Opinion & Commentary
Funding for indigenous communities still not finding targets
The funding intended to help Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders does not reach most of them. Abysmal overcrowding in run down dwellings is well documented, yet the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mal Brough, recently found that more than $2 billion allocated for Indigenous housing can not be accounted for by the Northern Territory and the States responsible for remote Indigenous housing. Much of the stolen housing money has been distributed through corporations registered with the Office of the Registrar of Aboriginal Corporations – ORAC – now in Mr Brough’s own Department. Indigenous corporations have been able since the Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act of 1976 to register with ORAC instead of with ASIC (Australian Securities and Investment Commission). The largest 300 of these corporations received nearly $380 million from three Commonwealth Departments in 2004-5. The additional millions received by the other Indigenous corporations and from other Territory and State sources have not even been added up.
Whereas reporting by ASIC corporations is mandatory, reporting by ORAC corporations is in effect voluntary. Only 28% of the 2585 corporations on the books in 2004-2005 reported fully, and another 12% reported partially. Compliance has been decreasing since 1989-90. It lifted slightly in 2003-4, but not to its starting level.
ORAC conducted 61 ‘examinations’ in 2004-5. Amazingly these were not to find out why 60% of the corporations did not report, but to demonstrate ‘a strong culture of governance’. Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation with an income of $25million in 2004-5 was selected. ORAC found it “very well run, with good governance and accounting systems in place. This was not only due the continuity of service of the senior management group (sic!) but also its strong culture of training in corporate governance”. Bawinanga is based in Maningrida, one of the largest Northern Territory ‘homelands’. During the past two years it has been exposed as arguably one of the most dysfunctional, notorious for its alcoholism and drugs, violence, particularly against women, abuse of boys and girls and climate of fear and sorcery. Its educational outcomes have been disgraceful. Its housing is shameful. Bawinanga was specifically praised by ORAC for the maintenance of it public environment: the few journalists permitted to visit Maningrida found it execrable.
A perusal of the documents submitted as ‘compliant’ shows that they are very different to the reports that all other Australians have to submit to ASIC. Indigenous corporations have been largely created by self selected cabals around ‘big men’ to access public funds and royalties. If a corporation is headed by illiterate committee members, their names are printed for them on the compliance report. Have they understood the profit and loss and balance sheets? They show purchases, for example of $180,000 on vehicles in two subsequent years, but a negative record of assets in subsequent years?
Health funding is channeled through large corporations that provide Indigenous health services. Remote Aborigines’ lives are more than 20 years shorter than those of other Australians. Why is the gap between mainstream and Indigenous ill-health still increasing? Yet accounting firms are signing off without a qualm with no less than 55 pages of boiler plate on reports that do not indicate how millions of public dollars are spent. There is no reason why the health corporations should continue to hide under ORAC.
A new Bill now before Parliament has been planned by ORAC “ to provide a unique opportunity for the Indigenous corporate sector to have a more modern tailored option. It allows for less ‘red tape’ for smaller community corporations, especially unfunded land holdings….Most importantly, the Bill allows ‘space’ for culture and local practices to be recognized in corporations’ rules and processes”.
What is this ‘culture’? It is on the ORAC website for all to see, introducing the revised ‘big mob of white-fella law’ in cartoons targeted at six or seven year olds who can not read or write sufficiently to understand the simplest of written instructions in English but are thought perfectly competent to sign off on millions of dollars of public expenditure. ORAC’s cartoons, presumably developed at considerable expense by consulting anthropologists, would have been thought offensive and insulting if used by the South African Government to address ‘kaffirs’ at the height of ‘Apartheid’. They are egregiously offensive and insulting to Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in 2006.
The time for treating Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders as children has surely passed. The Northern Territory and the States have totally failed to educate a generation in remote communities. A massive adult literacy campaign and a revolution in schooling are now needed to bring the remote settlements into the 21 st century, but this is no excuse for legislation that enshrines double standards so that most Aborigines and Torres Straits Islanders can continue to be robbed with impunity. They deserve the same probity and protection of the law as other Australians by having their corporations registered with ASIC. ORAC is a component of the apartheid policies that have wrecked Aboriginal and Torres Strait lives. It must be consigned to the rubbish bin now.
Professor Helen Hughes and Mark Hughes are researching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policies at the Centre for Independent Studies.
