In the last years of the Howard Government, Laynha and other organisations of its kind found themselves thrust into crisis mode. There was a lot of change during this period. Some of it was pre-emptive on the part of the organisation, in anticipation of the need to prepare itself for engagement with an increasingly interventionist regime. Some of it was enforced—to resist would have meant loss of funding and threatened the viability of the organisation.

The catalyst for change was the transfer of the CDEP program from ATSIC to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR). In 2005–06, changes to the CDEP program were put in place from the centre, which appeared to take no account of the realities of the local economies of, and the state of the labour market in, remote Aboriginal Australia, nor of the ‘job-readiness’ of the majority of the working-age Indigenous population. Laynha was told that it had 12 months to create one business and exit 15 individuals off CDEP and into ‘real’ employment. By dint of transferring some Yolngu staff of the organisation off CDEP wages onto ‘real’ wages paid from Laynha’s discretionary income, the organisation almost succeeded in meeting the ‘employment’ target, but clearly this was not a sustainable strategy over the longer term. The organisation did not have the capacity or the resources to start a business within a 12-month timeframe, and there was no coherent support from government to help them achieve this. It was almost as if government was wanting organisations like Laynha to fail, and not surprisingly, Laynha was told at the end of the year that it had performed ‘poorly’. For the next year it was told that it had to employ a CDEP co-ordinator as a condition of receiving the Laynha CDEP contract and that it had to undertake a capacity building plan against which its achievements would be measured as a condition for future funding. It was set another (higher) job creation target, and told it had to create two businesses. The CDEP guidelines for 2006–07 also had major implications, potentially, for other aspects of the organisation’s governance. Under ‘6.1.1 Governance’, the following appeared:

Or, in other words, by the end of the year the Laynha council would, in the government’s mind, be replaced by a board with 50 per cent non-Yolngu membership.

During the next year, Laynha commissioned a review of its structure (Tallegalla Consultants 2006), appointed a CDEP co-ordinator and, for the first time in its history as an organisation, a non-Yolngu CEO who was charged with improving the internal governance of the organisation. It also revamped its executive arrangements, including providing a stipend for the Chair of the newly constituted board of directors so that this position was no longer filled by a CDEP participant. All this was not achieved without internal struggle. Appointing a non-Yolngu CEO required a substantial change to the culture of the organisation, and the new CDEP arrangements, once the co-ordinator was in place, began to have perceptible effects that were not always welcomed by participants. For example, the continuing requirement to create jobs quickly meant a continuing emphasis on jobs at Yirrkala rather than on the homelands, and the stricter reporting requirements for CDEP participants began to have an effect on people’s abilities to fulfil their cultural obligations. The Yolngu board found themselves in the position of having to participate in social engineering, for example by reducing financial and practical support for funeral ceremonies, thus adding a new dimension to Yolngu ‘politics’.^[32] And the organisation was to receive two further body blows: the summary banning of kava on which it depended for valuable discretionary income, and the summary abolition of CDEP, now fortunately averted.

All this was taking place in a context of accelerating change in Commonwealth Government policy, in which the very existence of homelands, and therefore of the organisations that support them, began to be at issue. Also, as the NT Government’s planning for the new shire structure began to gather pace, questions over the future role of organisations like Laynha in the delivery of services have begun to be raised (but not as yet answered). Thus, despite making great efforts to comply with government requirements, to the extent of compromising the Yolngu view of the role of Laynha as an organisation, at the time of writing the future of the organisation seems very uncertain.

The strains placed on the staff of the organisation in the last two years have been very considerable. Staff vary in their perceptions of their role, and these differences have been exacerbated by the increasing ambiguity of Laynha’s role. Few of the non-Yolngu staff see the two ‘worlds’ as separate in the way that Yolngu do. Some subscribe to a government-like view of the position of the organisation. Others struggle to maintain a sense that they are working in a Yolngu organisation for the Yolngu members, while being conscious that they are implementing policies that are inimical to varying degrees to the Yolngu world view.