The financial framework underpinning the Aboriginal Land Rights Act in the NT

 

…what’s past is prologue; what to come,

In yours and my discharge.

The Tempest, Act two, Scene one

 

Jon Altman and I have just published two POLIS Working Papers (WPs), and Jon authored a third WP which together comprise a trilogy focussed on policy issues related to the financial underpinning of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (ALRA). ALRA received assent on 16 December 1976, so we will very shortly reach the fiftieth anniversary of the ALRA.

The first paper, WP5, is titled The Aboriginals Benefit Account in the Northern Territory of Australia: Fifty years of deferred reform. (link here)

The second paper, WP6 is titled Land Rights at Risk: Pathways to reform in the Northern Territory. (link here)

The third paper, WP7 is titled The Mining Withholding Tax and the Aboriginals Benefit Account: The case for tax abolition and the restoration of Aboriginal capital. (link here)

Jon chaired the first major review of the ABTA published in 1984, the major recommendations of which were largely unimplemented. I participated in the working party for that Review as a representative of The Central Land Council. Both of us have maintained a continuing interest in the operation of the ALRA over the subsequent decades, reflected in our respective academic contributions both jointly and separately over subsequent decades.

The following paragraphs are based on extracts (in italics) from the Abstracts to each of the papers.

WP5 looks back over the fifty years of the ALRA and considers the long arc of the various reviews undertaken into the financial provisions that underpin the legislation. We take as our starting point the multiple policy logics that underpinned the genesis of the legislation. These comprise (in our view) land restoration, land councils and land trusts, compensation, and the financial mechanism. We go on to provide:

an account of the ABA's financial history, examines the reform process leading to the 2021 amendments, and assesses AINT's first three years of operation against concerns raised at the time of the legislation's passage. The paper finds that while the 2021 amendments represent a partial step towards Aboriginal control, structural flaws within ALRA itself, and within AINT’s architecture are increasing in salience. The residual ABA financial reserve—still under ministerial control and possibly in medium term structural decline—is the most obvious, but not the only policy challenge. The paper concludes with some recommendations for charting a pathway to the reforms that are necessary to ensure the sustainability of ALRA and better outcomes for all Indigenous people in the NT.

WP6 looks forward rather than backwards, and examines

the continuing coherence of the four policy logics underpinning ALRA and argue that while the land restoration and land council functions remain broadly fit for purpose, the compensatory and financial mechanisms are the least coherent element of the current settlement. We propose that the underlying financial model be reconceived as a perpetual endowment, controlled by Aboriginal Territorians, in place of the current volatile and ministerially controlled arrangements. Finally, we set out one possible model—a First Nations-led collaborative governance process—for building a reform agenda over the coming years. The paper does not offer definitive recommendations; rather, it aims to equip those who must ultimately decide on the future of ALRA with a clearer view of the choices before them…

It is worth noting here that our proposed First Nations led collaborative governance approach sits squarely within Priority Reform One of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. Post referendum, structural reform will need to emanate from policy approaches that are not directly based on constitutional change (important as that will continue to be into the medium term).

WP7 examines the case for the abolition of the Mining Withholding Tax (MWT) which has been applied since 1979 and in Jon’s estimation has cost Aboriginal interests $200m in nominal terms, and around $365m in notional lost earnings. The MWT was levied on:  

payments made from the Aboriginals Benefit Account (ABA), the statutory account established under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (ALRA) to receive the equivalents of mining royalties generated on Aboriginal land. The tax has been questioned by successive reviews for more than four decades, and its abolition has been recommended on at least three occasions, without effect … Because the tax is met by the Account rather than deducted from what recipients receive, its incidence now falls wholly on accumulated Aboriginal capital. The paper sets out seven grounds for abolition, estimates the capital removed since 1979 at above $200 million in nominal terms and around $365 million when compounded at the minimal bond yields the ABA could lawfully have earned, and argues that restoration should be framed as an appropriation rather than a tax refund and directed to Aboriginal Investment NT’s Future Fund.

There is obviously much more detail, analysis and information in each of the papers. Taken together, they provide a synoptic view of the financial arrangements which underpin the ALRA stretching back fifty years and looking forward to the next half-century.

