No one knows how much money is expended on “Aboriginal Issues.”
According to the Steering Committee for the Review of Government Service Provision, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage these questions cannot be answered: • How much money is spent on Indigenous people in Australia?... How much did a specific department spend? ...• How effective is a service? ... • How much money was spent on Closing the Gap? ... • How much expenditure was related to provision as opposed to administration of Indigenous services? ... • How much benefit did Indigenous Australian get from the expenditure ? ...
With 3 billion dollars sitting in the Indigenous business and Land Accounts and only 10 million a year now being spent on purchasing land, shortage of money should not be the problem.
We see massive duplication of services. Annual native title reports show little or no change: Report after report identifies the same issues:
Aboriginal Communities and Aboriginal People are not homogenous and one size does not fit all. Communities have been subjected to statutory impositions to amalgamate in ways they may not otherwise have chosen in order to manage native title rights and other benefits. There are many failures and breakdowns of Aboriginal Corporations and some of these breakdowns are due to lateral violence – physical and fiscal and factionalism. Access to legal remedies is very difficult if not impossible and regulators frequently get called in too late.
Total autonomy and self determination are sometimes asserted as some sort of indigenous Holy Grail yet total autonomy in any community, indigenous or otherwise, is rare. Aboriginal Communities Corporations and their service providers (by their breakdown record) seem to demonstrate inadequate internal balances of power and the external power circuit breaker of legal action seems out of reach.
If it is broke – then fix it. One problem at a time.
An amendment to the regulating Act could provide that a substantial minority group is able to elect that the corporation “opt in” to external management. They can “get someone else” in to do it. That would have at least two affects; firstly it would provide an internal balance of power by giving some incentive to the management of the corporation to satisfy the substantial minority and secondly it would provide an equitable alternative if it did not.
see prior posts on this issue. Listed on main page of this Blog site. But here is one.
http://johnwbolton.weebly.com/blog/plenty-of-money-exists-for-aboriginal-needs