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Indigenous organisations, by and large, have relatively limited administrativecapability. Dealing with multiple government bodies, processes and reports imposessignificant demands on these limited resources. This places a strong onus ongovernments to minimise the burden placed on Indigenous communities andorganisations.The new Corporations (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Act 2006commenced on 1 July 2007. The new law aims to reduce red tape by streamliningreporting by Indigenous organisations. Small and medium sized corporations arelikely to have reduced reporting requirements. While some parts of the new lawmirror those in the Corporations Act, it also has parts that apply only to Aboriginaland Torres Strait Islander organisations, so that they can design rules better suited totheir circumstances (ORAC 2006).The Australian Government’s Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination (OIPC)commissioned an evaluation of the administrative burden imposed by governmentfunding programs on Indigenous organisations. The evaluation, undertaken betweenmid-2005 and January 2006, identified the following aspects of government redtape that stretched Indigenous governance capacity:• Indigenous organisations use many sources of funds from two levels ofgovernment, each with discrete reporting requirements and discrete contact staff.• Large numbers of small grants are treated the same as much larger grants, withsimilar reporting frequency and large numbers of performance indicators.• Organisations receive little feedback on their reports, and funding departmentsappear to make relatively limited use of the information being collected, whichis not likely to be useful in managing the activity or organisation well, orinforming future policy and program settings (OIPC 2006, pp. 5–7).The OIPC evaluation also found clashes of ‘organisation culture’, particularly afocus by funding agencies on rigid compliance. A ‘compliance paradigm’ wasevident in the application of ‘standard procedures’, such as standard contracts, orstandard performance indicators, which did not match the project activity orpurpose (OIPC 2006, p. 8).Australian governments have made a number of collective commitments to improvegovernment governance, including establishing the ‘COAG trials’, commissioningthis Report and agreeing to the ‘National Framework of Principles for GovernmentService Delivery to Indigenous Australians’ (box 11.5.3).11.48 OVERCOMINGINDIGENOUSDISADVANTAGE 2007