Yothu Yindi Foundation boss slams NT Government’s ‘financial mismanagement’
ABORIGINAL corporation leaders would be criminally charged if they mismanaged funds in the same way the Territory Government has, according to a prominent indigenous leader
Northern Territory
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YOTHU Yindi Foundation chief executive Denise Bowden has lashed the Northern Territory Government over its financial mismanagement saying its cabinet ministers would be charged with criminal offences it was an Aboriginal corporation.
But Aboriginal Affairs Minister Selena Uibo has hit back, accusing Ms Bowden of making “blanket statements” not back up by fact.
Ms Uibo also said she had been blocked from speaking at the Garma Festival’s opening ceremony and refused to guarantee the Northern Territory Government would continue to sponsor the festival, which is organised by the Yothu Yindi Foundation.
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Ms Bowden used her speech at the festival’s key forum to highlight the discrepancy in living standards between Aboriginal people living in remote parts of the NT and those living in Darwin and Alice Springs.
She said consecutive NT Governments has taken hundreds of millions of dollars in GST funding meant to address indigenous disadvantage and spent buying votes in Darwin and Alice Springs and funding a bloated public service.
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“If the Northern Territory Government was a corporation serious thought would have to be given to winding it up,” she said.
“If it was an Aboriginal Corporation its Cabinet ministers would be prosecuted.
It makes me cry that we are prisoners to this incompetence and maladministration.
Yet for all of this there seems no prospect of change.”
Ms Uibo rejected the allegations.
“I’d encourage the CEO to sit down with Government and have some of those concerns expressed but also to actually go through the detail and the figures to make sure if she’s making blanket comments that those comments are actually warranted,” she said.
Ms Uibo also said she’d been blocked from speaking at the Garma Festival opening ceremony.
“If we’re talking about indigenous voice, particularly in that parliamentary system, I’ve had to spend my time here at the forum being ignored by the forum organisers,” she said.
She said she would be writing to the YYF about the matter and would not guarantee the NT Government would continue funding the event.
“It’s a national forum it’s a key calendar event and so some of those conversations I’ll be having with the forum organisers,” she said.
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But Ms Bowden said she would “not hesitate in exposing to scrutiny an awful system that lives off the misery and disadvantage of my brothers and sisters.
She pointed to the Darwin Waterfront as one of dozens of examples that “make my blood boil”.
“Since 2006 the NT Government has spent over 300 million dollars, presumably from its untied GST payments, creating a Waterfront precinct, which in large part has been turned over to property developers and business,” she said.
“In addition to the sunk costs, every year the NT Government grants up to $20M to the Darwin Waterfront Corporation to run a conference centre and tourist facilities including a wave pool and an artificial beach and events like fireworks, concerts and driverless cars.
“Forgetting the hundreds of millions in capital costs, that’s an annual payment equivalent to 40 remote houses a year so local Darwinians and people visiting Darwin can enjoy themselves.”
She said she understood the need to promote tourism but said the spending was impossible to justify given the infrastructure deficit faced by people living in the bush.
“Another child is born to another overcrowded home. Another kid gets no sleep and can’t get to school. Another assault takes place in a house full to bursting point, and so on.”
Ms Uibo said the NT Government was spending a record $1.1 billion on remote housing over the next decade.
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