Guest Post: Jon Altman on AINT and the ABA

 

This is the first Guest Post I have published on A Walking Shadow, so a short introductory explanation is in order.

Jon Altman is widely recognised as one of Australia’s pre-eminent scholars on Indigenous policy. I won’t seek to categorise him further as his prodigious output over many decades defies simple categorization. He is an Emeritus Professor at the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet) within the ANU College of Law, Governance and Policy. He is also a Director of Karrkad Kanjdji Trust (link here) which operates across Arnhem Land with a diverse focus on supporting ‘healthy country’.

Just one of his abiding interests has been the policy issues around land, culture, traditional use of land resources, land rights, native title, Indigenous economic development, royalties, mining on Indigenous land, and the Aboriginals Benefit Account in the NT.

I first met Jon when I was working for the Central Land Council and he was researching his 1983 book Aborigines and Mining Royalties in the Northern Territory, and subsequently worked closely with him on the Review he chaired at the request of the then Government published in 1985 as the Report on the Review of the Aboriginals Benefit Trust Account (and Related Financial Matters) in the Northern Territory Land Rights Legislation. Since then, we have collaborated formally and informally on various projects and publications related to these wide-ranging issues. A long-winded way of saying that we share a longstanding interest in the policy issues which underpin the financial architecture of the NT Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976, legislation that an academic historian at the ANU described in a seminar last week as the ‘highwater mark of Australian land rights legislation’.

When I published my post yesterday on AINT titled Confusion Abounds (link here), Jon sent me the short paper he had written on the same subject. While our two papers were written independently, they cover much of the same ground, albeit from somewhat different perspectives. In many ways they are serendipitously complementary. Bearing in mind Shakespeare’s observation in Hamlet (V ii): ‘There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will’, it seemed too good an opportunity to miss. Hence my offer to Jon to publish his short article on this Blog, an offer I am extremely pleased he has agreed to accept. He has asked me to make clear that the views expressed are his alone and arise from his role as an independent academic.  The text below comprises Jon’s paper.

 

Jon Altman: How is NTAIC/AINT travelling three years on?

The ABA or Aboriginals Benefit Account is an institution established by ALRA in 1976 whereby the equivalents of royalties raised from mineral extraction on Aboriginal-owned land in the NT is reserved for Aboriginal, not just landowner, use.

The ABA has a history dating back to 1952 and an earlier fund the Aborigines (Benefits from Mining) Trust Fund or ABTF. This progressive arrangement was initiated by then Minister for Interior Paul Hasluck, the royalties were generated from mining on Aboriginal reserves.

Since 1978, in accord with ALRA, these payments were principally applied in four ways: a proportion (usually 40%) was paid to administer land councils, 30% was paid to the traditional owners of the land where a particular mine was operating, and the balance was either paid as grants to or for Aboriginal people (via incorporated organisations) in the NT.

For some unclear reason never properly explained, from 1978 payments out of the ABA were levied a mining withholding tax set at 20% of the base tax rate, a current impost of 4%. This amendment to tax law was imposed after land rights law was passed.

A summary table that I have compiled of the income and expenditure of the ABA 1978-79 to 24-25, a period of some 46 years, indicates that an estimated $5.3 billion in MREs have been paid to the ABA from consolidated revenue, with an additional $512 million earned in interest giving the ABA a total income of $5.9 billion. Note that MREs are then reduced by 4% through the levying of the mining withholding tax.

Of this amount a total of $1.58 billion (30%) has been paid to traditional owner organisations in areas affected by mining as required by law. $1.6 billion (30%) has been paid to the four NT land councils to claim and then administer Aboriginal-owned land that now covers 50% of terrestrial NT; and $928 million has been paid in grants to or for the benefit of Aboriginal people in the NT. This last amount constitutes about 15.7% of total ABA income as grants have generally been paid from interest income to avoid the MWT. The balance was held in reserve and by the end of the 2021-22 financial year this totaled $1.4 billion.

This arrangement has prevailed for much of the last 50 years since the passage of ALRA with two exceptions.

In 2007, ALRA was amended to allow the leasing of townships for 99 years with lease payments to be made to organisations representing traditional owners of townships. Since 2007-08 $108 million has been paid to the traditional owners of a handful of townships that have adopted these arrangements. The $108 million is to be repaid with $28 million (26%) returned to the ABA to date.

In 2021, ALRA was again amended with the establishment of the NT Aboriginal Investment Corporation or NTAIC that has subsequently been renamed Aboriginal Investments NT or AINT.

This new arrangement has had a long gestation.

The original statutory arrangements under ALRA legislated for the establishment of an ABA Advisory Committee that would make grant recommendations to be approved by the Minister for Indigenous Affairs.

A review of the ABA completed in 1984 that I chaired criticized these arrangements as paternalistic and counter to the principle of self-determination and recommended that in five years’ time, that is by 1989, the ABA Advisory Committee be delegated full granting powers.

This proposition was revisited from 2016 in negotiations between Ministers Scullion and then Wyatt and the four Aboriginal land councils and incorporated in amendments to ALRA in 2021.

However, and there is always a however, what eventuated has been somewhat different from what was envisioned in 1984.

In establishing NTAIC as a corporate Commonwealth entity, the amendments did not guarantee the new body a future flow of MREs but rather made it a one-off allocation of $680 million. This amount represented 49% of the $1.4 billion the ABA held in reserve in 2021-22.

In effect, the government with the support of the four NT land councils was establishing a new body that would take over by and large the somewhat cumbersome granting functions of the ABA. I say be and large because the ABA still holds $800 million (at 30 June 2025) that the Minister for Indigenous Australians can allocate at her discretion.

And the board of the new authority includes two independent members nominated by land councils and two members nominated by government, with the other eight being representatives (at two each) of the four land councils.

The new authority is subject to scrutiny under the the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013 (PGPA Act) established to ensure a coherent system of governance and accountability for public resources, with an emphasis on planning, performance and reporting.

This indicates that whether MREs raised on Aboriginal owned lands are public as argued by government or private as argued by Aboriginal interests, an issue that was hotly debated in 1984 when the ABA was reviewed, has been resolved in favour of the government’s position.

It is early days, just three years on from the operationalization of NTAIC in April 2023 it is difficult to make any definitive judgments on how effectively the new arrangements are operating and whether they are superior to the old arrangements.

NTAIC has published two annual reports for 2022-23 and 2023-24 and AINT somewhat belatedly a report for 2024-25 that was published on its website and then removed.

Arguably, the new arrangements are just in the ‘bedding down’ phase and AINT is proceeding cautiously given its operations under the PGPA Act carapace.

But in my opinion, there are already some worrying signs, some of which I predicted in my critical submission to a parliamentary committee that briefly scrutinized the amendments bill in late 2021 (link here).

The AINT (let’s stick to its most recent name) website provides quite a few documents: annual reports for 2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25 (for a time) and three corporate plans (the latest for 2025-2029). There is also the Strategic Investment Plan required before $500 million was released from the ABA and to invest; and a summary of all grants made by NTAIC then AINT to 31 March 2026, with many being legacy grants from the ABA.

I have scrutinized these documents that aim to ensure a high degree of transparency and accountability.

The central message is that AINT is ‘Backing Aboriginal led development through innovative investment’.

