When Sarah Holcombe and I approached ACGC to be part of the Indigenous Community Governance Project (ICGP) in the early months of 2004, our arrival coincided with that of a new Chief Executive Officer (CEO). The appointee was an officer of the NT local government department who, towards the end of his career, wanted to take the opportunity to show that a regional, multi-settlement local government like ACGC could work. He was open to our involvement and, as a new arrival, was not at all defensive about the existing situation at ACGC. We attended our first council meeting in June 2004, and council too seemed open to our involvement, though somewhat tentative.

Two months later we heard from the CEO that council had been dismissed. The reason was that members from some of the nine wards that then had members were not turning up to monthly meetings and the rules clearly stated that if council did not meet its quorum rule for two consecutive meetings it was dismissed and new elections called. The numbers on the electoral roll for each ward for this election in August 2004 are set out in Table 11.1. Clearly, the tenth ward, Anyungunba, which had not had members in the previous council, was not going to have members in the new council either, as the one person on the roll there could not self nominate. Woolla and Yanginj were also very low in numbers on the roll and it was known that these few enrolled people were not currently residing in the settlements.^[6]

When the new council was elected in October 2004, it did, however, have a full complement of 18 members from nine wards, Anyungunba aside. None of the elections was contested, so it appeared that community discussion had delivered just the right number of nominees for vacancies. About half the members were returnees from the previous council, including the previous chairman and the one non-Indigenous member for the Ti Tree ward. At the first meeting of the new council, the previous chairman nominated again for that position, but so did a new member who had developed a working relationship with the new CEO as a liaison officer during the period after the dismissal of the previous council. This new council member won the position of chairman in a fairly close vote.

Our relationship with the new council developed comfortably, though we moved away from using ‘governance’ as the key descriptive term for our project. The ‘governance’ terminology seemed to be associated with the idea of elected member ‘training’ of one sort or another, and we did not want to be cast in the role of a ‘training’ provider. We began to talk about ‘working with Council’ on ‘issues of importance or concern’ to them, because we were interested in ‘how’ ACGC worked and, without pre-judging the matter, how it might work better.

The issue that emerged in late 2004 was the number of Aboriginal people camping informally along the western side of Ti Tree town, without reticulated water or electricity (see Fig. 11.2). The local member of the NT Legislative Assembly for Stuart, and senior Minister in the Martin Labor Government, Peter Toyne, had just written to ACGC expressing disquiet at the low level of servicing for significant numbers of campers in this area and asking whether ACGC might be able to do some more.^[7] ACGC agreed to run a boxed water service in the camps over the summer of 2004, funded by the NT Government, and we offered our services to do a study of who was living in the camps and for what reasons, and to report back to council. The camping seemed to be an ‘issue of importance and concern’ at least for Peter Toyne, and therefore also for the council.

Sarah Holcombe’s chapter in this volume discusses in greater detail how this work proceeded, and we have also reported on it elsewhere (Holcombe and Sanders 2007; Sanders and Holcombe 2007). Suffice to say here, that the work proved a very useful way for us to get to know council members and their constituents, and for us to come to grips with life-ways and service patterns in the region. Declining service levels at Nturiya and places like Yanginj were clearly boosting numbers in ‘Creek Camp’, but so was trouble further afield, outside the Anmatjere region, in places like Willowra to the northwest. Among the 15 camps, which accommodated towards 100 people at times, there were about 25 very well established core, permanent residents. Some of these were public sector employees in Ti Tree, who were not offered housing with their employment. Employment-linked housing was restricted to senior employees mainly recruited from elsewhere. Two ACGC houses were available in Ti Tree for local Aboriginal employees, but this was far from enough, and one ACGC worker who had occupied one of these houses for a period had ended up living back in Creek Camp, sick of ‘other people’ using his ‘lounge room as a bedroom’. There were also old and disabled people among the core residents of Creek Camp, who liked it as a quiet, spread out place to live, with dogs, close to town services and family, but away from the whitefellas of the compact eastern residential area and with a bit of service support from the Aged Care Day Centre. Most of the 25 or so core residents of Creek Camp saw themselves as continuing to live there for some considerable time, and were more interested in exploring development options there than the idea of moving into houses on the east side of Ti Tree (see Fig. 11.2).