We don’t suggest that these papers represent the final word on any of the issues we cover. Our perspective is hopefully constructively critical, aimed at elucidating how the nation’s first major attempt to deal with the enduring issue of redress for dispossession has operated, drawing out either explicitly or by implication those deeper issues of continuing relevance in broader contexts related to subsequent state-based land rights regimes and to native title emanating from the High Court decision in Mabo No.2. We hope to engender a wider and more open debate on the issues dealt with in these papers.

In particular, the substantial financial sums negotiated by PBCs with miners and other third parties over the past three decades, and the likely future expansion (post the High Court decision in Timber Creek: link here) of potentially significant payments to native titles holders whose title has been extinguished without the legally required compensation will create new pools of Indigenous capital. These funds will face the same governance issues the ABA has faced over the past half century: who controls it; how it is regulated, and importantly, to what end. These papers are thus of potential relevance to readers focused on issues beyond the NT.

 

18 October 2026

 

Breach of trust: the nation’s failure on child protection and domestic violence

 

 

And oftentimes excusing of a fault

Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse,

As patches set upon a little breach

Discredit more in hiding of the fault

Than did the fault before it was so patch’d.

King John, Act four, Scene two

 

In his 2009 weird fiction/crime novel, The City and the City, British author China Miéville sets his narrative in two geographically overlapping fictional European cities which jointly cooperate in ensuring that their citizens do not ‘see’ or acknowledge the institutions and residents of the other. An enigmatic supervisory organisation known as ‘The Breach’ maintains the separation, and ‘breachers’ (ie citizens who fail to maintain the mandatory degree of separation) are taken into custody and face an unspecified punishment and generally are never seen again.

I was reminded of Miéville’s novel when, while following an ongoing and as yet entirely unresolved political crisis in Western Australia, I decided to take a closer look at the status and underlying basis for the Closing the Gap target related to family violence and child protection as laid out on the Productivity Commission dashboard. These are two separate issues, but are clearly often related, and impact on the life circumstances and opportunities of those affected in synergistic ways.

According to the Dashboard (link here), target 13 is framed as follows:

Target13: By 2031, the rate of all forms of family violence and abuse against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children is reduced at least by 50%, as progress towards zero.

Nationally in 2018-19, 8.4% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander females aged 15 years and over experienced domestic physical or face-to-face threatened physical harm (figure CtG13.1).

There is no new data since the baseline year of 2018-19.

The data for the baseline was sourced from the ABS 2018-19 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health survey. A further survey, the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey (NATSIHS) 2022–23 was conducted by the ABS between August 2022 and March 2024. For reasons I do not comprehend, this survey apparently didn’t collect data on family violence. The absence of regular data updates makes the notion that this target is being actively monitored by policymakers nonsensical.

The Dashboard entry for Target 13 does include a section on Supporting Indicators, which includes links to actual hospitalisation data for Indigenous women and children.  This allows us to at least get a sense of the scale and import of the issues facing women and children in relation to violence and family safety. Taking just the latest year available (2023-24), Indigenous women (aged 15yrs plus) were hospitalised due to domestic violence at a rate of 783/100,000, and Indigenous children at a rate of 43/100,000. In the NT (a rough proxy for remote regions), those two figures were 4041/100,000 and 143/100,000. In other words, NT Indigenous women’s hospitalisations were five times worse than the national Indigenous rate.

According to an AIHW webpage on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Performance Framework (link here):

First Nations females were 24 times as likely to be hospitalised for assault as non-Indigenous females between July 2021 and June 2023. The difference between the two populations was largest in Remote and very remote areas where First Nations females were 48 times as likely to be hospitalised due to assault as non-Indigenous females. [Note this is for assault generally, not by a domestic partner].

According to the Dashboard (link here), target 12 is framed as follows:

Target 12: By 2031, reduce the rate of overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children (0–17 years old) in out-of-home care by 45%

Nationally in 2025, the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children aged 0–17 years in out‑of‑home care was 52.2 per 1,000 children in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population (figure CtG12.1).

The 2025 rate is above the rate in 2024, and it is an increase from 47.3 per 1,000 children in 2019 (the baseline year).

Nationally, based on progress from the baseline, the target is worsening. This assessment is provided with a high level of confidence. 

The data underpinning Figure CtG 12.1 shows the non-Indigenous national rate as 4.5 per 1000 children in 2025, down from 5.1 per 1,000 children in 2019. In other words, the national Indigenous rate in 2025 is 11.6 times the national rate.

