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Australia pours $45 billion a year into Aboriginal Australia. Four times as much as it spends on all other Australians. So, where does all that money go? Not to all those remote communities and town camps that look like something straight out of the Third World.
Just like the Third World, the ‘Big Men’ get fat on the rivers of gold, while the people get fuck-all.
“How is all that money being used to actually benefit the community? I can’t find that out,’’ says South Australian Liberal senator Kerrynne Liddle, who was born and raised in Alice Springs.
Liddle has seen it all before. So have the rest of us who’ve been paying attention for the last half-century. Another taxpayer-funded Aboriginal corporation, another mountain of cash, another set of dire town camps that look like something out of a third-world documentary. And, surprise surprise, the executives are doing just fine.
Salaries for senior management at the taxpayer-funded Aboriginal corporation aimed at supporting Alice Springs town camps and providing broader Indigenous safety and community programs doubled last financial year, despite poor maintenance and living conditions of town camps.
Executives at Tangentyere Council’s Aboriginal Corporation doubled their compensation from $645,778 in FY24 to $1,211,517 the following financial year, an almost 100 per cent increase, despite dire town camp living conditions and failures to conduct repairs.
The accounts show Tangentyere added a new head of People and Culture role in October 2024. In addition they disclose the General Manager of Constructions was now considered among the senior leadership.
And still the camps and communities are squalid hell-holes.
“They are supposed to be there for the community but then don’t provide any information to the community on what they are doing. The money just keeps pouring in and nothing comes out.”
The more things change… Remember ATSIC? The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission was finally put out of its misery in 2004 after years of nepotism, corruption and spectacular waste. Geoff Clark, its former chairman, was later jailed for stealing more than a million dollars from Aboriginal organisations. In 2016, multiple Indigenous bodies faced fraud investigations. More recently, fights over the Blayney mine heritage have shown the same grubby turf wars. The names change. The story doesn’t.
And meanwhile, Australians get nothing in return but squalid town camps, Third World health outcomes in some communities, and a relentless procession of horror stories: children abducted from supposedly “dry” camps lined with empty bourbon bottles, houses requiring biohazard clean-ups before anyone can move back in, human faeces on walls, syringes in the yard.
A tradie fixing public housing in Alice Springs described the norm: Full biohazard decontamination gear is often required to deal with human faeces on floors and walls, cockroaches and mice, syringes and dirty nappies. Seventy to eighty per cent of the houses he works on are in that state.
“There’s lots of things an inquiry could look into. Maybe we need to consider building gated communities for the safety of women and children,” says Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
The usual suspects will scream “racism” at that, let alone any scrutiny of where all the money is going.. The same people who defended every previous rort will insist more money is the answer. They always do. Billions upon billions have vanished into this bureaucratic black hole for decades, with the same depressing results: dysfunction, dependency, and the occasional lurid headline when another child pays the ultimate price for adult failure.
The town camps themselves are relics of a failed 1970s experiment: separate development dressed up as self-determination. Some residents want them gone. Others cling to them. Either way, the current model is indefensible. Children should not be raised in places where the regional rubbish tip is their backyard playground and the organisation meant to maintain their homes is too busy doubling executive salaries.
Australia has tried compassion without accountability. It has tried more funding without transparency. It has tried separate bureaucracies answerable to no one. All of it has failed the very people it claims to help while enriching the usual suspects.
Maybe it’s time to stop throwing money at people who either won’t help themselves, or are too busy helping themselves to far too much.
