By ERWIN CHLANDA
How many troubled children in Central Astralia fall under the umbrella of the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA)?
Surely that was a known number upon which Anthony Albanese’s $250m “special grant” was based.
Apparently not. His Minister for Indigenous Australians, the Territory’s own Malarndirri McCarthy, doesn’t know, or won’t say.
And neither will she say how many of those kids have benefitted from the NIAA, nor how much has NIAA paid out to local non-government organisations (NGOs).
Senator McCarthy did not agree to be interviewed and relied on the blather from her minders that is offensive because of its irrelevance, and its failure to answer questions.
Sample: “The Australian Government is working in partnership with the Central Australia Plan Aboriginal Leadership Group, the communities of Central Australia, non-government and community organisations, and the Northern Territory Government to enhance liveability and improve community safety as it implements its plan to support Central Australia.”
Increasingly, poverty is being identified as a key reason for disadvantage, and the Universal Basic Income (UBI) is being discussed seriously as being superior to our convoluted welfare funding. A look at numbers is enlightening.
The NT has an excellent health service available to all its citizens. The Central Australian Aboriginal Congress funding, being a primary health facility, specifically for the Aboriginal minority, is on top of that.
Congress also operates two large contracts for the whole community: Headspace (mental health for young people), and the urgent care clinics.
Congress has an income of $83m, $69m from grants. Its 683 employees take home $57m a year (June 2024), while there are still hungry children living in rags and ruins.
At some point the question will need to be asked: If we can stop poverty, would we need Congress – and our multitude of other welfare carers.
Congress has not responded to a question from the Alice Springs News about how many people it provides services to.
Assuming that all Indigenous people – about 5200 – in Alice Springs are Congress patients, if they got to share the $83m they’d be getting $16,000 each or $64,000 for a family of four. That’s what UBI could look like in reality. And an army of public servants currently administering welfare could be re-deployed. The banks could distribute the cash.
The Congress example shows that three quarters of public funding goes to staff. That leaves a quarter for clients in need.
If you want to compare publicly funded organisations, the Alice Springs Town Council, to run the town, has a 2024/25 budget of $55m (expenditure). That’s $28m less than Congress.
Meanwhile the Albanese quarter of a billion is perpetuating a broken system. Calculated on the Congress model $188m will go to administration and staff.
NGOs and a new breed of companies that are private (Pty Ltd) but dependent on government money are hand-balling business to each other.
For example, Operation Lunar, a joint NT Police and Territory Families initiative, may be looking for someone to care for young Freddy who is in trouble a lot. They get in touch with Oonchiumpa Consultancy and Services which describes itself as a family business.
Interestingly, it is set up under the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC), as are most Australian small companies.
Most Aboriginal organisations are set up under the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations (ORIC).
ORIC provides online extensive financial and other details of its organisations. That is where the Congress details appearing in this article come from.
Company details available in an ASIC search are far less detailed.
This means companies with a welfare agenda registered under ASIC have the privilege of being far less transparent to their funders – the taxpayer – than is the case with ORIC companies.
The Alice Springs News understands that the Commonwealth is looking at rectifying these arrangements that are clearly keeping the public in the dark.
Oonchiumpa started in December 2023 to help young people in trouble. It has 24 of them on its books. It organises sport including horse riding, takes kids to school, matches them up with businesses providing work experience, maybe a job such as at MacDonalds, and so on – pretty well the stuff parents usually take care of.
One girl has a good chance of getting a job with IGA, the three neighbourhood supermarkets owned by Lhere Artepe, the town’s native title organisation.
Oonchiumpa director Kristy Bloomfield has just been appointed chair of the Lhere Artepe board. She has many years of experience working in the justice field.
OK, Oonchiumpa agrees to take on Freddy. It falls back on its “brokerage” function and passes on the young lad to the organisation Saltbush which in turn may hand him over to a freelancing youth worker, also Federally funded.
Says Oonchiumpa operations manager Tanya Turner: “We are an alternative service response. The young person would already have existing ties with services such as Saltbush commonly through the court, we would assist in supporting their engagement with the preexisting service.
“Our brokerage function is utilised to link the young person into Aboriginal led and culturally appropriate supports mostly provided by Aboriginal businesses.
“We do not pay existing services to provide programs they are already funded to perform.”
This is the state of play by Oonchiumpa which received $1.4m from Canberra for its first 18 months.
Oonchiumpa has managed to get free of charge a NT Government office in Alice Springs and is borrowing a government car but has to engage an accountant to comply with Government requirements, pay its staff and (presumably) fees to traditional owners guiding the culturally led program.
There is no doubt that most welfare organisations are saddled with operational costs, proportionally – such as Congress’s.
We asked Oonchiumpa operations manager Tanya Turner: If the poverty issue could be resolved, how many of these 24 kids would not need your help?
“It’s hard to say. There are other issues around poverty. The alcoholism, things like that, which contribute,” she said.
“I don’t know if giving every family a wage of $60,000 is going to resolve other background issues which impact our young people.
“Poverty is an issue for the young people themselves. You know, young people have nothing, they often are wearing the same clothes for a whole week because they just don’t have anything.
“The issues are so entrenched that I don’t think that alone is going to be the quick fix.”
IMAGE at top from the Oonchiumpa Facebook site.