Simultaneously, there are two broad objects that are not necessarily compatible: to deliver self-management and economic self-sufficiency to Aboriginal people living in the NT; and to ensure the social and cultural wellbeing of Aboriginal people living in the NT.

Note that these objects refer to Aboriginal people living in the NT not traditional owners of land or Aboriginal people (and one assumes Torres Strait Islanders) born in and of the NT.

These are AINT’s interpretation of ALRA’s requirement that s64 (4) grants are applied to or for the benefit of Aboriginal people in the NT.

As noted earlier, prior to the amendment of ALRA $928 million has been allocated as grants since 1978-79 and in recent years have totaled in the region of $60 million (2020-21) growing to $97.7 million in 2023-24.

To deliver on these goals AINT’s strategy is to make three types of grants – community quick response grants (up to $20,000 each), community impact and innovation grants and business grants – alongside in a Future Fund.

When ALRA was amended and NTAIC was created as a corporate Commonwealth entity it was allocated $680 million from the ABA, $60 million per annum for three years to maintain grants more or less at existing levels (in recent years) and $500 million for a Future Fund that would generate annual sustainable allocations in perpetuity from which to make grants.

The publicly available information on AINT’s grant making is difficult to interpret.

Audited financial statements verified by the ANAO indicate that no grants were made in 2022-23, $9.1 million in 2023-24, and $19 million in 2024-25.

But a 26-page document on the AINT website that lists NTAIC grants made between 2022 and 2025 (actually to 31 March 2026) tells a somewhat different story.

It shows that 30 quick response grants with a total value of $310,171 were approved; 15 community impact and innovation grants totaling $11.86 million; and 83 business grants totaling $8 million. Additionally, 131 grants totaling $38.7 million are listed as approved under NTAIC’s grants program guidelines 2022-2025 are listed (with 4 double-counted). On can only assume that most of these grants were made under the ABA rather than NTAIC/AINT banner?

This list matches, more or less, the message of the headline summary (link here): 250+organisations supported with grants totaling $60.3 million. This total figure over three years to 31 March 2026 (at an average of $20 million per annum) is significantly less than the 64 (4) grants made in each year since 2021-22.

I make just a few comments about immediate issues of concern.

First, to date, the granting operations of AINT appear expensive: in 2023-24 $9.2 million was granted with wages and salaries and directors’ annual fees totaling $5 million; in 2024-25, the ratio was better at $19 million in grants at a cost of $6.2 million. Admittedly these figures are inclusive of activities beyond grant making undertaken by AINT, but it is noteworthy that prior to the amendment of ALRA in 2021 these costs were borne by government not the ABA. Apparent independence comes at a real cost.

Second, much of the published strategic investment and corporate planning of AINT including its ‘theory of change’ seems to over-promise: AINT might articulate a vision to ‘back Aboriginal led development through innovative investment’ but it is far from clear what resources it will have at its disposal to do this, especially as its risk-averse goal is to earn a minimum 3% (+CPI) on its Future Fund of $500 million: even a doubling of this rate of return will only provide $30 million per annum, less than granted by the ABA in recent years. I suspect with such lofty goals expectations will be increasingly difficult for the AINT board of directors to manage.

Third, and perhaps most worrying, is the relationship between AINT and the ABA. When the ABA review of 1984 recommended Aboriginal-led independence for the ABA’s granting function it envisioned that MREs would continue to flow to be applied to or for the benefit of Aboriginal people in the NT. The current arrangements fall way short of that historical proposal. Not only does the Minister currently control a larger financial pool than AINT, but her pool will grow with annual injections of MREs, while the AINT pool has no guarantee of growth irrespective of how much resource extraction occurs on Aboriginal-owned land in the NT.

It strikes me that the immediate struggle to gain some Aboriginal control of some ABA funds has been successful. One could argue optimistically that ‘from little things big things grow’ and with time AINT will persuade future governments to transfer a greater proportion of MREs to AINT on an ongoing basis. Less optimistically one might argue that some of the structural shortcomings in the ALRA amendments foreshadowed in 2021 will undermine any attempt to productively deploy a share of MREs ‘to or for the benefit [and unquestionable need] of Aboriginal people in the NT’. It beggars belief that during five years of negotiation to amend ALRA between 2016 and 2021 some of these fundamental problems were not considered and resolved.

 

JCA 8 April 2026

Confusion abounds: the AINT strategy for the coming decade

My thoughts are whirled like a potter’s wheel;

I know not where I am, nor what I do.

1 Henry VI, Act two, Scene four.

Aboriginal Investment NT (AINT) is a corporate Commonwealth entity established in November 2022 under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (ALRA). Initially named NT Aboriginal Investment Corporation, the operational name was changed by ministerial fiat from Northern Territory Aboriginal Investment Corporation (NTAIC) to Aboriginal Investment NT (AINT) in August 2024.

There are 12 board members: two appointed by each of the four Northern Territory land councils, two appointed by the Australian Government, and two appointed by the board. Board membership is specified in section 65EA of the ALRA. The board appoints a CEO who is responsible for day-to-day administration. Under the PGPA Act, the board is the accountable authority for Aboriginal Investment NT.

AINT was funded from the Aboriginals Benefit Account (ABA), with an initial $680 million over three years to invest and provide grants to Indigenous businesses and communities across the Northern Territory. The ABA is established by the ALRA to receive and distribute funds generated from mining on Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory. Section 64AA of the ALRA sets out funding arrangements for the Northern Territory Aboriginal Corporation, also known as Aboriginal Investment NT. The $680m for investment and grants was allocated under subsection 64AA of the ALRA. AINT’s purpose is:

• To promote the self-management and economic self-sufficiency of Aboriginal people living in the Northern Territory (NT); and

• To promote social and cultural wellbeing of Aboriginal people living in the NT.

The outline above was taken from the 2024 ANAO Performance Audit (paragraphs 1.9 to 1.12). The text has been paraphrased to incorporate some footnotes and improve accessibility:

The ANAO 2024 Performance Audit

In December 2024, the ANAO published a Performance Audit examining the management of conflicts of interest by three portfolio agencies within the Aboriginal Australians portfolio, including for present purposes AINT (link here). The report is useful for a number of reasons, including for the high-level overview of the formal legislative and regulatory approach of the Commonwealth to conflict-of-interest issues in relation to Commonwealth agencies. Paragraphs 1 to 4 of the Summary and Recommendations section of the ANAO Report outline these, and Appendix 3 provides more detail in respect to the relevant legislative provisions.

AINT was established in 2022, and the ANAO audit was clearly designed to provide an early snapshot of the state of compliance.

The ANAO high level conclusions are outlined in paragraphs 13 to 15:

13. … Aboriginal Investment NT …. [was] partly effective in the management of conflicts of interest. While there were frameworks in place to manage conflicts of interest, there were shortcomings with the implementation of those frameworks. There were deficiencies with the documentation of board consideration of conflicts and documentation of conflicts of interest declarations and management actions for procurement, recruitment and grant activity.

14….  Aboriginal Investment NT [has] developed largely appropriate arrangements to manage conflict of interest consistent with legislative requirements of corporate Commonwealth entities …

15. The entities were partly effective in implementing arrangements for managing conflicts of interest. Board assessments of declarations of interest were not sufficient to record whether the board had determined declarations to be material personal interests. Aboriginal Investment NT’s board did not include declarations of interests in three out of session meetings and a workshop and did not always record the nature and extent of declared conflicts. There were instances of Aboriginal Investment NT Grants Committee members with declared conflicts of interest recommending grant applications for board approval ….  Aboriginal Investment NT did not adequately document conflict of interest management for procurement as required by its policy.