If you then dig deeper within the available disaggregations, there are high level summaries of the progress of each jurisdiction over the period 2019 (the baseline used) to 2025. In the NT, the rate for Indigenous children has been falling and was 29.5 per 1,000 in 2025. This is mirrored by a clear fall in non-Indigenous rates, from 3.0 in 2019 to 2.3 in 2025. The data suggests an across-the-board reluctance to remove children in the NT for reasons that are unclear. It is also unclear whether this is a jurisdictional policy issue, or a wider trend across remote regions generally.

In relation to child protection, there is a deeper conceptual problem which appears to have attracted no attention in public discussion around these issues. It is embedded within the Closing the Gap framework but also has a wider prevalence in ways of thinking about child protection generally, and within Indigenous contexts especially.

Identifying the rate of child removals as measured by data and/or trends in out of home care is an important indicator of a problem. It is akin to a doctor taking your temperature or blood pressure; it provides an indication of whether a problem of some kind exists. The data available nationally and across all jurisdictions makes clear that we do have a problem; but it doesn’t tell us what the nature of that problem is. To go a step further and make reducing the level of child removals a policy target in its own right is deeply problematic for at least three reasons: first, it creates incentives within agencies responsible for child welfare and safety to not remove children when their safety is at risk and removal is required; second, it addresses the symptoms and not the causes of the underlying family issues; and third, it incentivises governments to not focus on those causes and simultaneously creates expectations that governments are both responsible for and have the capacity to solve all these issues.

What then is the takeout from this relatively deep dive into the data in plain view on the Productivity Commission dashboard and other Commonwealth webpages?

One might draw the following conclusions:

·       In terms of establishing a policy target for family violence, the current Closing the Gap Framework is not fit for purpose (an argument laid out in some detail in this November 2025 post: link here);

·       There is an urgent need to reformulate the target if the current architecture for Closing the Gap is to be maintained (an issue which I have recently argued would be unwise: link here);

·       There is a need to understand the drivers of family violence in remote regions much better than we currently do. The issues are of a different dimension in remote regions, and thus arguably are of a different nature, and thus have different causes and drivers.

·       The overwhelming conclusion however is that, as with hyper-incarceration (link here), the nation is confronted by a national crisis of monumental proportions in relation to family safety, domestic violence and child protection, and at present despite all the rhetoric around closing the gap the nation is bereft of an effective national policy response.

What this quick overview of the state of play in relation to child protection and family violence suggests, especially when considered in conjunction with the rhetorical ubiquity of ‘commitments’ to closing the gap is that our policymakers, and crucially our political system, are unable to ‘see’ what is in plain view. Data and analysis appear to count for little; pushed aside by self-interest, the influence of interest groups, and the incomprehension of the wider electorate in the face of the barrage of ongoing change that pervades the modern world. What appears to have been lost is a deep-seated and disinterested commitment to the wider public interest.

Emotion cuts through where analysis fails

Over the past two months The Australian has published a flurry of deeply concerning revelations concerning the circumstances leading up to the murder of three children by their Indigenous mother, Margaret Hawke in July 2022 in Port Hedland in WA. Margaret Hawke was subsequently convicted of murdering her children and sentenced to life imprisonment and will serve a minimum of 25 years (link here).

Following the deaths, the children's grandmother Dorothy Papertalk called for an inquest, but this was denied by then Coroner Phil Urquhart in July 2025. His reasons were provided to Ms Papertalk in a 13-page letter where he argued that an inquest was not in the public interest, and that he considered that the children’s deaths were not ‘predictable or preventable’. In his view ‘there was nothing [the Communities Department] could have done differently’. Mr Tony Buti, the WA Attorney General argued consistently that he could not overturn the Coroner’s decision without fresh evidence. In response, the WA Opposition introduced a Bill into the Upper House seeking to clarify the Attorney General’s powers to order a coronial inquest.  

The Australian’s extensive coverage, which amounts to in excess of fifty reports, opinion articles and editorials (likely totalling in excess of 50,000 words) began when it uncovered evidence that internal communications within the Department of Communities (the agency responsible for child welfare) identifying that the children were at risk of harm had lain unseen for over a week over the period when the deaths occurred.

