AbstractIt is a truism that the impacts of any crisis always fall unevenly. In this chapter, we focus on the experience of COVID-19 by a particular population group, Indigenous Australians living in extremely remote circumstances. Here key responses to the disruption wrought by the pandemic have paradoxically registered as reprieve. In Australia, remote-living Indigenous peoples live in deep poverty and were anticipated to be highly vulnerable to food insecurity and supply chain disruption. Surprisingly, the pandemic served to disrupt in other ways. The hegemonic characterization of welfare-dependent Indigenous peoples as morally deficient subjects in need of discipline and control could not be sustained as the country “locked down” and over a million others became “welfare dependent” overnight. Unemployment benefits were temporarily doubled, and onerous work-for-the-dole mutual obligations eased. This essay explores potential positive changes to systems of food provisioning caused by government responses to COVID-19. The remote food security “crisis” is shown to be mainly an artefact of government policies designed to punish the poor and push unemployed remote-community residents into jobs. We propose permanent reform to the social security system that will enhance food security and liberate Indigenous peoples to more effectively self-provision and exercise “food sovereignty”.

This chapter explores post-capitalist development alternatives that are emerging in remote Australia for Indigenous peoples who have repossessed their ancestral lands. My exploration is based on over 40 years of research as an economic anthropologist/comparative economist exploring development alternatives. I deploy a grounded model of actually existing economies that I term ‘the hybrid economy’ to illustrate how through their agency Indigenous landowners are creatively reconfiguring and recombining elements of capitalist and non-capitalist forms of production. Customs and traditions that need to be legally demonstrated to secure landownership are being activated in pursuit of diverse livelihoods that include self-provisioning, the controlled commodification of culture and the production of environmental services, including carbon emissions avoidance and sequestration, and renewable energy mega-projects. The hybrid economy theorisation challenges the envisioning of capitalism as the singular dominant mode of economy and might yet prove a harbinger of post-capitalist futures essential for Indigenous and non-Indigenous survival.

The Commonwealth’s Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (ALRA) is a statutory instrument designed to deliver a form of social justice – that is, to arrest and even reverse the illegal land dispossession that occurred in Australia since British colonisation. The ALRA was developed and passed during the same period (1972–77) in which the Australian Government established a policy of Indigenous self-determination; as Justice Woodward stated when presenting the framework of the ALRA, ‘Aborigines should be free to choose their own manner of living’.2 Both conservative and Labor governments expected that land title would be a means for remote living Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory to eventually attain economic and social equality with other Australians.

In April 2020 a Group of Eight Taskforce was convened, consisting of over 100 researchers, to provide independent, research-based recommendations to the Commonwealth Government on a "Roadmap to Recovery" from COVID-19. The report covered issues ranging from pandemic control and relaxation of social distancing measures, to well-being and special considerations for vulnerable populations. Our work focused on the critical needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities; this paper presents an overview of our recommendations to the Roadmap report. In addressing the global challenges posed by pandemics for citizens around the world, Indigenous people are recognised as highly vulnerable. At the time of writing Australia's First Nations Peoples have been largely spared from COVID-19 in comparison to other Indigenous populations globally. Our recommendations emphasise self-determination and equitable needs-based funding to support Indigenous communities to recover from COVID-19, addressing persistent overcrowded housing, and a focus on workforce, especially for regional and remote communities. These latter two issues have been highlighted as major issues of risk for Indigenous communities in Australia It remains to be seen how governments across Australia take up these recommendations to support Indigenous peoples' health and healing journey through yet another, potentially catastrophic, health crisis.

Arnhem Land Fire Abatement (Northern Territory) Limited (ALFA) is a non-profit company established to make a financial return from savanna fire management. It operates as a charitable entity to ensure that its earnings benefit the Aboriginal landowners of Arnhem Land, many living in deep poverty. ALFA is unusual because it must operate at the intersection of Western and customary domains. It catalyses and supports the carbon emission avoidance activities of Aboriginal ranger groups and traditional landowners, who deploy customary and Western fire-management approaches at a large regional scale. Simultaneously, ALFA manages the Australian Carbon Credit Units that it earns, either selling them under contract to the Australian government or to corporate purchasers, or saving them for later sale. In this article we examine the first five years of ALFA since its establishment in 2015 - its origins and more recent history, its achievements and its governance. We then examine several climatic, financial, environmental and politico-cultural challenges that it faces operating in the Australian carbon and conservation economies. We show from diverse perspectives how, during a late-capitalist period of extreme climatic uncertainty, ALFA has evolved into an established model of sustainable postcolonial possibility, as 'no ordinary' company.

In much of remote Australia where a sizable minority of Indigenous people live, labour markets are able to employ only a small fraction of the working-age Indigenous population, a legacy of Australia’s settler-colonial past and present. In this chapter, we do two things. First, we describe the former Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) scheme as a basic-income-like programme. Using survey data from 2002–2003 to 2014–2015, we examine the impact of the abolition of the CDEP as a proxy for a future basic income scheme on cultural participation. We find that the existence of CDEP was associated with a modest increase in cultural participation, especially in attendance of sporting carnivals. Second, we argue for the implementation of a true basic income scheme in remote Australia as a first priority for a staged programme nationally.

The Government's policy of buying stations and building large settlements-at considerable cost to the taxpayers-and then encouraging large numbers of natives to congregate on these places enjoying Government sustenance with a minimum of work has not helped the employment problem … It would be easier, in our opinion, to 'blackbird' a boat load of Kanakas, than to pry loose a couple of native stockmen from some of these

This report was commisioned by Select Committee on the effectiveness of the Australian Government's Northern Australia agenda