11/08/2026
Marcia Langton writes :
On the first day of August this year, two men spoke at Gulkula, the sacred Gumatj land where the Garma Festival is held, about the same problem, and proposed competing solutions
Yingiya Mark Guyula, the independent member for Mulka, described two years of Northern Territory legislation – harder bail, tougher youth justice and last week’s weakening of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle – as steps in what he called a slow genocide of his people and their culture.
The prison population is up 30 per cent, he said; about 90 per cent of the adults in it are Aboriginal, and often 100 per cent of the youth. He had been to Canberra to ask federal ministers to intervene and had been refused.
Later that day, at the same podium, Noel Pearson of the Cape York Institute asked the country to consider a structural remedy: that the remote Aboriginal communities of Australia – the blue dots on the Australian Electoral Commission’s map where the vast majority voted “Yes” in the 2023 referendum – be brought under the sole jurisdiction of the Commonwealth.
This proposal revived a Fraser government policy legislated in 1978 for Aurukun and Mornington Island but never brought into effect.
Both were arguing the same premise: that money raised nationally for Aboriginal disadvantage is being spent by states and territories on other things.
One asked the Commonwealth to assume more responsibility for Indigenous affairs in the Northern Territory; the other asked it to take over funding across a third of Australia and at least four jurisdictions.
Neither could prove their case conclusively, because the Commonwealth does not publish the figures that would allow anyone to.
There are several things the Commonwealth can do about all this. First, reinstate the Indigenous Expenditure Report, which lapsed after four editions.
Restarting it is an administrative decision, not a reform. Second, it could honour clause 118 of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, which would see every jurisdiction report which Aboriginal organisations it funds and by how much. This was agreed to in 2020, but has not happened. Third, it could identify expenditure by recipient type, so that money reaching Aboriginal community-controlled organisations can be told apart from money reaching government agencies and non-Indigenous contractors. Governments already hold this data, but they do not release it. Fourth, the Commonwealth could require reconciliation between assessment and expenditure: publish what the Commonwealth Grants Commission, which calculates the distribution of the Goods and Services Tax, assesses each jurisdiction needs for its Aboriginal population alongside what that jurisdiction reports spending.
The fourth is the one that bites, and the one officials will resist, because it changes equalisation from a measure of what a state could do into a record of what it did. It is also the only measure that answers Pearson’s question about a government that prefers detaining children to educating them, because it makes the preference visible, attributable and potentially expensive at the ballot box. A substantial part of what the country counts as money spent on Aboriginal people is money spent locking us up and removing our children.
There is a deadline to this. The Productivity Commission is reviewing the 2018 GST arrangements now; its interim report lands on August 28 and the final report is due before the end of the year. Its terms of reference are wide enough to take in all four measures. This is the first opening in a generation. It will close, and the next is unlikely to arrive before the current Closing the Gap targets expire.
Both Guyula’s and Pearson’s broad proposals deserve serious attention, and the political class should not reach for the reflex that killed the Voice. There are, however, obstacles that render Pearson’s scheme unfeasible in its present form. The Voice Co-design report that Tom Calma and I led five years ago, tabled in parliament, solved most of the problems that plague it; we investigated these very issues over two years with a group of 50 and consulted more than 9000 people.
Pearson accepts that the states would keep the functions the Constitution gives them – schools, hospitals, housing, police, courts, prisons and child protection – yet those are the very systems he indicts. What would transfer to the Commonwealth in his model is the $6 billion a year of government spending that is Indigenous-specific: 1.1 per cent of total direct government expenditure, for 3.8 per cent of the population. Having correctly shown that the money is mainstream and cannot be carved into an Aboriginal share, his proposal then needs it carved out to work.
