A case study in creative funding arrangements: how the Indigenous Advancement Strategy grant program can be used to hand out money in a needlessly convoluted and opaque way

The federal government sensibly linked its ambitions to boost economic development in northern Australia with its Indigenous affairs policies, but a lot of the details about how this works are hidden behind opaque funding arrangements.

The key body that links the two federal policies is the Northern Australia Indigenous Reference Group, which was appointed in August 2017 to advise a joint ministerial forum in which the Commonwealth and the relevant states and territories are all represented. It’s made a lot of detailed and well-argued policy recommendations on practical ways to include the top end’s Aboriginal people in the push to unlock its economic potential.