NSWALC says Aboriginal land rights are under attack… but the harder question is whether the current system is actually delivering for the 91% of First Nations people in NSW who have no seat at the table.
The NSW Aboriginal Land Council dropped a statement this week with all the urgency of a five-alarm fire. The Minns Labor Government, it said, had introduced the Crown Lands Management Amendment (Statutory Review) Bill 2026 “by stealth” – an attack on more than 40 years of land rights.
The language was dramatic. “Without consultation or notice.” “An attack by stealth.” “Hollow out our rights.” The call to action was swift: contact your MP, stay informed, stand together.
But before we all grab the pitchforks, it is worth asking a different question.
Who, exactly, is this system working for right now?
The representation gap nobody wants to talk about
NSWALC claims to be the largest Aboriginal member-based organisation in Australia. That claim rests on the collective membership of 121 Local Aboriginal Land Councils across NSW – roughly 30,000 people.
There are an estimated 340,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in NSW.
That means the entire land council network represents fewer than 9% of the First Nations population in the state. The other 91% have no formal voice in how land reparations are managed, how funds are spent or which priorities get backed.
It gets thinner. NSWALC itself is governed by nine elected Councillors – one per region. And the quorum for a LALC members’ meeting? Ten per cent of voting members. So decisions about land, money and community assets can be made by 10% of an already small membership base.
First Nations voter engagement shows turnout in land council elections has been historically very low. South Australia’s First Nations Voice election – a useful comparison – saw fewer than 10% of eligible voters actually cast a ballot. When calling for transparency about the election participation (or lack thereof) the response from the institution was not transparency. It was silence.
That is not a mandate. That is a governance structure running on autopilot.
Follow the money
The financial picture makes the representation gap harder to ignore.
In 2021-22, NSWALC drew down $41.5 million from the Statutory Investment Fund to cover the operational expenditure of the entire network – both head office and LALCs combined. Of that, LALCs received core operating grants of $155,140 each – a total of $18,151,380 for the 117 that were funded. That means fewer than half the dollars drawn from the fund made it to the frontline. NSWALC’s own employee expenses ran to $24.4 million – more than the entire LALC network received in base operating funding. Total distributions to LALCs including program grants, funeral assistance and other funding reached $29.9 million, but the core operating allocation tells the real story.
20 LALCs were rated high-risk, and 19 – including three under administration and four non-operating councils – were unfunded
In January 2026, NSWALC lodged the 60,000th Aboriginal land claim. More than 44,000 remain unresolved, with an average processing time of 15 to 20 years per claim. In the 2025-26 financial year, just 274 hectares of land were returned across the entire state. The system is not just underfunded. It is underdelivering.
Four ICAC public inquiries into LALCs have been conducted since 2006 – Operations Petrie, Nestor, Greer and Skyline. The most recent, Operation Skyline, found in 2022 that individuals took advantage of a dysfunctional Awabakal LALC to improperly obtain over $1 million through corrupt land dealings. A brief of evidence was referred to the DPP as recently as October 2024.
But Governance complaints continue to surface… and when questions were raised on about NSWALC governance and an alleged ICAC investigation in 2024, NSWALC’s response was not to open its books. It was to issue a legal threat demanding retraction and an apology.
Transparency is not optional when you control $$$ hundreds of millions in Aboriginal reparations.
What the outcry is actually about
Read the NSWALC statement carefully and you will notice something. The core complaint is that the Bill would override the High Court’s decision in Quarry Street – a ruling that confirmed land must be physically used, not just leased, to block a claim.
That is a legitimate legal concern. Nobody sensible wants governments retrospectively validating dodgy leases to defeat Aboriginal land claims.
But the framing – “abolishes Aboriginal land rights by stealth” – does a lot of heavy lifting. It positions NSWALC and the LALC network as the sole custodians of land rights in NSW.
And it treats any change to the system as an existential threat.
The people most vocal about this Bill are the people who work inside the system: councillors, employees, contractors, consultants. The ones whose salaries, contracts and institutional relevance depend on the current model continuing exactly as it is.
That does not mean they are wrong on every point…
But it means their interests and the community’s interests are not automatically the same thing.
The middleman problem
Here is the structural issue that almost never gets airtime.
Under the current model, land returned through the ALRA is vested in Aboriginal Land Councils – not in communities, not in individuals, not in Nations. The land councils become the gatekeepers. They decide what happens with the land, who benefits and how assets are managed.
When that works well, it creates genuine community benefit. When it does not (and the record shows it frequently does not) it creates a layer of institutional control that serves the few who run things – while the majority of First Nations people in NSW see nothing.
A community member who is not a LALC member (and that is the vast majority of Aboriginal people in the state) has no say in how returned land is used. No vote. No input. No access to the Community Development Levy. No seat at the members’ meeting that only needs 10% attendance to be valid.
Self-determination is supposed to mean communities controlling their own futures. Not a middleman entity controlling things on their behalf with minimal accountability and even less participation.
What if the government is actually trying to help?
This is the question that will make the NSWALC establishment uncomfortable.
If the Minns Government is genuinely looking at how to support First Nations self-determination rights – rather than simply propping up a 40-year-old institutional structure that benefits the few who run it – then change is not an attack. It is overdue.
The ALRA review is due in 2026. That review should ask hard questions:
- Why does the land council network represent fewer than 9% of the Aboriginal population in NSW?
- Why is voter participation so low that quorum thresholds had to be set at 10%?
- Where has the money gone… and who has benefited most from the current structure?
- Is there a better model that vests land rights, economic benefits and decision-making power directly in First Nations communities and Nations rather than in intermediary bodies?
- Should Aboriginal people in NSW have a say in land reparations without needing to join a LALC first?
If the answer to those questions makes NSWALC smaller, less powerful or less relevant – that is not an attack on land rights…
That is self-determination working the way it is supposed to.
The real test
The question is not whether Aboriginal land rights should be protected. Of course they should.
The question is whether the current institutional structure is the best vehicle for delivering those rights to the broadest number of First Nations people… or whether it has become a self-preserving bureaucracy that services its own workforce first and community last.
When an organisation representing fewer than 9% of First Nations people in the state tells you to be afraid of change, ask who benefits from things staying exactly as they are…
Land rights matter… but so does accountability, participation and genuine self-determination! If the system is not delivering for the majority of mob, then defending the system is not the same thing as defending the community.
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