Few blue dot communities have the capacity and infrastructure to self-govern in the way Pearson proposes. Probably less than a third of the population is served by community-controlled corporations in the health, family and children’s services, and as clan leaders at the very remote homelands of Gäṉgaṉ and Bäniyala pointed out to me last week, the majority of Commonwealth and NT government funds in their Miwatj region is spent in the mining township of Nhulunbuy and nearby Yirrkala, to the almost complete exclusion of the homelands, where diesel generators provide the electricity, and telecommunications are intermittent at best. Most remote schools are state and territory-run, and even where an excellent community-controlled health service operates, one regional hospital serves the same high-need population across a vast region. Disaggregating state and territory health and education funds from the small bucket for community-controlled corporations in these regions could be a very backward step.
In intervening in the states as Pearson proposes, the Commonwealth would also be relying on the contested constitutional races power – the one Peter Dutton, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Nyunggai Warren Mundine deny exists. Yet it does, and it is a fatal obstacle to a solution in the states. Guyula’s request relies instead on the plenary territories power and sidesteps this issue. The plenary territories power is the power John Howard used in the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention in 2007. Guyula’s is the least difficult path to equity in funding distributions; Pearson’s faces many obstacles.
Central to both is the distribution of the goods and services tax, calculated on need by the Commonwealth Grants Commission but spent at the discretion of states and territories. The Northern Territory receives more per head than anywhere else in the federation precisely because of its large, remote and disadvantaged Aboriginal population, yet it does not spend this money to give those people equal standards of living. The Commonwealth writes down, in detail, how much of every transfer was generated by Aboriginal need, then hands the money over and never asks what happens to it. The money goes in; nobody can say where it comes out. The assessment is itemised; the expenditure is not.
In 2017, the Yothu Yindi Foundation, host of the Garma Festival, put a submission to a Productivity Commission inquiry that no minister appears to have read. It compared what the Grants Commission had assessed the Territory as needing with what the Territory reported spending. Family and children’s services: assessed at $179 million, spent at $43 million. Roads: assessed at $250 million, spent at $122 million. Services to Indigenous communities: assessed at $218 million, spent at $110 million. Across nine categories the shortfall came to $522 million in one year. Because no government publishes the Aboriginal share of the assessment, the foundation reverse-engineered it from the commission’s own working papers: 68 per cent of the Territory’s assessment had been generated by Aboriginal need, against the 53 per cent the Territory’s own expenditure review claimed – a gap of about half-a-billion dollars in a single year. In other words, basically the entire amount pocketed by the Territory comes from Indigenous funding. The Territory government disputed the numbers. Of course it did. There is no published figure to settle the argument, which is the entire point. Nine years on, nothing has been fixed.
This is the strongest evidence for the claim that the NT is a failed state with a carceral business model, taking funds from Canberra to allegedly overcome Aboriginal disadvantage while radically worsening the lives of its Aboriginal population through deliberate racial discrimination, deprivation and industrial-scale incarceration – from the age of 10 through to death – and the removal of children at rates exceeded only in authoritarian states. Guyula, a directly elected representative of blue dot communities, pleaded with Canberra to stop this cruelty towards his constituents. It refused, even while having an unfettered legal power to negotiate with the NT and use its funding levers and plenary territories power to fix most of these problems.
Understanding these arrangements well enough to challenge them takes forensic expertise that Aboriginal Australia should not have to buy. The Yothu Yindi Foundation bought it anyway. That capacity should be made permanent: an independent umpire monitoring the expenditure of funds intended for Aboriginal benefit, on the model of the Indigenous Policy Productivity Council proposed in the Empowered Communities design report of 2015 – Pearson’s own work, never built.
That a Yolŋu organisation had to reconstruct the Commonwealth’s own figures from published working papers, and was then contradicted by the very government whose conduct was in question, is the strongest single argument in this field. Until that reconstruction becomes routine disclosure, instead of privately commissioned forensic research, no structural reform can be tested – not Pearson’s, and not Guyula’s appeal to Canberra either. We are being asked to argue about where the money should go while being denied the means to discover where it went.
Ministers can end that this month. There is no legislation to draft and no referendum to win to achieve transparency. There is only a decision to publish what is already known. '
Marcia Langton is an Aboriginal writer, a descendant of the Yiman people of Queensland. She is professor of Australian Indigenous studies at the University of Melbourne.
First published in edition No. 612, August 8 – 14, 2026.
