On Saturday just passed ABC Darwin broadcast a piece by local reporter Olivana Lathouris about housing at the small Aboriginal community of Binjari.
Binjari is a fly-speck town just off the main road west of Katherine, 300 kilometres south of the Northern Territory’s capital Darwin.
The major premise of the ABC’s piece is that for all his grand promises about housing Prime Minister Albanese and his Labor government have let the people of Binjari down.
In March 2024 Prime Minister Albanese used Binjari as the backdrop for a a pop-up photo-op at Binjari to announce a $4 billion plus housing agreement with the then NT Labor government.
Albanese made the announcement on the verandah of a new duplex with Stevie and his family, proud occupants of number 70a, one of several new houses and duplexes handed over during the PM’s visit.
In the year since – according to the ABC report – 125 new or refurbished homes have been delivered across 28 NT townships and communities.
The ABC report hinges on the meagre fact that none of those 125 new builds were at Binjari. Hold that thought for a minute.
The ABC had local Danielle Raymond in front of the other half of the now one-year-old duplex – number 70b – that Albanese had used as a backdrop a year before. She told the ABC that “she was still waiting for new houses.”
Building worker Justin Maroney complained that he’d been made redundant by the Binjari Community Aboriginal Corporation (BCAC) because, according to long-term BCAC CEO Aloisi, the government contracts they’d relied on for local employment had all dried up.
BCAC is also the legal owner of the NT Potion 3362, the land on which the houses, offices, clinic, sports oval and facilities and roads are built on.
I’ll come back to that later.
Aloisi told the ABC that Binjari community had “received nothing,” that “everywhere is overcrowded” and the community was “worse off than we were [before].”
Many Binjari community members have long been aligned with the Country Liberal Party (CLP), though of course not everyone at Binjari supports or votes for the CLP.
As this photo taken at the CLP’s stand at the Katherine polling booth at the 2019 Federal election shows, BCAC’s CEO Aloisi has previously been associated with the CLP. I tried to contact BCAC and Ms Aloisi by phone and email without success.
I have no problem with anyone supporting the CLP but, one week out from a federal election, if the ABC is going to run a prime-time political hit-piece on the PM then it might be prudent to check the background of the person swinging the punches.
As Omar Little told Bey as he lay bleeding in a West Baltimore gutter in season one of The Wire, “You come at the king, you best not miss.”
In this case the ABC swung for the PM and missed by a Stuart Highway mile.
But that wasn’t the only thing the ABC missed.
BCAC is required by the Corporations (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Act 2006 (CATSI Act) to lodge several different annual reports with the Office of the Registrar of Aboriginal Corporations (ORIC) but it has yet to lodge audited reports for the financial year 2023-2024.
Indeed, it appears that BCAC has had some measure of commercial success in the past, having won substantial construction contracts at two regional communities that allowed it to employ a number of local workers and acquire plant and equipment.
BCAC’s most recent audited financial report is for financial year 2022-2023. That report shows a profit of $439,597.
However, there were early signs that BCAC was in trouble. In July 2024 Aloisi was a guest with 104.9 MIX-FM’s Katie Woolf and told her that Binjari had “undertaken building work for [the NT government infrastructure department] DIPL which was failing to meet with them about [at least 5] unpaid invoices.”
In early October 2024 – when BCAC was due to file annual reports for the 2023-2024 financial year – BCAC wrote to ORIC seeking a 6-month extension of time to 24 March 2025 to file its annual General Report, its audited Financial reports and its Directors Report as required pursuant to the CATSI Act.
In support of this application BCAC advised ORIC that BDO (Binder Dijker Otte – an international public accounting, tax, consulting and business advisory firm) had been engaged to prepare a report to the Federal Government’s Office of Township Leasing (which since 2017 has held a “Housing Precinct Lease” over the community housing at Binjari).
BCAC told ORIC it couldn’t do any further work until the BDO report was completed.
BCAC also advised ORIC that it had “experienced financial difficulties and has received little assistance from regulatory authorities or Government agencies making it difficult to operate, undertake and prepare the necessary financial, accounting and regulatory requirements within the normal operational and regulatory timeframes.”
BCAC told ORIC the earliest it could hold the 2024 Annual General Meeting would be late March 2025.
On 9 October 2024 ORIC replied to BCAC’s Directors providing a one-off extension of time to 28 February 2025 to lodge its 2022-2023 audited financial report.
According to publicly available records at ORIC’s website, by 28 February BCAC had failed to lodge the audited financial report or any of the other annual reports it was required to lodge under the CATSI Act.
On 5 March 2025, 3 working days after BCAC failed to meet that deadline, lawyers for a BCAC creditor in Katherine applied to the Supreme Court of the NT for orders to wind up BCAC and appoint liquidators under the (mainstream) Corporations Law.
On 10 April that application was approved by the NT Supreme Court and on 17 April 2025 ASIC published the Notice of Winding Up and Appointment of Liquidator.
The liquidator’s job is to take control of BCAC’s affairs and to collect, preserve and dispose of BCAC’s assets and, after paying the costs and expenses of the liquidation, distribute any remaining money to the creditors.
BCAC’s liquidator has advised The Northern Myth that it owns vehicles and equipment and these will be moved to Katherine for safekeeping prior to their sale.
They also advise they are working closely with the NT Department of Housing, Local Government and Community Development (which has a sublease from the Office of Township Leasing)and with Katherine Town Council, that provides municipal services to the Binjari community at this time. These plans will be communicated to Binjari residents by Housing and Council.
There is one other issue that may have fallen between the legal and administrative cracks.
Binjari – the community – was created in 1990 by the grant of freehold title following an application under the NT’s Pastoral Land Act for an excision of land from the surrounding Manbulloo pastoral lease to create a “Community Living Area” (CLA).
These CLAs re scattered across the vast pastoral estates of the Top End of the NT and provide people dispossessed by the pastoral holdings with a means of claiming small “pocket handkerchief” parcels of land to which they have historical connections.
Title to each excision is required to be held by a legal entity. Often in the past an incorporated association – similar to a football or stamp-collecting club – was created but in more recent times a CATSI Act corporation is established to hold the freehold title to that land.
In most, if not all, CLA’s a protective legal shield is applied that effectively places a caveat over dealings with land subject of a CLA.
Another way that land held by these CLA corporations is protected is to limit the activity undertaken by each CLA corporation to one purpose, i.e. the only job they do is to hold title to land.
Usually – when and where prudence and common-sense prevail – the corporations established to hold the title to CLAs do not operate shops, conduct business or employ people.
However, mistakes can be made and unfortunately there have been too many instances where – like BCAC – a land-owning corporation does end up conducting business, gets into strife and ends up in the hands of the corporate regulator or is placed under the control of a liquidator.
Hopefully the liquidators in this case will see reason and not try to deal with the land in a way that is contrary to the rights and interests of the Binjari community members or its traditional Aboriginal owners at law.
And maybe next time the ABC will exercise more caution when swinging for the fences.
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Further reading
In 2013 and 2014 I published two pieces that set out my previous adventures with ORIC as corporate regular of small land-holding corporations across the Top End of the NT.
On 25 October 2013 Crikey.com published Indigenous corporations and the low-hanging regulatory fruit and the following year published Legal hostilities end in failure for the Aboriginal corporate regulator here at The Northern Myth in February 2014.
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