According to Wikipedia there are roughly 70,000 Aboriginals in the Northern Territory, and about 45% of them live in remote communities. By my calculations, on the basis of Graham's figures, this means that we are offering about $20,000 per person -- including children -- per year on behalf of remote-community Aboriginals. For comparison, the median Australian household income in 2006 was $53,404.

It's hardly surprising that the NT government can't spend it all. The real question is why the hell does it cost so much to keep people living in a state of sickness and squalor; and how can we achieve a better return on these incredible sums of money?

I have worked out in NT Remote communites for a few years and I can assure you that things out there are very bad. I saw children under 12 with sexual infections - youngest was six. I saw people crippled with tertiary gonorrhoea because they had been infected with it for so long - probably from childhood, or they were reinfected so chronically that the same outcome was inevitable. I have workd on my own in communities that were supposed to have a minimum of three nurses - yet the selection of nurses for employment is strangely haphazard. I know of many wonderfully skilled nurses who have been turned away - there's no rhyme nor reason to it.

Health aside, I see the only real long term answer to the 'aboriginal issues' to be education. Mandatory, functional, education. Once again there are some great, skilled, dedicated and very committed teachers out there, having to fly by the seat of their pants, due to there being no dollars. Education there will require novel approaches for sure, but those teachers who have been out there a while are all more than capable of these ammendments to the system fashioned in urban Australia. Feed the kids (three meals a day if you have to) and they will come to school. It's how the missionaries did it and the missions (for all their dreadful legacies) did teach kids to speak English and to read and write. This has not been accomplished to any great degree out remote since. Certainly not in the seven remote communities I have worked in.

It is not as though the need is not there.

It simply beggers belief that the allocated funds were not spent on the aboriginal affairs.

If there is no lodical explaination, the whole government should be sacked and new elections called. Obviously it is time for more Federal intervention, at a much higher level.

No wonder a man swears!

While this article makes some good points, it seriously misunderstands the Commonwealth Grants Commission process.

The Commission’s expenditure estimates are not normative, in the sense that they estimate what the government “should” spend on a particular activity. Nor are its allocations like specific purpose payments, which are earmarked (as the name suggests) for particular activities.

Rather, the Commission's estimates are based on what it would cost to provide the average levels of service delivery of all the states and territories for a particular activity. The objective of “horizontal equalisation” is to distribute GST revenues so that, in principle, each state and territory could deliver the average levels of services at the average level of efficiency supported by the average level of tax effort.

There is nothing in this process to say what a state or territory SHOULD spend its money on - If all the states provided their citizens with free pornography, then the Commission would produce standard and standardized pornography budget expenditure estimates.

The NT gets by far the most money per capita out of this process because its large indigenous population and remote communities make demand for government services, and the cost of delivering them, very high.

How the money is actually spent is up to the States and Territories to decide according to their own policy and community priorities.

I agree that the NT should spend more on its indigenous people, though.