offer, albeit in the arcane code of economics and bureaucratic policymaking, both a coherent and persuasive argument for pursuing reform, and (between the lines) a roadmap for how to approach government seeking to influence policy. There is a place for public advocacy, even criticism, but it will be most effective if it is focussed on a limited number of consequential priorities framed around sustained and coherent evidence-based articulation of the agenda they might seek to put forward. Even so, that will often not be enough to overcome the innate inertia that suffuses policymaking in Australia, and success will ultimately depend upon an ‘alignment of the stars’. The alignment of those stars will invariably be a function of politics as well as wider contextual pressures and opportunities.

While this may seem too pessimistic, it strikes me that to one extent or another, it was ever thus. Every major institution in existence today, every major reform, every legal framework, is the result of a good idea being developed, framed and taken forward in a way that persuaded a government to act notwithstanding the political headwinds of those who were opposed. For every institution in existence, the stars in fact aligned.

To be blunt, rhetoric serves some purposes, but it is never adequate on its own to drive reform. There is always a need for hardheaded and detailed policy analysis at all stages of the reform process. I would venture to say that Australia is suffering from a long-term decline in such analysis, and the Indigenous policy domain is not immune from this disease. For this reason, the work of the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee is both inspirational and a roadmap. It deserves to be studied closely by anyone interested in seeing the emergence of a better and more inclusive society.

 

 

Declaration of interest: I was employed as a ministerial adviser in the Office of Jenny Macklin from 2008 to 2012.

 

29 April 2026

Lest We Remember

How many thousand of my poorest subjects

Are at this hour asleep! O sleep, O gentle sleep,

Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee…

Henry IV Part 2, Act three, Scene one

 

I am glad that ANZAC Day comes around only once a year. I find it emotionally and ethically challenging.

It is important that we remember those who fought in past wars, those who died and were injured, and their families. Lives cut short or permanently compromised, families rendered asunder. These are both personal and national tragedies. Not only have wars harmed individual Australians, but the Australian nation has been harmed socially, economically and politically by the wars we have engaged in.

These tragedies are exacerbated by the reality that too often, Australians have fought in senseless wars, in the service of foreign states and interests, defending concepts such as freedom and democracy that have been selectively and unequally implemented and delivered. As a nation, we claim these values as fundamental to who we are, but too often we selectively frame them so that we are blind to their deficiencies and fail to find the will power to make the changes necessary to ensure they are fit for purpose. Increasingly we live in a world where those who claim the moral high ground, and proclaim it from the metaphorical hilltops, who assert they support freedom for all, and the precepts of democracy, are operating with much baser motivations.

For these reasons, I distrust narratives that glorify war and violence, that value hyper nationalism over the shared humanity of all peoples, and that lay the groundwork for political movements that leverage xenophobia and hate based on race, ethnicity, religion, artificial notions of purity and superior intelligence and so on.

There is a place for nationalistic pride and self-confidence, but (if we believe the world should be guided by principles built upon ethical principles and justice) not to the exclusion of respect for universal human rights, and the overarching value of respecting and even celebrating the existence of different societies, languages, cultures and peoples.

There is thus a fine line between on one hand remembering the painful sacrifices and losses involved in past wars and extolling the bravery and prowess of Australian servicemen and servicewomen, and on the other hand, celebrating and advocating the use and application of armed force. Invariably, lauding the use of force requires the concomitant necessity to ignore or downplay the consequences, direct and indirect, of violence on other humans, invariably in the service of some political objective decided by decisionmakers and interest groups that are far removed either by virtue of their wealth or status from the consequences of these policies.

Since the Boer War, many or even most Australians have seen serving in the armed services in a crisis or emergency as an obligation of citizenship. The rhetoric and ideology of nationalism has a strong hold on Australia, as it does on most nations.

Historically (and somewhat surprisingly) many Indigenous Australians have volunteered to serve in our military notwithstanding the history violent dispossession of First Peoples and the more insidious and longstanding adoption of exclusionary policies by the states and the Commonwealth.

John Maynard has an essay in the Conversation titled Aboriginal Anzacs fought for Australia, but returned home to racism. It fuelled their activism  (link here). It is worth reading.