The revelations expanded to report issues in Port Hedland relating to inter alia unsupervised Indigenous children living in public housing, allegations of sexual abuse of young girls by older men, reports that other agencies such as the police and the housing agency were aware of issues that were not addressed by the child protection staff. Coverage initially focussed on the WA Government’s refusal to reverse the coroner’s decision in 2025 to refuse an inquest and then segued into criticism and a political debate centred on the alleged failure of various ministers including the Premier to visit Hedland and respond appropriately to the crisis.  

A wide range of commentators were also quoted or given space to express their views, including former Federal and State politicians, prominent Indigenous commentators, legal experts, and local community members most notably the children’s grandmother Ms Papertalk. At one point, the Commonwealth Minister for Indigenous Australians, Malarndirri McCarthy, called on the Premier to initiate a review or inquiry, and Liberal Party Shadow minister for skills and training, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price made comments arguing that the Commonwealth should take over responsibility for Indigenous child protection.

In recent days several developments have occurred. In response to the mounting public pressure, the WA Ombudsman released details of an investigation he undertook in 2025 into the deaths of the children (link here and link here). The Commonwealth National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People has announced that she will undertake an independent review into the Pilbara Child Protection system (link here) and has released terms of reference (link here).

On Thursday 15 October 2026, Mr Buti finally announced that after personally reviewing the relevant files, he had decided that there was new evidence and had written to the coroner to request a Coronial Inquiry be undertaken. He also announced an internal review of the Coroners Act (link here and link here).

There is clearly a way to go with these issues. The Ombudsman Report is essentially a summary of what they considered but contains almost zero substantive analysis. The three recommendations are so vague as to be meaningless. For example, suggesting that the Department of Communities

develops a supervision framework and implementation plan that includes the monitoring and evaluation of case practice supervision for frontline child safety practitioners; and

takes steps to strengthen the effectiveness of current strategies for frontline child protection service delivery when the number of child safety practitioners in a District falls below critical staffing levels.

strike me as hollow and inconsequential to the point of absurdity. The third recommendation to the Police is similarly pointless. The review, completed in November 2025, appears more like a box-ticking exercise than a serious analysis of what transpired and what might be done better going forward. The Inquest will likely take at least a year and may raise numerous wider issues. The WA Government has now bent to the extraordinary public pressure. While a Coronial Inquest is welcome, and necessary, it will by definition focus narrowly on the deaths of the children. Important as that will be, it is not an adequate response.

An editorial in The Australian on 9 October 2026 was headlined: Inquest into child murders in Hedland only the start. It argued that the official response to The Australian’s reports of widespread abuse and neglect was ‘lamentable’. The editorial went on to say”

It is part of a bigger failing by governments at all levels. It reflects a loss of moral authority not confined to Indigenous affairs.

According to a statement issued by Catherine Liddle of SNAICC (link here), the WA Government commissioned from SNAICC a policy roadmap to guide implementation of its Closing the Gap commitments in 2022, which was finalised in September 2023, but then effectively shelved. According to Liddle:

The road map is a comprehensive way forward, to address key drivers of children coming into contact with the child protection system – poverty, housing insecurity and homelessness, family and domestic violence, a lack of culturally appropriate family-support services, and institutional racism. 

But the government mothballed its own report, ignoring the recommendations developed by the state’s Aboriginal community and its years of expertise, while Aboriginal children continue to be at risk. The government has never even made a formal response to the report. 

The Commonwealth National Commissioner’s review appears designed to reflect Indigenous voices but given its tight time frames and the wider pressures on the Commissioner, I suspect it will struggle to come to terms with the underlying drivers of severe dysfunction across multiple fronts and is unlikely to be taken seriously by either level of Government.

The Australian and its reporters, especially Ros Thomas, have clearly been fearless in pursuing this complex array of related issues and appear unlikely to let go quickly. I don’t agree with the underlying tone of some of the coverage and opinion pieces offered. Nevertheless, in my view, The Australian’s reports have made a remarkably important contribution to raising the profile of these issues.

It is unfortunate that the extraordinary data available in plain sight on the Productivity Commission Closing the Gap dashboard does not engender an equivalent level of concern: emotion invariably trumps analysis.  However, if that concern is to be transformed into substantive and effective policy change there will eventually be a need for hard-headed and rigorous analysis to be fed into the considerations of policymakers and governments. It strikes me that the issues raised by The Australian are a microcosm of much more fundamental challenges impacting Indigenous families nationally, and particularly across remote Australia. We should not lose sight of that fact.

