Open Roads, Locked Gates: Accountability corruption and morality in the Northern Territory's policymaking arena

Abstract

Obscured by the dramatic spectacle of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (aka the Intervention) in 2007, another significant reform was being implemented in the Northern Territory's (NT's) Indigenous affairs policy arena: In 2008, 53 mainly rural and majority-Indigenous community councils were forcibly amalgamated into eight regional shires. Years later, the new shires remain trenchantly unpopular, and have been criticised for having undermined local governance and control over government service delivery. Yet policymakers have used a mix of administrative expertise and moral righteousness to justify the reform: as a necessary change to curb corruption and instil 'good governance' into the sector. This mode of argumentation allowed for popular opposition to be effectively marginalised, by removing any moral alternative to the new shires.

My insider ethnography focuses here on the Roper Gulf Council region and the operations of the multi-billion dollar McArthur River Mine near Borroloola in order to explore moral-based policy definitions of accountability and corruption, and the messiness of their translations into practice. Why, for example, does government fund costly management structures to strictly monitor council vehicle use, but largely overlooks tax avoidance and environmental pollution by the mining industry? I offer a political and cultural interpretation of how 'accountability' is deployed in policy debates - not as an equitable expression of commensurable rules, but as an unstable reflection of wider social power relations within settler-colonial Australia.