Most of these issues appear to have been addressed subsequent to the performance audit, but their early emergence demonstrates both the internal pressures in play in what are cross-cultural organisations, and the risks that continue into the future.

The AINT 2024-25 Annual Report

Under the PGPA Act, the AINT report was due on October 30, 2025. The AINT advised the Minister that the ANAO had experienced delays in finalising the audit, and as a result the Minister initially agreed to an extension to the end of November and then extended it to the end of February (link here). In the event the Annual Report was published on the AINT website in the first week of March 2026. The Chair wrote to the Minister providing a copy of the audited financial statements on 18 February, the accountable authority statement was signed by the AINT Chair, CEO and Chief Operating Officer on 19 February 2026, the unqualified ANAO audit opinion was signed on 20 February 2026. We live in strange times where time appears to move backwards (at least in the NT). The financial statements (without the ANAO audit opinion) are also available on the ACNC web site as the AINT has charitable status. Somewhat bizarrely, the Annual Report has since been removed from the AINT website and is not available on the Department of Finance Transparency Portal. To my knowledge, there has been no explanation provided by either the Minister or AINT for this action.

In addition to the apparent reversal of time, there is an unfortunate error in the heading to the figures in Note 10 to the (original) financial statements page 92 which has the effect of multiplying the relevant management personnel salaries one thousand times. It is not clear if this will be remedied when the Annual Report is finally republished. I do not believe that this is the reason for the withdrawal of the report as this error also occurs in the equivalent section on page 82 of the previous AINT 2023-24 Annual Report.

Given the comparative complexity of the AINT financial statements, and the delayed release of the report, the 2025 ACNC Annual Information Statement (link here) provides the best current snapshot of the AINT’s overall financial status. This shows that in June 2025, the AINT held net assets/liabilities of $693.3m. This comprised current assets of $422.9m (comprising according to the more detailed financial statements $300m in cash and cash equivalents and $100m in ‘other investments’), and non-current assets of $272.5m. Liabilities were only $2.1m. It seems likely that the non-current assets are all invested in the AINT Unit Trust (see below). It is unclear if any of the current assets are also in the Unit Trust.

The AINT Strategic Plan (available on its website) is built around the establishment of two Funds, the Future Fund and the Community Ready Fund. The Future Fund invests the AINT corpus, the Community Ready Fund is utilised for financing AINT operations and ongoing grants. See page 32 of the Strategic Plan for the best description of the Future Fund so far made public. Section 7 of the Strategic Plan describes the approach of the Community Ready Fund including some one-off allocations which allow the project grant profile to continue in the short term above the long-term level available from the Future Fund. See the graph on page 51 displaying the forecast grant spend from the Fund into the next four years.

The Annual Performance Statement in the Annual Report (pages 32-37) reports that both funds delivered above target returns over the past year.. In a section titled Investment Performance, AINT reports that the Future Fund achieved an annualised return of 5.8%, exceeding its benchmark target of CPI plus 3%. (In contrast, on page 36, the report states that the Future Fund achieved a 5.9% return). At 30 June 2025, the Future Fund held $522.5m in assets, comprising $100m in term deposits and $226.3m in cash awaiting investment. This suggests that $182m was invested. The Community Ready Fund delivered 4.9% return against its more modest target of CPI plus 1%. Its balance on 30 June was not stated, but the report notes that the fund ‘was fully invested with $120.6m deployed…’ While the investment returns are useful, without knowing the quantum of the funds invested, readers have little idea of their real significance.

Somewhat confusingly, the section on Financial Results (pages 68-69) refers to the commencement of investment activities through the AINT Unit Trust, a controlled entity established to manage long term investments. The AINT financial statements provide just a single column which consolidates the operations of both the AINT and the Unit Trust. A more transparent approach would be to do as the ILSC did before the recent sale of Voyages and list both the ILSC and the consolidated financials in separate columns. The Notes to the Financial Statements (Note 11) refer to the expenditure of $305m to purchase units in the Unit Trust during 2024-25, but this figure cannot be tracked into the financial statements themselves. The AINT Unit Trust presumably holds the $182m invested in the Future Fund and the $120.6m ‘deployed’ by the Community Ready Fund, which totals $302.6m.

Apart from Note 11 to the Financial Statements which lists fees of $717k in 2024-25 to advisory firms CIML and JANA paid from the Unit Trust, there is no reference in the Annual Report to the management fees and investment advice fees that underpin the Unit Trust arrangements. However the Senate Entity Contracts Listing for 2024-25 published on the AINT website lists contracted management fees for CIML over five years to 2029 as $19.24m and for JANA for investment advice over the five years as $1.9m. Combined, these two contracted firms will cost an average of $4.2m per annum for the next five years to manage the AINT investments within the AINT Unit Trust.

Not only is the Annual Report’s description of the relationship between the AINT Unit Trust and the two Funds operated by AINT opaque and indeed, confusing, but it is also unclear just how the AINT exercises its control over the Trustees as the Trust Deed between AINT and CIML does not appear to have been published or summarised in any public documentation. What is clear is that the AINT Investment Committee and in particular its Chair Peeyush Gupta and member Richard Brandweiner (both of whom come from finance backgrounds) play crucial roles in managing the Future Fund, and the Unit Trust investments. These two were the only Investment Committee members to attend all 7 meetings of the Committee during the financial year (see page 51 of the Annual Report).

Given the potential complexities involved I asked my AI research assistant Claude for its view on the rationale for using such a structure. Given the tax-free status of the AINT, it responded inter alia as follows:

Compliance and reputational signalling arguably becomes the dominant remaining rationale. A [tax free] charitable entity established by Commonwealth legislation faces heightened scrutiny — from the ACNC, from its enabling legislation's oversight mechanisms, and potentially from parliamentary accountability processes. Holding investments through a formally constituted unit trust with a corporate trustee, a trust deed, and defined investment mandates demonstrates structured stewardship of assets in a way that direct holding does not. It creates a paper trail and governance architecture that can withstand external scrutiny.

The candid assessment is that for a sole-owner tax-exempt charitable entity, the unit trust structure offers relatively thin functional advantages compared to direct investment or a subsidiary company. The structure makes most sense if the trust deed itself — through its investment mandate and distribution rules — serves a constraining or accountability function, or if there is a genuine prospect of admitting other investors in future. If neither applies, the administrative overhead of maintaining a separate trustee, trust deed, and unit register may outweigh the residual benefits. [emphasis added]

The question worth asking in this context is whether the structure was chosen for sound governance reasons at the outset, or whether it persists as inherited architecture that has never been critically examined against the entity's actual circumstances.

These are more substantive questions that the AINT has not, so far, envisaged being asked, let alone answering. In my view, the AINT would be well advised to consider reframing future statutory reports to provide clearer and more transparent information about its investment operations.