While I am loath to make recommendations that are unlikely to be taken up, it is time for a serious, open and transparent national review process run by a capable, qualified and independent reviewer or reviewers aimed squarely at devising a new policy paradigm for family safety and child protection. Such an inquiry would necessarily examine afresh the assumptions on all sides of the political debate that have guided policy approaches to date. In this context, I will mention just two words that suggest just how difficult the challenge will be: alcohol and gambling.

There are no short term or easy solutions, and it seems clear that our existing political institutions are incapable of taking the nation forward in addressing these issues. Accordingly, there will need to be new institutions created which are beyond the reach of short-term politicking, and which are based on transparency and accountability to both Indigenous Australians and the wider public.  

The alternative is more of the same: more political patchwork; more social and bureaucratic dysfunction; more violence against women; more innocent children maimed, killed, and irreparably damaged and harmed.  In such a world, we all become ‘breachers’, breaching the trust we inherited from the architects of our political institutions, our forebears, and the trust we hope to pass on to our grandchildren. We should all expect much more of those who resort to violence, especially men, but those expectations ring hollow if we don’t expect more of ourselves in the face of outbreaks of extreme violence which serve to complement and reinforce the confronting and long-standing publicly available data which once truly ‘seen’ for what it is cannot be ‘unseen’.

 

16 October 2026

Everyone’s priority; no-one’s responsibility: a submission to the 2026 Review of Closing the Gap

 

 

…when we are sick in fortune—often the surfeit of our own behavior—we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion...

King Lear, Act one, Scene two.

 

My submission to the Productivity Commission's second triennial review of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap has now been published (link here; submission 11)

My starting point is that Closing the Gap is mainstream national policy, not simply an Indigenous program. It was built on the broad public concern that followed the 1967 referendum, and it will stand or fall on mainstream Australia's confidence that it is working. That confidence is fading. On the Commission's latest figures, only four of the nineteen socioeconomic targets are on track. Ten are either going nowhere or going backwards or cannot be assessed at all.

I argue that support for the current Closing the Gap framework, as well as the broader approach of governments towards addressing Indigenous aspirations, is in long-term decline. Without a new approach based on substantive reform informed by hard-headed analysis and policy narratives that engender trust in the wider electorate, the absence of support will lead to the risk that a future government simply abandons the framework.

The submission argues that the current crisis for the Closing the Gap failure emerges from the design choices built into the National Agreement. The current architecture has nine jurisdictions, nineteen targets, four Priority Reforms, hundreds of programs, more than 600 pages of Implementation Plans each year, and almost constant review. No single person can grasp the whole of it, and no single institution can be held to account for any particular outcome. Closing the Gap has become everyone's priority and no-one's responsibility.

The failure of the Closing the Gap framework and narrative is emblematic of a broader crisis confronting the wider Indigenous policy domain. A new national policy direction is required which in my view will only emerge if the Productivity Commission takes on a much wider remit than set down in the Treasurer’s Terms of Reference (link here) and recommends the significant reforms required along with a viable implementation pathway.

Two propositions are central in my arguments to the Commission:

1. Remote and non-remote Australia are different policy problems. The national targets could in principle be met almost entirely through improvements in urban and regional Australia, while remote communities stand still or go backwards. I propose separating the Agreement into two distinct frameworks.
2. The Review should chart a pathway to a reformed Closing the Gap architecture. In my view it must be built on radical simplification. I propose that such a pathway would require an independent estimate of what substantively closing the gap would actually cost, the development of a small number of high-level comparative targets owned by governments to underpin a long-term national project, and ten-year funded sectoral priorities designed jointly with relevant First Nations interests and which link funding to actual targets. The Commonwealth should lead as ‘first among equals’. I suggest it will be crucial to have a new architecture agreed and funded before the current targets expire in 2031 (some expire before then).

There is much more of interest in what is arguably an overlong submission.

I also recommend interested readers look at Jon Altman’s submission published as submission 9 (link here) which adopts a different, but important perspective on the challenges inherent in the Closing the Gap process.

The Commission's draft report is expected in April next year and the final report is to be finalised in August.

 

6 October 2026

 

This post has been drafted with research assistance from Claude (Anthropic).