During these years around the millennium, ACGC was not under particular pressure from the NT Government to be reformed. Along with Yuendumu, ACGC was the only remote area local government in central Australia that could claim a population of over 1,000. So, the reform effort was in many ways directed much more to the 20 or so other such local governing bodies in central Australia that serviced populations of well under 1,000 (see Sanders 2006b). ACGC’s challenge, either side of the millennium, once it had recovered from its financial overrun of 1996–97, seemed to be managing emerging centre/periphery tensions.

Once Ti Tree town had been added as a ward in 1995, it became very clear that the town was becoming the centre of ACGC operations. Housing began to be built there for managerial staff and a new, quite substantial office complex and council chambers began to be planned and developed there, which was finally opened in 2002. ACGC also developed a new Aged Care Day Centre in Ti Tree during these years, as well as having its major works yard there (see Fig. 11.2).

With all this development of ACGC infrastructure occurring in Ti Tree town, there were clearly times when some of the council members and their constituents from the outlying discrete Aboriginal settlement wards wondered whether they were getting an appropriate share of the ACGC’s attention and resources. The two most outlying and quite populous settlements, Laramba to the southwest and Engawala to the southeast, had little to gain from infrastructure and services being developed in Ti Tree town, as they were the best part of 150km and two hours drive away (see Fig. 11.1). Each maintained their own community association and office, and ran a Community Development Employment Project (CDEP) for local people separate from ACGC.^[4] Also, their power and water systems were stand alone and not always run by ACGC. So, there were several times when Laramba, in particular, felt it was gaining little from ACGC and threatened to break away with a grouping of settlements to its west. At one point, Laramba’s secession ambitions were even discussed in the NT Legislative Assembly (LANT 2002a: 934).

Some of the settlements closer to Ti Tree also had cause to wonder about the efficacy of the ACGC arrangement during these years. Three settlements 50km from Ti Tree on dirt roads, Yanginj, Woolla and Anyungunba, had just basic water, electricity and housing services managed by ACGC, and were having trouble retaining residents. As numbers of residents fell, so did service levels. Two other settlements 50km from Ti Tree, but adjacent to the highway, Alyuen and Wilora, seemed to be doing better at retaining their residents, but in some sense this was not primarily due to ACGC services. Alyuen had access to a nearby roadhouse for stores, and Wilora had access to a small pastoral station store, a CDEP run independently of ACGC, and a small school. Again, ACGC really only oversaw the water, electricity and housing in these communities.

The two closest settlements to Ti Tree, Pmara Jutunta and Nturiya, were experiencing different issues again. Already among the more populous settlements in the regional grouping, their populations seemed if anything to be growing, but at the same time, their service levels seemed to be falling. Being only 10km and 17km respectively from Ti Tree, there had been a judgment made by the ACGC administration in previous years that the residents of these two settlements could use the ACGC office in Ti Tree and no ACGC office presence was maintained in Pmara Jutunta or Nturiya. While this may have seemed acceptable for a while, when the community store run by the Aboriginal pastoral company closed at Nturiya early in 2002, that settlement was effectively left without any local place for even basic administrative business. Nturiya was now simply a housing estate from which people were obliged to commute to Ti Tree for virtually all services. Pmara Jutunta, by contrast, still had a community store, although it was becoming run down.^[5]

While the decline of store services in Nturiya and Pmara Jutunta was not the direct responsibility of ACGC, when combined with the lack of ACGC offices in the settlements it did not augur well. Service levels generally in these two more populous settlements seemed to be contracting back to just housing, water and electricity, as in some of the less populous settlements 50km out of town. This contraction of service levels in the discrete Aboriginal settlements surrounding Ti Tree was clearly going to have ramifications for ACGC as the local governing body, particularly when contrasted with ACGC’s growing level of infrastructure in Ti Tree town. There were thus, it seemed, some centre-periphery tensions developing in ACGC around the turn of the millennium, which needed to be managed.