A critique of the AINT Investment Strategy

 I should begin by noting that I was (amongst many others) a critic of the legislation establishing AINT for several reasons. My post from November 2021 titled Opportunities and Risks (link here) provides a high level critique of the proposed legislation (as it then was) establishing NTAIC (now AINT). For those interested in exploring the issues raised in more detail there is a link to the various submissions to the Legislation Committee considering the Bill and unsurprisingly I recommend reading my submission. It takes a wider lens than just the proposed corporation, and deals with the systemic conflicts that I suggested would inevitably emerge. I don’t propose to focus on this wider picture here but instead will focus on the potential alternative investment strategies available to NTAIC.

In relation to the operations of the Community Ready Fund, I don’t wish to say too much. It is clearly the ‘front of house’ for the AINT, and until recently there has clearly been a legacy of approved grants that had to be processed and finalised. In the discussion in the Strategi Plan of its objectives, there are four separate areas of focus, plus a vague commitment to focus on sector-based activities. The four foci are (i) grants, (ii) collective impact initiatives, (iii) place-based investments, and (iv) strategic investment. Areas (iii) and (iv) together encompass so called nation building investment. This strikes me as on over-engineered attempt to make the grants process look coherent and rational. To my mind it is both too all-encompassing (‘everything is a potential focus and priority’) and thus easily subverted for political or other reasons.

I will make two high level conceptual points that in my view the AINT should consider seriously. First, there is much greater impact in supporting high quality grass roots organisations with positive track records which deliver valuable services on the ground. It would be particularly valuable to identify elements of their activities that governments are not prepared to fund and/or elements that build organisational resilience. Second, for small Indigenous businesses, I would suggest that instead of grants that the AINT consider experimenting with low value interest free loans that are repayable once the business meets particular revenue or profit thresholds and are written off after a set period (say ten years) if those thresholds are not met.

In relation to the Future Fund, I have more serious reservations about the utility of the strategy that has been adopted. The current investment corpus appears to total around $500m to $600m. Taking $500m as the base, if the investment target is met, and there were zero distributions the Future Fund will compound each year and grow to $672m in current dollars over ten years. If the 3% growth ($15m pa) is fully distributed, the fund will continue to be valued at $500m over the decade. If say half of the growth was distributed each year ($7.5m) then the fund would grow to $581m over the decade. It is unclear if the target growth rate is net of management fees, but at $4m per annum that either cuts into the available funds for distribution or adds an effective premium of 0.7% to the target (i.e. it must actually return CPI plus 3.7% to allow $15m pa to be distributed on average). A long-term investment return of around $15m per annum will not sustainably fund the projected level of grant expenditure of $40m. Such a spend rate will either require additional injections of capital or lead to a reduction in the AINT investment corpus over time.

Given the passive nature of the Fund at present, and the current level of advisory fees, there may be merit in considering whether it would be more cost effective to utilise the Commonwealth Future Fund as a fund manager. This is the course adopted by the Commonwealth to manage the Land Fund which provides the annual revenue base for the ILSC.

The bottom line here is that the AINT has established what is effectively an endowment fund and without further injections of capital, and effective and serious constraints on transfers to the Community Ready Fund (which would lead to a loss of political support for AINT within the NT Indigenous community), it is unlikely to grow substantially beyond its current size. Even were a Commonwealth minister to inject further funds into the Future Fund from the ABA, say to double it to $1bn, the annual funds available for distribution would only be around $30m in current dollars. This does have the potential (if targeted and sustained) to make some difference in selected areas or sectors, but it is not going to ‘build intergenerational wealth’ for anywhere near the majority of Indigenous Territorians. This is the objective of the Future Fund as laid out in the AINT Strategic Plan, yet the rhetoric does not match the reality.

What then is the alternative?

My strong suggestion would be to adopt an entirely different approach aimed at leveraging the available capital to invest directly in a select number of sectors and enterprises in the NT that for one reason or another have not attracted either government or private sector investment in the past and which are also of direct relevance and significance to either remote communities and/or the Aboriginal community writ large. Sectors that are crying out for such a ‘social impact investment’ approach include establishing community housing entity to operate across the Territory, building a Territory wide disability coalition or service providing disability services funded by accessing mainstream funds from the NDIS, building an expanded territory wide mobile dental service, taking up an equity position across multiple Aboriginal owned building companies thus allowing them to access more capital both directly and indirectly. There are numerous other opportunities of a similar kind (see the link to the Centrecorp Foundation below). My assumption is that the AINT investments must be commercially based (i.e. designed not to lose money) and should actively seek to leverage their capital and Indigenous access to find commercial partners to take up influential stakes in commercial opportunities which directly provide benefits for Indigenous Territorians. I accept that this approach appears high risk but doing nothing (or a bare minimum) with available capital while persuading yourself that you are building wealth delivers certain failure. It will require sustained and strong governance, a disciplined approach to strategy, and strong commercial acumen, but these are not an unthinkable aspiration for Indigenous interests.

Examples of this broad approach include Indigenous Business Australia in Canberra, and the extraordinarily impressive Centrecorp Foundation in Alice Springs (link here) which manages a portfolio of assets valued at around $250m. Centrecorp has invested in core commercial real estate in the Alice Springs CBD, Darwin, and a number of other regional centres, some residential housing opportunities in Central Australia, and is a substantial owner of the major Toyota supplier in Central Australia and a major hire car business. These businesses operate across the Indigenous / non-Indigenous commercial domains and have been very successful in building credibility for Indigenous interests within the commercial circles in Central Australia. One consequence of such a strategy, if executed successfully, would be to build real political influence for Indigenous interests within the NT.

Confusion abounds

The confusion related to the delayed finalisation of the audited financial statements and the stop/go/stop imbroglio with the 2025 Annual Report are in the scheme of things of minor import. The early missteps over conflict-of-interest processes identified by the ANAO are easily rectified.

The confusion arising from the opaque relationship between the two strategic funds and the AINT Unit Trust is more significant as it reflects a degree of transparency failure which works against clear and rational thinking about the substantive reality and constraints facing AINT and its current investment strategy. The most significant consequence of portraying transparently the limited opportunities built into the AINT are the lost opportunities that nevertheless might be harnessed from the not inconsiderable quantum of financial assets under AINT management.

A major driver of these lost opportunities is the lack of clarity in the AINT’s various governance reports around the serious limitations in the outcomes negotiated by the Commonwealth and the Land Councils in 2021, which in turn arise from the systemic and structural conflicts of interest between the land councils and the wider Indigenous community in the NT, and the separate desire of the Commonwealth to respond to the longstanding demand from Indigenous interests for greater control over the ABA, while off-loading admin costs for grant management yet retaining substantive control. For an explanation of these in more detail, I refer readers (again) to my submission (#4) to the Legislation Committee in considering the legislation that established AINT in2021 (link here). That lack of clarity around the reality of the limitations of the legislation and thus the AINT, suggests that the confusion which pervades the AINT’s operations is in fact built into its institutional architecture.

