ANALYSIS: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was right when he said this week that governments needed to do better for the Northern Territory and the NT Government now led by Labor Chief Minister Natasha Fyles needs to have its come to jesus moment after years of misusing federal Indigenous disadvantage money that has led to the recent troubles.

This is a home-grown problem of successive NT governments starting back in the Clare Martin Labor days that wilfully misappropriated federal funding meant for Indigenous disadvantage and hoped it would never catch up with them. Finally, it has.

As Fyles leaves for a second round of crisis talks in Canberra today about the crime problem currently gripping Alice Springs, she will again be asking the feds for more money to address Indigenous disadvantage in the Territory.

“The Commonwealth need to step up and we need to see needs-based funding,” she said. “I have said this time and time again – the NT, based on GST formulas and the cost we have of delivering services, it’s simply not fair.”

This has been the NT Government’s plea for some time, demanding more money from the Commonwealth to address Indigenous disadvantage and then turning around and spending that money on a bloated public service that has more executive positions than Victoria and pork-barrelling the cash into where the votes are that keep them in power – Darwin’s leafy northern suburbs.

While the rest of the nation bankrolls the Northern Territory to the tune of more than 70 per cent of its now $9 billion expenditure budget through GST payments, there has never been any real strings attached to how the NT Government has spent money on remote disadvantage.

The cracks have finally started to show in places around Alice Springs, after the Fyles Government allowed the federal Stronger Futures legislation to lapse with no plan in place to deal with the consequences despite being told by Indigenous groups that there were going to be problems.

It wasn’t just the lapse of the alcohol bans that led to the dysfunction, the entire situation was ready to break before that and just needed one more element to tip it over.

The fact it has taken this long is troubling but not surprising.

As former NT Labor Aboriginal affairs minister Ken Vowles told the Guardian on his way out of Cabinet in late 2018 over disagreements with the then-Gunner government over fiscal management, “We’re going to say we need [more money] because we have remote Aboriginal communities – then we’ll spend it on a waterpark [in the northern suburbs]”.

“We have ripped off countrymen in the bush for many, many years to prop up the [Darwin] northern suburbs,” he said back then.

“The money not spent on Aboriginal communities is disgusting.”

And four years later, Fyles is now making the same argument the NT always has, that we need more federal cash to address disadvantage in remote communities. And the feds will hand it over with no strings attached because it’s a small price to pay for the facade that this jurisdiction can handle its own problems when it has clearly shown that it cannot.

The NT’s continued cries of more money for Indigenous disadvantage and spending it elsewhere was once called the “greatest scandal in contemporary Aboriginal affairs” by The Australian.

In 2018, the Yothu Yindi Foundation estimated the NT Government had underspent nearly $500 million in GST payments meant for disadvantage in one year alone.

The government get away with it because the Commonwealth has never required the NT Government to show, by any meaningful measures, that it is actually spending that money on Indigenous disadvantage. And they never cared enough to watch it for themselves.

Our government also developed ways of getting around those basic reporting requirements; in one documented case, the government has argued because 95 per cent of the NT’s prison population is Aboriginal, then 95 per cent of its corrections budget – and its executive public servants in Darwin – is therefore Indigenous expenditure.

So the senior bureaucrats with their executive salaries are the rightful beneficiaries of that Indigenous spending because they are the ones calling the shots on how best to handle the “Indigenous situation”, according to the NT Government.

For years the money has instead been spent on growing the NT public service, which grew by 40 per cent between 2004 and 2016, far outstripping population growth, and has also been used for vanity projects in and around Darwin.

As many have suggested over the years, it benefits the Territory Government to keep Indigenous people disadvantaged so they always have an argument for increased federal funding when they go broke, they just did not count on the situation exploding like it has in Alice Springs.

The feds have continually thrown money at the NT to hope the problems go away without carefully monitoring where it was actually going. It can’t do that anymore.

Albanese is correct when he says governments need to do better; Commonwealth included.

It cannot continue to blindly hand money over to the NT Government that has caused these social problems and expect it to fix it. This NT Labor Government has proven once again they do not know what they are doing and cannot manage the affairs of the Northern Territory.

Besides the out-of-control crime problem in Alice, let’s not forget the abysmal failure that is this Labor Government’s 10-year $2.2 billion remote housing program that has failed to reach targets for years, at one point in 2018 kicking off a war with the Commonwealth over funding.

Gunner had touted it as the focal point of his so-called “generational change” that would fix everything.

“Health and education outcomes in our remote regions will never improve until we repair housing — it’s the number-one issue facing remote communities,” he said in 2019.

The most recent figures showed that by July last year it had only reached a quarter of its bedroom targets. But the government continued to lie and tell the public it would actually beat its targets by this June.

At what point does this government come to terms with reality, admit its failures and ask for help?

At what point does the Federal Government start taking control to ensure the money the NT gets is actually spent on addressing real Indigenous disadvantage across the Territory? And stop simply throwing money at the problem?

On Wednesday, the Aboriginal Peak Organisations Northern Territory (APONT) called for a seat at the table with both levels of government to address Aboriginal disadvantage, something that has been called for before but which Fyles has already ruled out because the public service knows best.

Make no mistake, the Fyles Government’s inability to keep its citizens safe is a massive failing caused by a refusal to properly address its problems before they exploded. But so is its inability to deliver remote housing, remote health initiatives and many other social program elements that have led us to where we are today – basic functions of a government.

As the nation eagerly awaits both governments’ solutions contained in the report by newly appointed Central Australia Controller Dorelle Anderson – the daughter of former NT MLA Alison Anderson – you can bet the easy answer will involve more federal funding for the NT public service or as Fyles calls it “needs-based funding”.

But someone outside the NT needs to ensure it’s going to the right places and the people it affects need to oversee it as well. Otherwise it’s more of the same with no meaningful solution for Alice Springs or the Territory as a whole.