Education is the keys to all poverty.
If the government stood by its rules and said it was compulsory for all children go to school, and are made to, this would stop children being in town and on the streets during the day, and too tired to roam the streets at night.
Not all children like and do well at school, but this is a big start to their future.
Spend on good tax payers on this youth plan.
If you are going to advocate for UBI, you should address some of the very reasonable concerns raised by many very reasonable people every time this issue comes up.
How would a UBI program ensure the $16k per person is spent on food, shelter and essentials, rather than grog, drugs and pokies?
And how much would the administrative costs of such compliance measures etc add up to?
Better to reform Congress et al and mandate greater transparency for Aboriginal NGOs rather than deploy a whole new untested framework which will likely have a swag of unintended consequences and require millions to fix/roll back.
If NT residents were offered a vote on UBI, the answer would be a resounding No Way. It’s a bad idea, full stop.
The simple problem is that for organisations to achieve their KPIs, their Aboriginal clientele must be willing to change. However, most Aboriginal people of the current generations do not want to go outside their comfort zone.
If organisation staff then try to push Aboriginal people to change, those people resist in many creative ways, and this becomes frustrating and uncomfortable for staff.
Thus by mutual agreement comfort and the status quo prevails.
Many Aboriginal people of previous generations were visionary and wanted to change the structure of their governing organisations to be more effective.
However, government and NGO bureaucrats blocked such collaborations because it reduced their own control, self-importance and value, thus threatening their comfort zone.
So, everyone has been learning to become ever more comfortable with the status quo, despite evidence that it does not function.
Examples abound.
PS to my comment above:
Today, schools are the place where people learn the many skills needed to change. Every detail in a school – and all of teachers’ immense training – is designed to make the complex process of change structured, predictable and safe.
All young children enjoy change in a safe environment. If children attend school regularly, they keep that enjoyment alive into adolescence.
If adolescents find a career which helps them develop their own identity, they will keep that enjoyment alive into adulthood.
On the other hand, if adults in a family did not attend school regularly, they would see school as unsafe and so would not know the benefit of pushing their children to attend regularly.
Everyone knows this.
Unless the good people of Alice make their concerns public and increasingly obvious in a consistent and energetic way, nothing will change, except NT and Federal governments wallpapering over the rapidly expanding cracks!
Michael and Don are absolutely right. Thousands of workers and practitioners build their careers offering baseline comfort to welfare communities.
I think many remote families have become disengaged, demoralised and resigned to this survival baseline. Remote area staff, highly paid “visitors”, seem comfortable, often invested in perpetuating a power dynamic that places them in the position of care-giver.
This mediocre status quo is bleeding the bush, it offers up capable people as vulnerable and helpless. When all else fails we can take the money and run or blame the victim.
Nail on the head, Mike: “Take the money and run AND blame the victim.”
@ Don Fuller: How to increase our concern in an energetic way? Any ideas? Advices? I have been in Alice since 1974. I have witnessed the gap becoming wider and our politicians / so called leaders becoming more deaf or more stupid than never before! Do you think they really want to know?
Ironically, it was somewhere in the 70s that the concept of “self determination” was foisted on Territorians from “experts” from afar.
While the concept has its place and merit, it has to be applied with wisdom and dexterity, which both require deep local knowledge.
There are a small number of examples of success, but I doubt any of them resulted from the official application of that policy shift, which essentially included the “desire and obligation” to go to school as part of self determination, and we can all see the result of that.
While various missions and Government settlements did use what now days are considered variously as unacceptable methods of “coercing” children to attend school, they were productive, and the results spoke for themselves. At the one I have more than a little familiarity with, children arrived at school, were given a hot shower, a clean change of clothes, and a hearty breakfast, all prepared by employed members of their own community. They were all taught the 3 Rs etc, by very devoted teachers, who operated in conditions that today would never be accepted by any public servant.
Some 20 years ago I attended a wedding in that community, of one of the previous staff member’s daughters. It was also attended by some elderly previous teachers and other staff from the earlier days I speak of, and I witnessed an incredibly emotional reunion of those teachers etc, and their almost as elderly students from maybe five plus decades before.
The genuine respect, appreciation and love that these past students showed to their old teachers etc that day still chokes me up.
You can call the methods patronising and worse, but everyone was a winner in that and similar situations. We are all the losers from the effects of the policies that replaced them.
Furthermore, I recall watching a “forum”, hosted I think by Paul Lienman (spelling?), along the lines of QandA, but well before that program, in I think Canberra.
As I recall, the participants were all Indigenous. With absolutely no disrespect to the rest, there were maybe only two folk in the audience that “could string a sentence together”, and hence were able to make a meaningful contribution that night – one was a young protégé of Noel Pearson, and the other was a senior lady who grew up at the establishment I spoke of above.
A letter she and her husband wrote to us on the death of our father some years later, also brings me to tears.
@ Rod Cramer. Yes. When people step out of their comfort zone, it shows they care. Taking personal responsibility for the welfare of another is the antithesis of the current bureaucratic culture, where everyone can avoid personal responsibility.
Years ago, a minion of Minister Macklin visited a Warlpiri community to announce her new nonsensical policies.
He explained to the community that they could not blame him for Jenny’s policies, because his role was only to implement them.
The senior men said among themselves: “He has no penis.”