For AINT, the most important factor in its ultimate success or failure will be whether it develops the capacity to think strategically about the opportunity matrix it faces and the capacity to act decisively to execute a cogent and considered plan. Confusion is the enemy of both prerequisites. Or as Mark Twain is reputed to have said:

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

 

7 April 2026

ANAO financial audits and the case for ALRA reform

 

Come, I have learned that fearful commenting

Is leaden servitor to dull delay;

Delay leads impotent and snail-paced beggary

Richard III, Act four, Scene four

In early December, I published a post on the absence of the Annual Reports for the ALC and AINT prior to Estimates. In that post I was critical of the fact that no formal extension for the delay appeared to have been granted. There was no statement to the Estimates Committee hearing advising Committee members and the public that the reports had been delayed and extensions granted. I have now belatedly discovered that the relevant approvals were sought and granted and the documents were tabled (link here and link here). Those approvals only extended to 30 November, and do not appear to have been renewed or further extended. The tabled correspondence identifies resource constraints within the ANAO as the reason for the AINT audit delay, and staff turnover for the ALC delay. This post suggests that there may be other issues in play as well.

In December, shortly before the end of 2025, the ANAO published a report titled Audits of the Financial Statements of Australian Government Entities for the Period Ended 30 June 2025 (link here). The ANAO helpfully note upfront that:

3.1 A financial statements audit is finalised when the auditor has formed an opinion on the financial statements, and that opinion has been expressed through a written report….

After providing some high-level data on audit completions, the ANAO reported:

3.7 There were four entities for which the 2024–25 financial statements audit had not been finalised by the ANAO as at 30 November 2025. They were Anindilyakwa Land Council, Northern Territory Aboriginal Investment Corporation, Aboriginal Investment NT Trust, and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service. Further details are included in Chapter 4.

I don’t propose to pursue the issues around the ASIS audit apart from noting that there do not appear to be further details in the DFAT portfolio entry in Chapter 4 nor is ASIS listed in the Report Appendix. Secrecy prevails in the world of espionage! Presumably the Inspector General of Intelligence (link here) will be following through on this issue.

The ANAO report includes an extended analysis of the timeliness of annual reports (paras 3.11 to 3.24). This indicates that some 20 agencies reports had not been tabled as at 30 November 2025 (para 3.24) representing 11% of the agency reports requires to be tabled. Of these however (as indicated above) only four relate to the non-completion of the audit. Three of the four relate to the entities established by the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (ALRA) administered by the Minister for Indigenous Australians and funded from appropriations to the Aboriginals Benefit Account (ABA) established under ALRA. In contrast to the tabled documents seeking and providing approval for extensions, the ANAO make no comment regarding the cause of the delays.

In relation to the Northern Territory Aboriginal Investment Corporation (AINT) and the Aboriginal Investment NT Trust, there is no information in the ANAO report apart from the advice that the audit is continuing. There is no indication on its website (link here) advising the delay in the finalisation of the annual report. The website does list the contracts entered into in 2024-25 as required by a Senate Order (link here) which indicates that the AINT has entered into a contract with CIML (an investment advisory firm) for the ‘management of Investment Trust’ with an associated cost of $19,243,073. If this payment is in fact the cost of the management of the investment trust, which according to the 2023-24 AINT annual report (page 76) potentially totals $560m (this being the amount expected to be received from the ABA), then the amount of $19m appears on its face potentially excessive. It amounts to 3.39 percent of the investment fund (but might conceivably be for multiple years). When I asked my own AI adviser (Anthropic’s Claude) about the likely fees typical investment advisers would charge, it replied:

If the trust is managed by a genuine institutional investor such as …a government investment agency; a sovereign wealth fund; a large corporate trustee with pooled institutional assets, then yes, you'd typically see those lower institutional rates of 0.10-0.30%, or even lower for very large mandates.

Assuming a rate of 0.30%, the annual cost for a fund of $560m would be $1.68m. The listing of both AINT and the AINT Trust suggests that the ANAO are delving more deeply into these arrangements. Of course, there may be circumstances of which we are not aware that explain these payments, and apart from the questions raised above, there are no indications of issues of concern at this point. However, ina previous post I expressed my scepticism of the broader context underlying the establishment of AINT and the implicit assumptions that seem to have taken hold (link here). There is one other interesting item included in the AINT Entity Contracts listing: Yamagigu Consulting were paid $267k for ‘Nation Building Consulting’ for four months work. Yamagigu were the governance advisers chosen by the ALC when the NIAA required them to appoint a governance adviser following the termination of the former CEO Mr Hewitt.

Anindilyakwa Land Council

There is no further mention of the ALC in the ANAO report apart from Appendix One where it is listed and annotated with the words ‘Audit not yet completed’.

Notwithstanding the parsimonious details, it is possible to hazard a guess at what may be delaying the audit report for the ALC by considering the commentary provided related to the audits of the three other NT land councils.

The ANAO identified seven instances across the whole government sector of serious legislative non-compliance, which it described in the following terms (para 3.61):

Significant legislative breaches include instances of significant potential or actual breaches of the Constitution; and instances of significant non-compliance with the entity’s enabling legislation, legislation that the entity is responsible for administering, and the PGPA Act.

Of these seven, two related to NT land councils (see para 3.62).

In relation to the Northern Land Council: Royalty Trust Account:

The ANAO identified contracts where the distribution of royalty monies to traditional owners was not made within six months, as required under subsections 35(3) and 35(4) of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976;

Further details can be found at paragraphs 4.14.71 to 4.14.78.

In relation to the Tiwi land Council: Non-compliance with the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976. Further details are available at paras. 4.14.87 to 4.14.94. For reasons that will become evident, it is worth recounting this issue in full:

4.14.90 The ALRA Act establishes TLC’s responsibilities for payments in respect of Aboriginal land, requiring payment of an amount equal to amounts received to, or for the benefit of, the traditional owners of the land, within six months after that amount is received through the Royalty Trust Account. Previous audits have identified non-compliance with this requirement of the ALRA Act.

4.14.91 During the 2023–24 audit, the ANAO identified that a total of $808,000 of royalties had been held by TLC for more than 6 months. TLC sought advice regarding distribution of the funds by an alternative mechanism to an identified Aboriginal Corporation who would then pay the funds to the appropriate traditional owners to assist with their township leasing rental payments in accordance with Section 35(4B) and Section 36 of the ALRA Act. These sections of the ALRA Act require that any funds received by TLC from the Aboriginals Benefits Account must be paid to a relevant Aboriginal Corporation within six months of receipt.

4.14.92 TLC advised the ANAO that it has taken all reasonable steps to comply with subsection 35(4B) of the ALRA Act, which requires payment to an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Corporation for the benefit of traditional owners.

4.14.93 As no such corporation currently exists, TLC sought Ministerial approval under subsection 35(5) for an alternative payment method. The Minister declined the proposal and did not issue a determination to enable compliance with subsection 35(4B). [emphasis added]

4.14.94 During the 2024–25 final audit, the ANAO noted that funds continue to be held in TLC’s land use funds account. The TLC advised the ANAO that it is awaiting the establishment and registration of a corporation by the Wulirankuwu clan group with ORIC before releasing the funds. TLC is providing administrative support to Tiwi Resources Pty Ltd to assist with progressing this establishment

I found the bolded text above intriguing. While the ANAO remit does not extend to assessing the actions of Ministers, the factual recounting of the Minister’s decision not to issue a determination raises legitimate questions. The obvious question of course is, why did the Minister decide to allow the legislative breach to continue and be ongoing rather than take the decision to distribute the funds as provided for in the Act? Did she just fail to respond, or did she provide the TLC with reasons? If not, why not?

