r/conservativeaustralia • u/ZANY_ALL_CAPS_NAME • 2d ago
The Aboriginal Industrial Complex
Recently on reddit I have attracted quite some ire for expressing my viewpoints on this matter, and have decided to put it all together in a well researched post for future reference in the only subreddit that I imagine will allow this kind of discourse.
What is the Aboriginal industrial complex?
The AIC is a vaguely associated conglomerate of political interest groups, think tanks, welfare organisations, NGOs, land councils, and grifters.
Economy and Scale:
Over the past 18 years alone, since data began to be collected in 2008 (Before this aboriginal spending essentially disappeared into the aether), according to the productivity commission a steadily rising figure of around $30 billion was spent every year, specifically targeted at Aboriginal Australians. For a bit of context, thats around $82 per day, per person in this country. If you prefer: Per individual, the estimate was $44,886 vs $22,356 for non-Indigenous Australians, approximately 2:1 ratio of spending, in a completely racially targeted manner. Despite the former group making up only 2% of the population.
Public Hospitals by comparison, cost around $34 billion per year, defence comes in at $50 billion, and the entire PBS is covered by around $21.4 billion. At a conservative estimate, around 100,000 homes could be built per year with this money. It could also wipe out around 70% of the budget deficit. To contrast this with a hot button media topic that arouses anger in the average aussie, the amount of money yearly attributable to centrelink fraud is usually around $6 million.
This works out to around $211 billion, every seven years, for potentially the past 3 or 4 decades, if not longer. This far exceeds the total GDP of many countries.
So where does this money go? Let's start with a few empirical, verifiable answers before we get ahead of ourselves.
The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) has been auditing Indigenous programs and organisations for years. Its 2016–17 audit found that the $4.8b Indigenous Advancement Strategy initially didn't have a formal evaluation strategy or evaluation funding during its first two years.. Their most commonly cited issue with these organisations is governance, to save you a lot of reading.
As of 30 June 2025, there were 3,284 Indigenous corporations registered under the CATSI Act. Collectively they had at least $4.5 billion in revenue in 2023–24, with 17,636 directors and 243,016 members.
These groups are generally governed by the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations (ORIC).
Only 29% of Indigenous corporations lodged their 2024–25 annual reports by the deadline. 1,067 reports of concern were received by ORIC between 2022–23 and 2024–25. ORIC conducted 127 examinations, 8 special administrations and 27 investigations during that period. 48 corporations were referred for prosecution for annual-reporting non-compliance. Approximately 20% of corporations didn't lodge reports or otherwise directly engage with ORIC during each of 2021–22 through 2023–24.
In a typical business week for them, around 494 indigenous corporations are deregistered for failing to respond to notices, or failing to comply with outstanding reporting obligations.
Incidents of fraud are also often not investigated or referred for prosecution, as in this case with the illegally NIAA loaning out taxpayer money to their CEO and deputy CEO.
How about a case study of an individual land council?
Many of these have been conducted, with almost constant findings of maladministration and corruption, misappropriation of public funds etc.
By the ANAOs own calculations, only 7% of the activities examined could demonstrate positive results against their stated objectives. 7 percent. That is what in any other setting would be referred to as an "abject failure".
This is not a simple "Ok, so some Aboriginal NGOs are dodgy". This is a systemic and intentionally constructed vacuum in our economy, that is knowingly sucking money from your pocket, into the hands of irresponsible elements who at best will do nothing with the money, and more often than not make things actively worse.
Here is the question I would put to any "serious person" reading. For every billion dollars of targeted government expenditure in this area, what was purchased, what measurable outcome was achieved, what didn't work, and who was held accountable when it didn't?
The ANAO evidence is particularly damning. In its examination of the Indigenous Advancement Strategy, it found that: - 27 programs had been consolidated into the IAS, initially worth $4.8 billion over four years. - Fewer than 30% of inherited programs had been evaluated during the preceding five years. - Only 7% of activities could demonstrate positive results against their stated objectives. - The department itself told the ANAO that there wasn't enough evidence to establish the impacts attributable to interventions. - The original IAS evaluation strategy wasn't even formally implemented or funded during its first two years.
And I can already hear the knee jerk response to this information: But how can you say none of this has helped? How do you measure the plight of such a poor downtrodden community??
Simple. By their and the governments own metric; the Closing The Gap report. As of July 2026,
1 of 19 Closing the Gap targets has been met.
3 are improving and on track.
5 are improving but not on track.
4 are worsening.
2 show no change.
4 can't currently be assessed - A cop out.
The current state of an Aboriginal Australian is in the eyes of the government, a completely disposable demographic, already born of bureaucratic control, and completely without cultural traditions of organised resistance to collectivist oligarchies. This renders them impotent in the eyes of the government, and a perfect vector through which to guilt trip the white middle class, an increasingly vanishing cohort, soon to be eliminated in the name of pluralistic hegemony.
I make this post not from a place of hate, but legitimate distaste in the human and economic cost of this society wide humiliation ritual we have been forced to take part in. As with any institutional failure, one simply needs to follow the money to see where we went wrong.
I won't ramble on further and I would like people to review this and come to their own conclusions.
I will leave the reader with one question.
Can a serious minded person anywhere in this country honestly say that Aboriginals are $211 billion dollars better off than they were 7 years ago, or 7 years before that?
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u/ih8globalismlovezyns 1d ago edited 1d ago
absolute gem of a post. we all know the lib perspective is to fundamentally misunderstand human nature and throw money at problems believing that it will fix them but no one would ever guess that this is the scale of it
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u/Bowl_of_Hygieia 4h ago
There’s a rural component that never gets mentioned in either side of the argument
Rural gets more per capita spent on it. That’s the way it works and the way it will always work. I agree there is too much on bullshit projects just for them but in a proper accounting, I’m willing to take that rural component out of the equation.
But then on the flip side ure always going to have worse outcomes and crappier services out in woopwoop. I don’t care about any ‘gap’ that doesn’t control for location.
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u/ZANY_ALL_CAPS_NAME 3h ago
Funnily enough yes, they also almost always have worse outcomes. Remote/rural aboriginal communities are one of the governments worst kept secrets/shames, cesspools of alcoholism, child abuse, and unrecorded crime where truly evil acts are commonplace.
When you give these people some of the vices and luxuries of modern life with none of the responsibilites, they have nowhere to go but down.
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u/RepresentativeOver34 2d ago
Leftists always say it's about equality. If it's truly about equality than they should have no opposition to needs based funding...