This last finding led us to explore the attitudes of other Ti Tree residents and NT Government officials to the idea of developing Creek Camp with reticulated services and possibly some buildings. Many were open to the idea, however, key interests within the NT Department of Planning and Infrastructure were not so keen and, in support of that stance, cited NT Government policy against the further recognition of Aboriginal community living areas in urban areas. The obstacles to reticulated services and other development at Creek Camp at this higher level of government seemed insurmountable, and ACGC itself also had some reservations, both on council and among its key managerial staff. So, after three reports to council over 18 months, we saw no option but to step back from this difficult issue for a while. Our probing had put a more positive and quantified image of Creek Camp in the public domain, but there was still no obvious way forward to ameliorate the existing situation.

In the middle of 2005, as we were first reporting to ACGC on the Creek Camp work, the one settler member of council resigned due to family commitments. Being replaced by an Aboriginal resident, council then became all-Aboriginal again, in a way that it had not been since 1995; and it has remained that way since. Late in 2005, council was once again dismissed for not meeting its quorum rule for two consecutive meetings. A new issue that was thus emerging was whether the quorum rule should be made less demanding. The 2005 council was reluctant to change the rule, with some of the long-serving members arguing that it was good to have people from all wards in the meeting when making decisions generally, but also that members from particular wards needed to be there for making decisions specific to their ward. Indeed, during 2005 we observed a tendency to defer to and support people from particular wards in decisions relating specifically to their wards.

For example, during 2005 the issue was often raised of reinvesting in electricity infrastructure at Yanginj and Woolla. Without residents permanently present, the generators in both places had gone missing over recent years. Some money was available for re-investment, but the CEO’s argument was that, in order to safeguard assets, ACGC could only reinvest if there was some assurance of people residing in the two settlements. However, none of the four members of council from these two wards who were raising this issue could clearly commit to resuming residence themselves, or on behalf of members of their families. Other council members were generally supportive of their re-investment push, but essentially deferred on the matter to the ward members and the CEO. The issue gradually lost currency in council meetings as it became clear that the ward members could not commit to residence and the CEO was maintaining the need for such commitment in order to re-invest.

The new council that was elected in early 2006 only had 13 members from eight wards, nine of whom were returnees, including the chairman, and all of whom were, once again, elected unopposed. Woolla had no members in the new council, and Yanginj and two other wards had dropped down to just one member each, which potentially made meeting the quorum rule even harder, as these three single ward members had to be present at all meetings. We thought, at the time, that council was losing interest, as they were finding the CEO somewhat ‘hard’, even though procedurally he was scrupulous in keeping members well informed and involving them in decision making.^[8] Council members were also coming to understand that the CEO was a stickler for the rules, and we realised that probably in the past, the council had often not met its quorum rule, but that clerks and CEOs had simply not invoked the rules.^[9] Faced with this strict adherence to the rules and the prospect of being dismissed yet again, council began to shift, pragmatically, on the idea of changing the quorum rule. At the first meeting of the new council in February 2006, no quorum was achieved. At its second meeting in March, when a quorum was achieved, council passed a resolution that the quorum rule be changed to a simple majority of elected members. However, ACGC could only request such a change; the power to effect it lay with the NT local government Minister, and because of consultation requirements this would take some time.

From March 2006 onwards, the CEO seemed to soften somewhat. He gently let it be known that now that council had passed its resolution to have the quorum rule changed he would not dismiss it for not meeting the higher quorum rule—and in July 2006 this declared intention was indeed tested. After almost two years in the job, the CEO also seemed to be softening because he was benefiting from some build up of other managerial staff around him. A new social services director and staff were strengthening the level of ACGC activity in aged and disabled services, sport, recreation and youth services, and also child care services, not only in Ti Tree but in the outlying communities as well. The corporate services section had built a Rural Transaction Centre within the council office in Ti Tree and was increasing ACGC’s level of both Centrelink and personal financial services. There was thus a sense that ACGC was growing and expanding its servicing roles a little, beyond electricity, water and housing, and back out from Ti Tree town into the outlying communities. This seemed to allow the CEO to relax a little with council and to take some credit for ACGC’s modest recent expansion of services.