While legislative compliance is important for obvious reasons, the actual consequences of these breaches on the life opportunities of the relevant land council constituencies are minimal. However, this may not be the case in relation to the broad swathe of events over the past few years on Groote. Nevertheless, I have recounted these two cases because they suggest the audit strategy being pursued by the ANAO in its financial audits. They point to a new focus on royalty distributions and the relationships between the land councils and the corporations that are the beneficiaries of the relevant section 64(3) payments.

While we do not know just what has given rise to the delays in the ALC audit, one obvious supposition would be that it relates to the relationship between the ALC and the key corporations which have received the bulk of the ALC section 64(3) payments over the past six years or so. I dealt with these issues in my recent post titled The Angels Weep (link here). I have long ago formed the view that the ALC (at least under its former CEO Mr Hewitt) has utilised its financial assistance and cross board appointments to several corporations to which it is allocating royalty equivalent payments to exercise effective control over those corporations and have argued that this would be both a legislative breach and would undermine the accuracy of the ALC financial statements. The facts supporting the development of my view were first laid out in the ANAO performance audit of the ALC published in 2023 (link here).

In this context, it is worth noting that none of the four corporations that might be said to be at the centre of this ‘effective control’ issue (ARAC, AAAC, GHAC and Anindilyakwa Leaders Future Fund Aboriginal Corporation) has yet posted their 2024-25 financial reports on the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations website, and thus all four are technically in breach of the CATSI Act. While I suspect that the Registrar normally gives corporations some leeway in posting their financial reports, it is of concern that none of them has yet done so. It is my understanding (though I stand to be corrected) that the ALC provides assistance to all four corporations with their financial record keeping, and thus these reporting problems potentially signal deeper issues and problems within the ALC. This is despite the assistance provided during the last financial year by governance advisory firm Yamagigu, at considerable cost. Moreover, AAAC (which owns 70 percent of the proposed Winchelsea mine) has yet to post its 2023-24 financial report, and the Office of the Registrar has recently announced that it has initiated an investigation into GHAC, albeit without providing any background information related to the issues of concern being examined.

Conclusion

The Minister and her agency have spent the last three years effectively in denial, suggesting by their inaction and their systematic lack of transparency that the challenges facing the ALC are of little or no consequence. While the audit of the ALC financial statements may ultimately provide a thumbs up on the ALC finances for 2024-25, the broader context of continuous high level staff turnover, the ongoing National Anti-Corruption Investigation, and the potential misallocation of millions of dollars in royalty equivalent funds (monies appropriated by the Commonwealth Parliament) over recent years as I set out in my recent post The Angels Weep, and the delays in audits and financial reporting to the Parliament as set out in this post, suggest a deeper malaise characterised by ongoing and increasing financial risk, and the possibility of wider social consequences that are not visible through the lenses used by governments and their bureaucracies. In my view, that malaise extends to the absence of effective regulation by successive ministers and their agency, NIAA.  

If I am only half right, there would be a strong case for the ANAO to initiate a performance audit of the allocation of funds appropriated to the Aboriginals Benefit Account (ABA) by the Parliament, and for a deeper Parliamentary inquiry into the administration of the ALC and associated beneficiary corporations over the past 12 years or so. While I have little doubt that the NACC will ultimately uncover some egregious behaviours related to the ALC’s administration, I doubt that the NACC will manage to get their heads around the myriad social, economic and political complexities that have emerged on Groote over that period and nor will they focus on the wider policy solutions required that flow from the issues they uncover.

It is almost twenty years since the last major independent review of the operations of the ALRA. It is time to have a considered and proactive examination of the legislation and its fit with contemporary expectations given its salience in the Northern Territory and its importance to the lives of so many Indigenous Territorians.

Without ongoing and incremental reform, the risks are that the rolling crises in ABA allocations will continue until they reach a point where a future government decides the political cost of the abolition of the ABA arrangements aimed at benefiting Indigenous Territorians is less than the cost of the criticism that will continue to flow from a poorly regulated policy space. The current Commonwealth Government is unlikely to act without proactive engagement by Indigenous interests across the NT on these issues. Keeping your head down, and supporting the status quo, is a successful strategy until the day when the world changes and external forces intervene. That day may not be imminent, but it will surely arrive at some point in the coming decade or two. Support for proactive and incremental reform from the Indigenous leadership in the NT would allow Indigenous interests to shape the extent and speed of reform and would be preferable to cataclysmic retrograde policy changes without Indigenous input at some point in the medium term future.

 

5 January 2026

 

Annual Report delays in the Indigenous Australians portfolio

"O, what may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!

Measure for Measure Act three, Scene two.

Commonwealth statutory entities are obliged to prepare annual reports including audited financial statements. These requirements are normally found tin the relevant legislation establishing the entity and in the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act (2013) (PGPA Act). These reports are required to be tabled in Parliament. The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet prepares Tabling Guidelines which outline the processes expected to be followed in relation to the tabling of such documents. The most recent Tabling Guidelines were issued in July 2024 (link here). The relevant section relating to annual reports states as follows [emphasis added]:

Annual Reports

It is expected Annual Reports are tabled prior to the start of the Supplementary Budget Estimates hearings each year and immediately published on the Transparency Portal after tabling occurs. This ensures Annual Reports are available for scrutiny by the relevant Senate standing committee. To facilitate this, documents can be tabled in the Senate on any business day in October excluding any Thursday when the Senate is sitting. The Department of Finance is responsible for establishing the requirements for annual reporting by Commonwealth entities and companies. Enquiries about the preparation, content and reporting timeframes should be directed to the Department of Finance: PGPA@finance.gov.au. Relevant guidance for Commonwealth entities and companies annual reporting requirements can be located at https://www.finance.gov.au/government/managing-commonwealth-resources/planning-and-reporting

Annual reports are periodic reports under section 34C of the Acts Interpretation Act 1901 (AIA). In the event that an appropriate deadline for a report cannot be met, an extension must be sought in accordance with relevant legislation or subsections 34C(4) or (7) of the AIA, as appropriate. Whether a report is overdue will depend on the particular circumstances of each Commonwealth entity or Commonwealth company. Statements relating to extensions for overdue reports which are required to be ‘laid before each chamber of Parliament’ will be tabled as deemed documents in the House of Representatives and Clerk's documents in the Senate.

The Senate Estimates hearing for the Indigenous Australians elements of the Prime Minister’s portfolio are being held today and tomorrow (1&2 December 2025). As of this afternoon, the 2024-25 Annual Reports for two portfolio entities (Aboriginal Investment NT (AINT) and the Anindilyakwa Land Council (ALC)) had not been tabled and are not available on the Transparency Portal, and as far as I can determine, no statement by the Minister approving an extension of time for the tabling of these reports has been tabled.

While this might seem to be a comparatively trivial oversight, both the Aboriginal Investment NT and the ALC are responsible for the allocation and investment of scores of millions in funds appropriated to the Aboriginals Benefit Account. Over the past three years the ALC has been the subject of a slew of accountability concerns and there are serious doubts related to the probity surrounding the allocation of over $100m in royalty equivalents in recent years (link here).

AINT in its response to the Senate Order requiring a listing of entity contracts (link here) revealed that it has paid CIML $19m for the management of an Investment Trust. CIML, or Channel Investment Management Limited, is an Australian company that acts as a responsible entity and trustee for various managed investment schemes. CIML provides responsible entity services to funds that invest in areas like fixed income, Australian and global equities, and private debt. I have no reason to question this contract arrangement but mention it to make the point that there are serious large financial transactions in play within AINT that deserve serious oversight by the Senate.

