Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Northern Territory
Funding for Aboriginal disadvantage, however, has been a contentious matter
since self-government was established in 1978. Speaking at the 2017 Garma Festival
of Traditional Culture, former Chairman of the NT Grants Commission and former
Coordinator-General Bob Beadman said that while the reason for the dearth in
funding is multifaceted, a fundamental reason is that ‘The Commonwealth Grants
Commission carve-up provided no catch-up to address the infrastructure deficit
dump passed to the NT at the time of Self-Government’. 18
Because of the small population, there are limited revenue-raising opportunities
for NT governments. Taxation revenue is limited to payroll, motor vehicle registration
and stamp duty–type revenue. The boom and bust nature of the NT’s resource-based
economy means there is some income from mining royalties, but these are subject to
minimisation by the companies concerned and don’t contribute a great deal to the NT
budget. 19 Thus the NT is heavily reliant on federal government funding.
Notwithstanding that 30 per cent of the population is Aboriginal, the NT is
losing ‘Indigenous funding’ to other states because increasing numbers of people
in those states are identifying as Aboriginal. This is complicated by the Commonwealth
Grants Commission’s failure to assess relative need between Aboriginal
populations in Australia 20 since its creation in 1933.
The enduring lack of comprehensive federal policy in relation to northern
Australia has been lamented by Megarrity 21 as the ‘politics of neglect’ based on
viewing the nation’s north as an economy rather than a society, and failing to
consider intellectual contributions from a range of community members. Historical
neglect, he noted, means that the north is still considered a wild, frontier land for
which visions of wealth and splendour are a product of east coast metropolitan
‘white fella Dreaming’.
Political parties
There are two dominant political parties in the NT: the Country Liberal Party
(CLP) and the Australian Labor Party (ALP). The CLP was formed in 1974, when
the Liberal Party, which was concentrated in Darwin, and the Country Party, which
was concentrated in regional bush centres, merged to become the sole conservative
force. The NT branch of the ALP was formed in 1973 and has traditionally been
regarded as ‘weak’ because:
18 Beadman 2017.
19 See Northen Territory Government 2019.
20 For example, there is no distinction between the remote community of Papunya in Central
Australia and Parramatta in urban NSW so the same ‘loading’ applies to both communities. See
also Beadman in Productivity Commission 2017.
21 Megarrity 2018, 183.
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