Where Gove's Money Went

This paper starts from the ground. At Mata Mata, a Yolŋu homeland in North East Arnhem Land, there is no working vehicle and no rubbish collection, and a grocery run to Nhulunbuy is a 400-kilometre round trip. Across the Northern Territory’s homelands, the main program for municipal services and housing repairs has been cut by 38 per cent in real terms since 2016, most dwellings and their infrastructure are decades old, and resident schooling has been slow to come. Yet the Yolŋu clans are the land holders of one of Australia’s longest-running mines. The Gove bauxite mine and alumina refinery have operated on their country since 1970–72 under three owners: Nabalco, Alcan and Rio Tinto. On the author’s estimate, about A$1.1 billion to A$1.2 billion in nominal dollars has reached Aboriginal people and organisations from Gove since 1970, less than half of it the Gove-area groups and none, on the published distribution, Marthakal or Mata Mata. Over the same period a 30 per cent share of Gove sold for A$740 million in 2001, implying a value of about A$2.5 billion for the whole, and Alcan reinvested US$2.3 billion in an expansion later written off. The paper’s central comparison is with the United Arab Emirates. In 1971, the year Milirrpum v Nabalco held that the Yolŋu had no title the common law could recognise, the tribal leaders of Abu Dhabi and Dubai became the governments of sovereign states that owned their oil, and within a few years they controlled most of its production. An illustrative counterfactual, using only the paper’s own figures, asks what the Yolŋu clan leaders would have held had they owned the bauxite and the refinery as land holders. The paper also traces the royalty system, the owners, the Territory’s institutions, what has reached the homelands and Yolŋu efforts to build enterprises, and sets Gove beside other resource regimes.