The similar Senate Order report for the ALC (link here) reports expenditures in excess of $500k related to an Independent Board Advisor, communication services, and planning and reporting services.

Clearly both organisations have the capability to engage external consultants if necessary to ensure that their obligations to the Parliament for annual reporting are met.

This raises the question then whether the delays in tabling have been the result of directions by the Minister rather than an inability to finalise a draft.

This afternoon the ALC appeared along with the other three NT Land Councils before a desultory hearing of the Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee. Each of the other three land councils were asked a few questions based on their annual reports, and they largely agreed to take them on notice. The absence of a tabled annual report from the ALC was not raised by any of the Senators present. Aboriginal Investment NT is scheduled to appear before the Committee tomorrow; I am not holding my breath.

Readers can draw their own conclusions; for what it is worth, my take is that the Parliament’s appetite for ensuring substantive accountability by the Executive is close to zero.

 

1 December 2025

Addendum 05 January 2026

I have now found the tabled requests for and approval of extension to the tabling of the Annual Reports for the ALC and the AINT. Both appear to have been tabled within the requisite time frame, but only provide approval for extension to 30 November 2025.

The relevant links to the tabled documents are below:

https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Tabled_Documents/13215

https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Tabled_Documents/13026

I apologise to readers for my error in not finding these documents when I originally searched for them.

 

The Yunupingu High Court Decision: some downstream policy issues

 

When clouds are seen, wise men put on their cloaks;

When great leaves fall, then winter is at hand;

When the sun sets, who doth not look for night?

Untimely storms makes men expect a dearth.

Richard III, Act two, Scene three.

 

The Federal Court decision which led to the appeal to the High Court in this case was handed down in May 2023. I published two posts following that decision (link here and link here). In those posts I contemplated the potential policy implications in the event that the High Court ultimately were to endorse the Federal Court’s decision.

In early March this year, the High Court handed down its decision and upheld the Federal Court decision. I will leave the technical textual analysis to the lawyers, but it seems to me that the analysis I offered in May 2023 continues to hold true in broad terms. I recommend readers re-read those posts as they have continuing relevance. For a good summary of the implications of the High Court decision, I recommend the brief by international law firm Ashurst (link here).

The High Court decision has implications primarily for the NT, but also in theory for the ACT and perhaps other territories (link here).

In terms of the core future policy implications, I would nominate three related (and arguably intertwined) issues which will shape the ultimate outcomes:

1.    The nature of the compensable native title interests that were extinguished;

2.    The quantum of potential compensation likely to flow both to particular native title holding groups and overall; and

3.    How best to manage whatever compensation benefits ultimately flow.

As I pointed out in my previous posts, and as was reiterated by Ashurst, the flow-on effects of this decision will take time to emerge, and there may be an attempt by the Commonwealth to short-circuit future litigation and potential expansion of liability by negotiation of wider agreements along the lines of what occurred in Western Australia following the Mabo decision. Whether these flow-on implications arise from litigation or agreements, one insight which is indisputable is that the compensation funds that flow will essentially be one-offs (even if they flow over some negotiated period). Indigenous interests therefore have an incentive to prepare by building their capability to manage significant compensation flows. The obvious starting point therefore is to consider the feasibility of the development and use of mechanisms and policies which deliver perpetual benefit-flows. There are also strong arguments in favour of Indigenous interests considering the best policy architecture for managing such flows. However, the successful implementation of these types of arrangements are not straightforward.

Perpetual Funds

At present in Australia, we have a spectrum of governance arrangements for managing native title benefits rangeing from the ad hoc arrangements applying to native title payments operating in Western Australia (where there is limited visibility of their effectiveness) through to the more structured arrangements in Victoria where the Victorian Traditional Owners Funds Limited (link here) provides a financial investment service to the various Traditional Owner Trusts which have negotiated agreements with the Victorian Government. The NT of course has its own existing high level governance arrangements for managing royalty flows and native title financial agreements plus a range of subsidiary mechanisms essentially controlled or at least influenced by individual land councils or their constituents. Obviously, the NT’s existing overarching policy architecture will be the starting point for any consideration of necessary future arrangements. However it is clear (at least to me) that these extant structures are sub-optimal and require reconsideration and substantial improvement to meet future circumstances. In the rest of this post, I seek to outline at least in broad terms why I believe the current institutional architecture for managing financial benefits for Traditional owners in the NT are not fit for purpose.

The Aboriginals Benefit Account

The starting point for any consideration of the policy architecture for land rights and native title payments in the NT is the Aboriginals Benefit Account (ABA) established by the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (ALRA). This account is an institutional policy mechanism whose roots can be traced back to Paul Hasluck’s time as Minister for the Interior. It involves the Commonwealth appropriating an equivalent amount to the mineral royalty revenues accruing to the NTG (and the Commonwealth in relation to uranium).

The ABA is effectively controlled by the commonwealth minister for Indigenous Australians and its funds are allocated for various legislatively specified purposes: land council administration, land council distributions to corporations representing those impacted by mining, and various sundry costs such as township leasing. In addition, the ALRA legislation provides for various payments to the recently established NTAIC, now known as Aboriginal Investment NT (AINT), comprising a one-off capital injection of $500m and three annual payments of $60m, as well as annual administration costs. Importantly, there has always been an element set aside for beneficial grants to the wider NT Aboriginal community.

The ABA does not represent the totality mining related payments to Aboriginal Territorians as payments negotiated by land councils are outside the ABA, and so are some older trusts such as the Groote Eylandt Aboriginal Trust established by missionaries before the advent of land rights.

Aboriginal Investment NT

According to the most recent financial statements for the ABA (which can be found in an appendix to the NIAA Annual Report: link here), the ABA currently holds assets valued at $1.47bn offset by liabilities of $566m comprised primarily of the (tautologically described) ‘initial one-off endowment of $500m’ to NTAIC plus a further payment of $60m being the last of three legislated $60m payments designed to provide funding certainty to AINT its establishment phase. Any additional funding for the Future Fund and/or the Community Ready Fund is at the entire discretion of the Minister of the day. The ABA’s residual current net asset base is thus $907m. The annual appropriation to the ABA is based on the quantum of mining royalties levied by the NT Government which in turn is influenced by production levels in the various mines on Aboriginal land in the NT. By far the largest contributor to the NT Government mining royalties is the GEMCO manganese mine on Groote, scheduled for closure in the early 2030s.

According to the AINT financial statements in its annual report (link here), and its Strategic Investment Plan (SIP)(link here), AINT has allocated $500m to its Future Fund which is intended to finance its Community Ready Fund which is used to make community grants, and to invest in sector development and what the Plan terms nation-building investments. The Future Fund is designed to accumulate for at least ten years with the aim of providing a funding source into the medium/longer term. Its target rate of return is CPI +3%. The SIP notes that the AINT Board had allocated $155m to the community ready fund. The 2023-24 financial statements list AINT’s net equity holdings (assets less liabilities) as just under $680m.

There are two implications arising from the legislated framework for AINT. First, while its annual operational costs will be funded from the ABA, the funds available for distribution from its Community Ready Fund over the next decade will essentially be in the hands of the Government. This is the Fund which makes beneficial grants to community organisations across the NT.

