Regulatory oversight: the missing element in effective public policy

 

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

but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.

Measure for Measure, Act two, Scene two

 

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

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

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

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

Senate Estimates and ORIC

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

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

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

….

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

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

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

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

……

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

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

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

The ANAO and ORIC

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have deleted footnotes and added emphasis.

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

….

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

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

….

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

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

 

Concluding comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

10 June 2026

Wilya Janta’s remote housing reform agenda

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

 

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

Hamlet, Act four, Scene five.

 

Last Sunday, ABC Radio National aired an interview (link here) with Norman Frank Jupurrurla and Dr Simon Quilty, two of the founders of Wilya Janta, a Tennant Creek based Aboriginal owned cultural consultancy focussed on the importance of housing in contributing to community wellbeing in remote communities (link here). Dr Quilty was also interviewed on ABC Breakfast on Monday 25 May (link here) discussing a range of issues related to Indigenous health and its relationship with housing. I recommend readers listen to one or both interviews; I guarantee you will learn something new.

Although I already knew of the contributions made by the interviewees to remote housing and energy infrastructure policy and had read some of their academic research (link here), I found the account to their joint history in establishing Wilya Janta particularly engaging and persuasive.

The interview in turn led me to their web site (link here) which I strongly recommend to readers for both perusal and potentially for a deeper dive.

My own deeper dive on the Wilya Janta web site led me to the commissioned research report from economic consultants SGS Economics and Planning titled Culturally Safe and Healthy Aboriginal Housing: Business Case. This paper seeks to lay out in a rigorous manner the broad principles that lie at the core of Wilya Janta’s approach to remote housing for Aboriginal communities. In very large measure, the SGS Paper succeeds in making the case for a new and much more innovative approach to designing and constructing remote community houses.

Here are some selected quotes I have cherry picked from the paper:

For generations, Indigenous people in Australia have been living in government housing that fails to acknowledge their historic and ongoing colonial displacement. Despite policy shifts through assimilation, integration and reconciliation, remote housing in the NT continues to be delivered through a centralised, top-down approach that lacks meaningful engagement with community, resulting in Eurocentric housing that fails to reflect cultural values or climatic and environmental realities.

This generates a suite of interconnected problems across design, delivery and maintenance of remote housing. These problems are summarised as: 1. Inappropriately designed housing fails to meet residents’ environmental, physical, cultural and social needs, leading to poor health and wellbeing outcomes. 2. Poor engagement with local decision makers reduces community participation and ownership, resulting in higher delivery and maintenance costs.

Addressing these problems has the potential to deliver substantial benefits, not only improving the wellbeing of residents but also contributing to broader social and economic outcomes for remote communities and Territorians. These benefits include: 1. Improved resident health and wellbeing in Aboriginal communities 2. Improved housing asset performance and sustainability in Aboriginal communities 3. Improved local participation, capability and economic opportunity in Aboriginal communities….

… Despite commitments under the national Closing the Gap Strategy (2020) and recent efforts by the NT Government to facilitate greater local control of government-funded service delivery, existing approaches to housing design and construction continue to offer limited flexibility. This approach limits the ability to deliver housing that reflects Aboriginal aspirations and lived realities, leading to a range of negative outcomes for households, communities and ultimately, all Territorians.

The SGS paper represents an attempt to translate into accessible terminology the importance of culture in the lived lives of remote communities, the unique ‘social order’ that holds these communities together and makes them who they are.  It describes the strategic approach of Wilya Janta which is based on developing tangible examples of appropriate housing and seeking to use these as the platform to persuade governments, and especially the NT Government, which has responsibility for the construction and ongoing maintenance of social housing in remote communities, to fundamentally change its approach to design and construction going forward. While the argument is based primarily on the benefits of cultural alignment, there is also a strong theme built upon the urgent need for changes to housing infrastructure to facilitate better access to solar power, and to better insulate the housing from the impending climate changes that are likely to substantially change the underlying conditions of life in these locations.

I strongly support the policy directions being advocated by Wilya Janta and many others engaged with improving the quality of infrastructure in remote communities. What given me hope that the Wilya Janta agenda will succeed is that it is built from the bottom up, it has a community focus, appears committed to a transparent engagement on the issues, and is not solely reliant on government for the progress made to date.

Nevertheless, the apparent inability of governments over decades to even acknowledge let alone solve these issues suggests that there are wider forces at play. It strikes me that I should at least mention these not, to undermine the Wilya Janta agenda, but to provide a sense of realism as to just how steep the climb ahead will be.

Challenges

The major challenges to the wider spread and acceptance of the Wilya Janta reform agenda include:

Demographic pressures, especially Aboriginal mobility into towns from communities and out of towns back to communities. Aboriginal people in remote communities and town camps are highly mobile, and this can mean that in situations where housing infrastructure is finite and kinship relationships extend well beyond the nuclear family, there are extremely high levels of demand for accommodation over extended periods. Even the best designed houses will be subjected to high levels of stress.

The design of governments. Government agencies are staffed by public servants with multiple roles and responsibilities, across significant geographical ranges. Talented public servants whether they work for the Commonwealth or a state/territory government, are incentivised to build their careers at the centre and not in the regions. Governmetn agencies are invariably subject to high staff turnover and often carry an ongoing cultural and geographic knowledge deficit. In other words, there are systemic constraints which work against the likelihood that many public servants will build local knowledge and still retain influence in the central office.