I have previously published two ANZAC day posts on this Blog. The first in April 2016 titled Ben Murray Gallipoli Veteran (link here) remembered an imposing man of Diyari and Afghan descent, who when I met him in the early 1970s was living alone in a ramshackle ruin in the ghost town of Farina in northern South Australia. Ben Murray was captured by the Turks in Palestine and almost bayoneted. The account of his survival is recounted in the various short articles that are mentioned and linked to in my 2016 post. (Updated link here).

Here is a short extract from one of those sources (the original links no longer work):

With the passing of the years Ben has apparently telescoped his memories of the First World War and it is difficult to reconstruct the sequence of events. It seems likely that Ben went on after Gallipoli to fight in Palestine, and that in one of those battles, possibly during 1916, he was captured by the Turks. Ben recalls his unit making an advance on a town and that the Turks counter-attacked, killing Australians and narrowly missing Ben.

 I got a bullet too, the coat here - just missed my guts. And I dropped, I dropped and I lay there then, with the other dead boys. Mates of mine. They never missed them.

The Turkish soldiers were close by now, near enough apparently to finish Ben off if he had made the wrong move. His response was quick, unusual and may have saved his life. For Ben there was little to separate Turks from the Afghans he had known in Australia and so he called out the few words he had learnt from his Afghan cameleer acquaintances - the Muslim prayer uttered by them before they slaughtered a beast - as well as some Afghan names:

I sang out: 'Moosha malad! Akbar! Dadleh! Bejah! [Ben's father's name]’. I said: 'Bejah! Dadleh!' That's what I said. And they take me then. They kept me. Better than getting a bullet! If I didn't sing out...they would have killed me alright! They put a bullet through me - just missed coat [i.e. passed through coat]. But the second bullet didn't come, never come

Ben died in 1994 at the age of 101.

The second post published in April 2023 dealt with (by implication) the insidious pervasiveness of violence and its consequences once it becomes the primary means of engaging with the external world. The post was titled Anzac Day 2023 (link here).

In that post, I referenced recent writing by Kate Auty revisiting the Forrest River massacres in 1926, one hundred years ago this year, and the subsequent Royal Commission.

I wrote in that post

While the myriad issues thrown up by the Royal Commission that followed will never be determined with any certainty, what is clear is that the police party, comprising former soldiers with experience of war took with them over 500 rounds of ammunition. This patrol was just one of numerous similar police patrols that had taken place in the East Kimberley since the arrival of the pastoral industry in the 1880s. Take a moment to imagine the psychological impact on the traditional owners of the country involved. It was a dynamic that had been widely replicated across the continent since the early 1800s.

 Without entering into the debate regarding whether Aboriginal people resisted the invasion of their countries, who can know or account for the distress, pain and suffering visited upon the Aboriginal men, women and children who were innocent bystanders to a process with implications and consequences truly beyond their comprehension, their world turned upside down.

Like Ben Murray in relation to his deceased comrades, we should certainly remember all those who have lost their lives in violent altercations undertaken by nation states, whether in formal wars, or informal conflicts, whether in foreign lands or within Australia.

It seems to me however that remembering must be more than wreath laying on one day of the year (important as that is). Proper remembering requires us to think long and hard about what underlies these conflicts and take action to identify policies and tangible reforms that diminish the likelihood of these tragedies occurring in the future. Unfortunately, as a nation we do not invest enough effort in contemplating what such policies and reforms might look at.

We have our democracy and our freedom, but we appear institutionally incapable of exercising these rights and opportunities in ways which will strengthen our independent capacity to choose our own future. For all the discussion of Australian values, we Australians are remarkably insouciant about protecting our sovereignty, and more importantly, about protecting our ability to protect our sovereignty in a rapidly changing world. In this respect, we settler Australians may have something to learn from this continent’s First Peoples, whose focus on celebrating and respecting the links between people and country is central to their worldview.

The institutionalisation of Anzac Day, and the ubiquity of the phrase ‘Lest we Forget’ are important and valuable, but not if they signify ‘Lest we Remember’.

 

25 April 2026