Second, and importantly, the idea of a perpetual Future Fund is essentially a chimera. Assuming AINT achieves its target rate of return of CPI + 3%, then by 2035 it will have grown to $672m in 2025-dollar terms. From there on the use of an assumed 3% returns for distribution to the Community Ready Fund would finance a grant of $20m per annum in 2025 dollars in perpetuity. When one considers that previous annual grant levels from the ABA were around $40m per annum, and have recently dropped to around $25m, it becomes apparent that unless investment returns greatly exceed the target, the AINT Future Fund will require further endowments merely to ensure AINT can keep doing what the ‘old’ ABA was doing.

The more general and most important point deriving from this analysis is that the notion of establishing a perpetual fund to finance the economic transformation that is required in the NT (and the rest of remote Australia) is much more difficult than governments and the Indigenous leadership in the NT (which negotiated and agreed to the legislated architecture of the AINT) have been prepared to admit.

Implementation Challenges

The AINT was a signature reform, yet it will not deliver transformational change as presently funded and I would argue as presently designed. I will expand on what I consider will be necessary to drive such transformational change in a later post. While it is possible that a future Government will allocate more capital to the AINT from the ABA and/or that the AINT’s investment performance will be substantially better than its target, there is also a significant downside risk that governments will prefer to retain direct control over the balance of the ABA (and its significant automatic annual accretions) and/or the possibility of either poor or unlucky financial management by AINT. Moreover, the provision of automatic operational funding for the administration of AINT is in my view a potential structural flaw as it removes the crucial incentive that ensures management is financially rigorous and replaces it with an incentive to be politically attuned. Ultimately, this may be to the disadvantage of Indigenous interests in the NT.

Apart from highlighting the challenges of establishing financial Trusts or Future Funds that will maximise the longevity of any compensatory benefits that flow from expanded compensation arrangements due to Yunupingu, I wanted to focus on the ABA and AINT, because they each appear to provide a mechanism that could be used (or arguably misused) to fund compensation payments arising from future litigation in the NT.

When AINT [then referred to as the NT Aboriginal Investment Corporation or NAIC] was first foreshadowed during Minister Ken Wyatt’s term, there was widespread opposition from some quarters to its design. I was amongst those with concerns and published two posts on this blog (link here and link here). One of the concerns I raised then was that the establishment of the AINT was only partial leaving considerable funding in the hands of the minister. Moreover, this funding discretion was unfettered as the establishment of the AINT was the rationale for abolishing the ABA Advisory Committee. It is now crystal clear that the Minister retains considerable leverage over the AINT by virtue of her power to approve or not approve operational funding and the additional endowment top ups which will be necessary merely to maintain current levels of beneficial grants.

In my second post, I pointed to the major increase in funding for the land councils announced by Minister Wyatt and suggested that it was not coincidental in ensuring that the land councils supported the amendments. I thought then, and think now, that this was a short-sighted decision by the land councils. Whether the land council leadership realised it or not, an objective assessment suggests that they and their advisers were outmanoeuvred and collectively co-opted by the Commonwealth.

The most recent ABA financial statements indicate that last financial year the Minister approved over $80m in grants to private sector entities from the ABA (it was $60m in the previous year) [see page 186 of the ABA financial statements (link here)] with minimal transparency while the AINT committed in principle grant funding of $20.6m and $8.7m (see pages 27 and 29 of the annual report) and actually spent only $9m (see page 75 of the Annual Report). The ABA’s revenue growth has slowed over the past year following damage to the wharf at Alyangula, however it can be expected to continue at around $300 to $400 million per annum over the next decade. In other words, the ABA’s financial assets are growing at a faster rate than AINT’s financial assets generally and particularly the AINT Future Fund.

The bottom line was that the Minister retained access to the largest slice of the ABA pie with unconstrainted flexibility to make beneficial grants from the ABA while Aboriginal interests have through AINT gained access to a smaller slice of the pie, with constrained flexibility and high expectations from the communities seeking to overcome economic and social disadvantage.  

Risks

The design architecture of the ABA following the establishment of the AINT creates a significant risk that is considerably heightened by the Yunupingu decision. Given that the ABA is funded by appropriations to be spent for the benefit of Aboriginal people in the NT, it is theoretically possible that the Commonwealth might decide to utilise the ABA funds under the control of the Minister to finance any compensation liabilities it accrues into the future because of the High Court Yunupingu decision. More likely (given that the Commonwealth has form in this respect) the Commonwealth might seek to use its control and the financial heft of the ABA to negotiate a financial settlement of all potential litigation with the land councils and their constituents (either separately or together).

We are already seeing the Commonwealth seeking to constrain the likelihood that the land councils will ‘rock the boat’. It is clear that the political salience of the land councils has increased in recent years as both sides of politics have searched for ways to engage with disenchanted voters across the NT (link here).

The risk for Indigenous interests generally is that the land councils have a limited policy remit and perspective yet effectively operate as proxies for Aboriginal interests generally. The risk for land based Aboriginal interests is that the land council leadership and bureaucracies become increasingly vulnerable to co-option by governments.  The level of payments to the land councils from the ABA has increased considerably over the past five years. In just one year, from 2023 to 2024, ministerially approved administration payments to the four NT land councils rose from $109m to $138m, an increase of $28.9m or 21%. This generosity does not come free; it has an ulterior purpose and also has an opportunity cost in foregone investment by the ABA in pressing Indigenous priorities.

Of course, a new conservative government might revert to the earlier tactics and seek to dismantle what they see as the hegemony of the land councils (link here). Either way, Indigenous interests stand to lose out.

Way forward

In my view it is time for the Indigenous leadership in the NT to reconsider their strategic vulnerabilities and begin to strengthen the ramparts defending their key institutions. A key element in such a reconceptualised strategic approach would be to focus on building stronger governance capabilities, committing to stronger transparency (no matter how uncomfortable it seems) as an insurance against poor governance, and working harder to build a unified advocacy capability. Self determination is never handed to anyone on a plate; it must be argued for and grasped. And once gained it must be defended and used carefully. It is not possible for any group entirely dependent on government funding to exercise real self-determination.

The Yunupingu decision is the latest in a long line of High Court decisions seeking to remediate the incapacity and unwillingness of executive governments through time and across the nation to address deep-seated disadvantage, inequality and discrimination. The decision is important, but transforming newly acquired rights for Indigenous interests into tangible and transformational gains requires building the advocacy capabilities to reform institutions and the political unity to protect the incremental gains made in previous times. In both these arenas, a commitment to high quality governance and maximum transparency will be the friend and not the foe Indigenous interests, not least in undermining the proclivity of governments to co-opt those whose interests they decide to ignore or set aside. There are reasons that governments avoid transparency and seek to operate in the shadows.

Conclusion

The downstream policy implications of the High Court decision in Yunupingu are potentially significant. The expand the footprint of Indigenous rights in the Territories and particularly the Northern Territory. Yet taking advantage of those rights will not be easy and will require not just the preparation of new compensation litigation, but the development of strategically sophisticated political and advocacy capabilities, and a preparedness to resist the propensity of governments to co-opt emerging leaders who might otherwise constrain their attempts to maintain the status quo ante.

 

17 April 2025