Another aspect of this expansion of service roles was that during late 2005 and early 2006, ACGC was being encouraged by the Commonwealth Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) to become involved in running CDEP. This had two aspects. One was taking on the running of the existing CDEPs at Laramba and Engawala, and the second was developing CDEP for the first time in the settlements closer to Ti Tree. This second aspect was a substantial new opportunity for ACGC to offer quite large numbers of part-time jobs to local Aboriginal people in Pmara Jutunta, Nturiya, Ti Tree and Alyuen. This clearly had great potential for making ACGC more relevant and present in the lives of the residents of these settlements. However, the other aspect of ACGC taking on CDEP was somewhat more fraught, as it could easily be seen in Laramba and Engawala as ACGC muscling in on their long-standing, local, autonomous office and CDEP arrangements.

When DEWR awarded the CDEP contract for Laramba and Engawala to ACGC, the CEO knew that they would have to do some work allaying fears and building support in these communities. The local CDEP manager in each place, who doubled as a general office manager, would now for the first time become an ACGC employee, rather than being autonomously employed by a local committee. This new ACGC employee would clearly need to work with the local committees in these places if the new arrangement was to endure. Consequently, ACGC contracted the consultancy firm Burdon-Torzillo to do some ‘CDEP governance’ work in these two settlements, and we were encouraged to work with them. At the same time, an officer of the NT local government department was charged with the responsibility of consulting constituents about the proposed quorum rule change and helping the Minister ascertain that people were satisfied with it. We became adjuncts to both these processes, travelling frequently to Laramba and Engawala and less often to some of the other outlying settlements.

Our role in the quorum change consultations was educational. We developed some graphics to explain the proposed new quorum rule in comparison to the existing rule, one version of which was designed for notice boards and is reproduced in Fig. 11.3. These graphics seemed to work well as an educational tool and meant that the NT local government department officer had a sounder basis on which to assess that people understood and were supportive of the new rule. Like the Council, constituents seemed pragmatic about the rule change once they understood why council was being repeatedly dismissed. The Minister approved and promulgated the new quorum rule, which came into effect from November 2006.

Source: Diagram developed by Burdon-Torzillo

Our role in the Laramba and Engawala ‘CDEP governance’ work was largely to assist Burdon-Torzillo in holding discussions with the ‘committee’ in these two settlements about the new administrative arrangements. In one of these settlements this meant meeting with a relatively small group of local people and in the other it meant large community meetings. In both settlements there were some fears about the changes to CDEP and local office staffing arrangements, but there was also a willingness to work with ACGC on refining the new arrangements. The main concern was to keep some degree of local settlement autonomy in the utilisation of the local CDEP workforce and equipment, and in the running of the local office and other local services. In light of this, Burdon-Torzillo developed the idea of local-regional agreements between ACGC and the two settlement committees, which would be signed by each (see Fig. 11.4). These agreements were developed during the second half of 2006 and signed in December. The significance of this work, however, was as much in the process as the product. The ACGC administration was showing considerable respect for single-settlement localism in dealing specifically with Laramba and Engawala in this way. Indeed, by the end of the process, the CEO was hailing Laramba and Engawala as ACGC’s best organised settlements and wondering whether local committees and offices on other settlements could be usefully re-instituted as part of the introduction of CDEP.

In the later months of 2006, an old settlement office in Pmara Jutunta was indeed refurbished and re-opened as part of the introduction of CDEP. A non-CDEP, settler staff member of ACGC was out-posted to this office for administrative and logistical support, commuting out daily from Ti Tree. A Pmara Jutunta settlement committee was also encouraged and established among CDEP participants, though with a broader remit than just helping organise CDEP in the settlement. Our next ‘research’ task, looking forward to 2007, was identified as supporting and working with this committee and the out-posted ACGC officer, helping them to address Pmara Jutunta settlement issues and to liaise with council regionally.^[10] There was also the suggestion that a similar arrangement might be developed at Nturiya, though that settlement no longer had an old office that could be easily refurbished, nor as yet, a coherent group of CDEP workers who could be drawn on to develop a settlement committee.

At the end of 2006, therefore, ACGC seemed to have rediscovered the need to support strong single-settlement localism within its larger multi-settlement regionalism. This seemed to us a very positive development that in some ways revisited the guarded regional federalism of ACGC’s early constitutional design. Laramba and Engawala, rather than being seen as troublesome regional outliers, were now being recognised anew for their autonomous settlement strength. The introduction of CDEP to other ACGC settlements was being seen as an opportunity to reinvigorate their single-settlement strength as well, within the larger regional framework.