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Another day, another Aboriginal ‘service’ organisation swimming in taxpayer millions while the people it claims to help live in squalor.
Tangentyere Council Aboriginal Corporation, the outfit that runs Alice Springs’ 18 town camps, pulls in a cool $45 million. And that’s just in a single year. Where does the money go? Clearly not to the people it’s supposed to.
Twenty-four million dollars vanishes in ‘staff costs’: that is, the insiders paying themselves eye-watering wages and perks. The rest supposedly goes on a long list of programmes for everything from child protection to night patrols. Yet, year on year, Aboriginal children account for nearly 90 per cent of child protection reports in the Northern Territory, despite Aborigines being just one quarter of the NT’s population. With the spotlight of legacy media attention briefly turned on the town camps, what are journalists finding?
Residents are still living in tin sheds, shipping containers and demountable hovels with shared toilets that take three to four days to fix when they clog. White Gate camp, just east of Alice Springs, has about 15 people, including kids, sleeping on mattresses piled on dirt floors while dogs and rubbish compete for space.
The appalling living standards in town camps have been under scrutiny following the alleged abduction and murder of five-year-old Kumanjayi Little Baby.
Sound familiar? It should. Not just the name, which is the Aboriginal equivalent of ‘Jane Doe’. Blither about ‘culture’ all they want: surely the final insult to yet another Aboriginal child brutalised by a Stone Aged culture is that they won’t even say her name.
But the real reason this should all sound so grimly familiar is that it’s exactly the same script that led to the Howard government disbanding the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) in 2004. ATSIC was supposed to be the pinnacle of self-determination. Instead it became a byword for nepotism, cronyism and breathtaking waste. Billions vanished into consultancies, luxury cars and favoured ‘big men’ while remote communities rotted. The Auditor-General’s reports read like a criminal indictment. So Canberra pulled the plug, to the predictable chorus of screeching about ‘racism!’
Two decades later, nothing has changed except the acronyms. Tangentyere Chief Executive Walter Shaw has been in the job since 2011. The organisation’s last easily-findable annual report was 2017–18.
When a survey team from auditing firm Deloitte visited the Northern Territory’s town camps in 2016 to conduct a major review, responses on the ground were mixed. Residents in Elliott were tired of talking about housing when nothing ever changed. Borroloola’s town campers were keen to participate and explain their aspirations, and people in Darwin and Tennant Creek all participated.
But the Deloitte crew immediately ran into trouble in Alice Springs, home to the largest number of town camps. They were ordered out of town on their very first visit.
Tangentyere Council Aboriginal Corporation, the powerful organisation that represents Alice Springs’ 18 town camps, was not happy with the review, commissioned by the Northern Territory government, and actively opposed parts of it.
Call it ‘spearing the messenger’, Shaw dismissed Deloitte’s review as “non-indigenous cultural relativism”. Meaning that Deloitte had the temerity to point out that pumping more money into town camps with no economic base simply “invests in continued disadvantage”.
The ‘payback’ for locals who dare speak out is clearly even more threatening than the verbal nulla-nulla dished out to Deloitte.
Many people are critical or openly questioning of the organisation but don’t want their identities revealed. A respected elder, who did not wish to be named, called for a change in leadership and accused Tangentyere of being “really secretive”.
“There’s a lack of accountability, lack of responsibility. It needs a changing of guard. They’ve had the same cohort of people in there in charge since forever, and they’re not winning the game,” the elder said.
Liberal senator Kerrynne Liddle, who was born and raised in Alice Springs, has tried to track funding and program outcomes through questions in estimates committees but says she is none the wiser. The camps, she says, are separatist relics of the past.
And there’s the heart of the problem: trying to fit the square peg of a Stone Age culture into the round hole of the modern world. This is not isolated incompetence. It is the predictable result of trying to graft long-evolved Western systems based on trust, transparency and individual accountability onto tribal mindsets where the ‘big men’ take the lion’s share and hand it out to the Aunties and Uncles. Kinship trumps merit and accountability is for whitefellas. Nepotism isn’t a bug in that worldview: it’s the feature.
The same pattern repeats across the indigenous industry: huge budgets, opaque reporting, same faces in charge for decades and residents left in Third World conditions.
The real obscenity is who actually loses. Not the urban Aboriginal middle class: the majority of indigenous Australians today live in cities and suburbs and are generally no worse off than other Australians. The losers are the small percentage still trapped in remote communities and town camps, condemned to live as museum pieces in a failed social experiment. Taxpayers, of course, get rinsed for another $45 million a year with nothing to show for it.
The indigenous grievance industry doesn’t want solutions. It wants the grift to continue: for an activist on the taxpayer payroll, a problem solved is an existential and financial crisis.
So, taxpayers keep writing cheques and remote kids keep sleeping on dirt floors –or worse: disappearing into the night while the adults are drinking themselves into a violent stupor.