Persuading governments to change course and ensuring that future ministers or changes of bureaucratic personnel will not reverse course when budget pressures or unforeseen political pressures arise is almost impossible. It requires at the very least the development of sustained advocacy capability amongst those who support the original reform. The unfortunate reality is that many so-called reforms are adopted by government because they have short time horizons and they know that if circumstances change, they can change or reverse course. Moreover, the persuasion of government to adopt reforms is more difficult when the up-front costs are high and the long-term benefits accrue beyond the politically relevant time horizon. This is especially so where the substantive reforms under consideration are inherently innovative. The design and quality flaws in the existing stock of remote housing units across the north is a direct reflection of this dynamic; governments have limited budgets and prefer to spread available resources very thin even while they know that they will evaporate within a short period. The decision to abolish the National Partnership on Remote Indigenous Housing (NPARIH) when its initial ten-year span expired in 2018 is perhaps the most egregious example of this dynamic in play (link here).

Scaling up. Even where governments can be convinced that a reform or change is worth adopting, they have strong incentives to pursue pilots and other less than comprehensive changes. One of the specific challenges the Wilya Janta reforms would face in being scaled up is that the model requires close and careful design consultations in each region. These consultations cannot be done by public servants who do not have specialist backgrounds, so will be expensive and slow to develop. How to maintain ministerial interest and political commitment over a sustained period is a real constraint.

The centrality of repairs and maintenance.  The reality is that remote housing is subject to extraordinary external and internal pressures: from climate, from overcrowding, from volatile domestic relationships which can easily descend into violence, and from lack of clarity on what is expected of tenants. While data is virtually non-existent, the asset life span of most remote housing is much shorter than housing in non-remote Australia. Better design will ameliorate some of these issues, but not all. In addition, governments themselves, who retain responsibility for managing repairs and maintenance of social housing, already struggle to (a) allocate adequate resources to maintaining the housing asset base, and (b) struggle to implement their maintenance programs effectively and at scale across vast distances.

In relation to the issue of housing asset lifespans, I requested AI Claude (Sonnet 4.6) to tell me if there was any data on asset life spans across remote Australia. Here is its conclusion:

Bottom line for your purposes

The honest answer is that the sector has not produced the comparative lifespan data you're asking about in a usable form — partly because lifecycle costing has been systematically absent from remote Indigenous housing policy, and partly because the political incentive has been to report on new dwellings built rather than on asset condition over time. The ANAO's 2022 audit of remote NT housing confirmed that data collection and asset management systems remain inadequate. This lack of data undermines the effectiveness of any future asset management strategy by either government or community housing providers. It is also an impediment to any transition of housing to Aboriginal community control.

If you're building a policy argument around this, the most defensible framing is probably that the gap between accounting life (what governments assume for depreciation purposes) and functional life (what the physical evidence shows) represents a hidden subsidy failure — governments are writing down assets over 40–50 years while providing maintenance funding consistent with structures that are effectively exhausted in a fraction of that time.

In other words, state and territory governments are systemically under-investing in making sustainable provision for the ongoing maintenance of remote housing, and the costs are falling on the Aboriginal tenants through accelerated loss of amenity. Governments (and historically particularly the NT) then turn around and request the Commonwealth to periodically step in and rescue them. The Commonwealth has itself been short-sighted over an extensive period, preferring to deal with current problems rather than systemic ones. The poor record of independent and rigorous evaluation by the Commonwealth of remote housing, an issue which is hugely significant in adversely impacting Indigenous health outcomes, suggests that the Commonwealth is also complicit in this systemic and largely invisible discrimination against remote housing occupants.

Conclusion

I list these challenges not to argue against the Wilya Janta reform agenda, but to provide a sense of reality as the scale of the challenge involved, and to identify the need for more thinking and research on how best to implement the Wilya Janta reform agenda at scale.

My own provisional view, based more on intuition than science, is that reliance on government to pursue these reforms is a potential dead end. Instead, Indigenous interests would, in my humble opinion, be better advised to explore the development of specialist sui generis organisational approaches that are committed to scaling up the reform agenda yet are not reliant on, and indeed are insulated from, the overt influence of government. The place to start might be the development of community housing models that access Rent Assistance (a needs-tested mainstream program available to low-income renters) as a primary source of operational funding. There may be other alternatives which have not occurred to me.

Given the extraordinarily strong links between housing and the social determinants of health, and the substantial and ongoing shortage of remote community housing across the North, it would be a major policy mistake were the nation to avert its gaze from these issues. The Wilya Janta model has much to recommend it: it is innovative, it involves community from the ground up, and it meets the increasing pressure of rapid climate change. I wonder however whether Governments are up to the task of pursuing the public interest. It seems to me that the solution to that problem is for Wilya Janta and its allies in the public at large to set out independently of government and to pursue their own interest utilising innovative institutional design as well as innovative housing design.

[Apology: the original post included a number of typographical errors, and some inaccurate syntax. I have attempted to correct all these errors in the current version. No change to the substantive meaning of the text has been made.]

 

25 May 2026

 

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