It is ice skating month in Alice Springs, where the average daytime temperature hovers around 37 degrees in January.
A pop-up rink has been constructed in the Convention Centre courtesy of the National Indigenous Australians Agency. Free ice skating is part of the Territory government’s summer holiday program designed to flatten the curve of youth crime, which has turned a once-charming outback town into the juvenile delinquency capital of Australia.
Former chief minister Natasha Fyles announced the program in November, saying ice skating and other activities would serve “to keep kids engaged, to tire them out and to give them a feed so they go home and have a good night’s sleep, not causing trouble coming into town and running amok”.
Wednesday marks the first anniversary of Anthony Albanese’s heel-dragging day trip to Alice Springs, his only visit to the town since becoming Prime Minister.
He announced that the federal and territory governments would establish a Central Australian Regional Controller responsible for co-ordinating federal and state programs and ensuring “they provide for the best use of taxpayers’ dollars to make a substantial difference”.
It would be reassuring for taxpayers to know a review of the ice rink’s impact on school-age crime will eventually be undertaken. How many potential young hoodlums flop listlessly on the couch at the end of a hard day’s skating rather than go out to commit mayhem?
The audit might look at the relevance of a school holiday activities program in a jurisdiction where a third of Indigenous children don’t attend school. It might ask if the money could be better spent persuading Aboriginal kiddies to get their skates on in term time and get themselves to school.
Sadly, government programs are seldom scrutinised for effectiveness, particularly in Indigenous affairs. The challenge for bodies such as the NIAA is not saving money but spending it.
At the end of June, the body was sitting on a cool $1.5bn in cash allocated for various government programs but not yet dispersed.
In 2023, it handed out 4500 grants totalling $1.6bn. It dispersed $214m to the four NT Land Councils, mini-fiefdoms in their own right. NIAA handed over $687m to the Northern Territory Aboriginal Investment Corporation and $58m to the Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation.
The voice was destined to become part of this blubbery, unaccountable and ineffective Aboriginal industrial complex, which is one of the reasons Australians chose to reject it at the October 14 referendum.
The Aboriginal establishment has grown exponentially in recent decades thanks to lazily allocated government funding, mining royalties and mission creep. It has fostered a sub-industry of grant harvesting and rent-seeking, laundering government funds through thousands of different channels.
The NIAA is a case study of how quickly a cashed-up quango forgets what it was put on Earth to do. It was an initiative of Scott Morrison’s government, part of a broader government shake-up to make the spending of taxpayers’ money more efficient and accountable.
Its purpose, outlined in the Government Gazette, was to co-ordinate commonwealth-funded programs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It was to advise the prime minister on priorities and lead initiatives to close the gap. Crucially, it was tasked with analysing the effectiveness of Indigenous programs and services delivered by other government agencies to improve the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
This is the NIAA’s mission as described on its website: “To ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are heard, recognised and empowered.”
The repurposing of the NIAA occurred without legislation and without debate. Last year, it worked tirelessly in support of the voice referendum. It was in the inner circle that shaped the proposal for constitutional change and ran an extensive “education campaign” online and in print, publishing two million brochures supporting the Yes vote.
The NIAA’s administrative budget in 2020 was $246m. In 2023, it was $364m, an increase of 66 per cent. Which prompted an eminently reasonable question from Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to the Finance Minister in October: “Can you give us a real, practical example of a policy that your government has initiated through the NIAA that is improving the lives of our most marginalised Indigenous Australians?”
Katy Gallagher spoke expansively about service delivery, outcomes and consultation but failed to address the question, implying that the answer was no; she couldn’t give a practical example of NIAA spending that has improved the lives of marginalised Indigenous Australians.
Three days after the collapse of the voice referendum, Price and Senate colleague Kerrynne Liddle introduced an urgency motion calling on the government to support a royal commission into child sexual abuse in Indigenous communities and an audit of commonwealth spending on Indigenous programs.
The motion was defeated on the votes of Labor and Greens senators and independent ACT senator David Pocock. No one on the wokier side of politics is interested in opening that particular can of worms that would reveal the failure of Indigenous policy stretching back years.
They would rather talk about the voice, abolishing Australia Day or anything that detracts from the ugly reality on the ground.
If Mr Albanese were to return to Alice Springs, he would discover youth crime has not declined while government-funded programs have proliferated. They include a program encouraging budding young Aboriginal artists to decorate the shutters of boarded-up shops. Never let a crisis get in the way of a grant opportunity.
The crime spree continues in plain sight. Last Sunday night, an IGA supermarket was plundered of booze by thieves using an angle grinder to cut through a brick wall.
The previous evening, police charged two 13-year-olds who allegedly kicked down a woman’s door and stole her Ford Ranger, which was later intercepted by police deploying tyre deflation devices. Two youths, aged 12, were taken home to be placed in the custody of an allegedly responsible adult.
On Monday, three boys aged between 11 and 13 invaded a home after throwing rocks at the windows and threatening the occupant with a metal pole. In the early hours of last Thursday morning, a group of youths vandalised 18 cars along Gap Rd.
Southern Watch Commander Terry Simpson said police attended for “insurance purposes only”. “We didn’t want to wake up all the victims,” he said.
“Most often, the grog runners, drug dealers, thieves and abusers are not invisible,” Senator Liddle told me at the weekend.
“It’s often their victims who are. Distraction and denial do not make anything different.”
Nick Cater is senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre.
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