Managing an Aboriginal Corporation in Tingha

In 2002, I moved out of Queensland to manage the Mrangalli Aboriginal Corporation in Tingha, NSW. This proved quite rewarding, but it wasn’t without it’s problems. Sadly, the corporation no longer exists, for reasons we will discuss later.

Before non indigenous settlement the area now known as Tingha was mainly inhabited by people from the Nucoorilma clan of the Gamilaroi Nation. Many of their descendants still live in the surrounding area.

The town of about 800 people is located 19 kms from Inverell in the Northern Tablelands of NSW. The Aboriginal Corporation also had a workshop and office in Inverell.

The main industries are tin mining and agriculture, and the Aboriginal Corporation was strongly involved in the latter.

They had a market garden in the town, which provided employment for about 20 people under the federally funded Community Development Employment Project (CDEP), a type of Aboriginal work-for-the-dole program.

The CDEP was quite successful, in that it required participants to work a minimum of 15 hours per week for the equivalent of unemployment benefits for Centrelink, and any extra hours done over that time were rewarded with extra pay and lower tax rates. Most participants found they could get more than 15 hours per week, often 4-5 days of full time work.

The program employed a total of 80 participants in both Tingha and Inverell, with the main projects being a large market garden in Tingha, a contract with Inverell Shire Council to maintain all the cemeteries in the local council area, residential construction, clerical work and an automotive workshop in Inverell.

The Mrangalli Aboriginal Corporation was unique in Australia, in that it allowed 15% of the participants to be non-Indigenous. Their charter allowed that all people should be included for inclusivity and to foster better relations in the community.

The result was that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people were working side by side, and in the six months I was there I saw little, if any, racial intolerance from either side.

The Corporation was also combined with the Mrangalli Housing Corporation, which aimed to find affordable housing for Aboriginal people in the area.

The Housing Corporation would buy rundown houses in Inverell and Tingha, and the Aboriginal Corporation would employ people from the program to make the houses liveable. The rents from the houses went back into buying more properties and providing more employment through renovations.

The market garden was another project that ended up being quite productive, and employing 30 people. It was a large project that grew a variety of vegetables that could be sold considerably below market prices to the local community to keep household food prices down. The garden still managed to make enough profits to be self-sustainable.

There were another 15 people employed maintaining the cemeteries in the local council area, and I was impressed with how much pride they took in their work. They mowed the lawns, weeded around the burial plots, fixed the fences, straightened flowers, kept the headstones clean and generally kept the cemeteries looking good for visitors to the grave sites. The contract was won on tender from the Inverell Shire Council.

There was also a workshop in Inverell that maintained the machinery and equipment needed to keep the market garden, cemetery maintenance and construction projects operating. This included tractors, lawnmowers, cars, motorbikes and other equipment.

Additionally, there was an office in Tingha where the manager and administrative staff were located, and qualified tradespeople overseeing each of these operations.

Of course, you can’t just take people off the streets and expect them to be proficient in these trades, so the corporation also required long term participants to undertake traineeships through TAFE NSW. There were traineeships in mechanics, horticulture, carpentry, construction, office administration, real estate and other areas involved in the running of the corporation.

Oversight was provided by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), which oversaw all the Aboriginal Corporations in Australia, as well as the CDEPs.

Unfortunately, the corruption which ended ATSIC also ended Mrangalli. Auditor’s reports from Mrangalli showed that money was missing, about $400,000, and the matter was referred to Australian Federal Police (AFP). While the AFP did not lay any charges in Tingha, ATSIC was not so lucky.

ATSIC was closed down by the Howard government in 2004, and all it’s operations transferred to the relevant line departments within the Australian government. Howard did not try to fix the problems within ATSIC, and did not even try to find an alternative model to keep the programs in Indigenous hands.

Soon after ATSIC closed down, the CDEPs were also abolished, in 2009 under the Rudd government. This marked the end for Mrangalli and CDEPs right around Australia, and participants were now required to work 5 hours a day, 5 days a week under the mainstream Community Development Program (CDP).

Mrangalli returned a few years later, but as a registered charity, not as an actual corporation. It has not achieved the same success it achieved in it’s original form.

I had some great times at Tingha, and found that the Indigenous and non-Indigenous people lived and worked together reasonably well, more so than I have found in the cities. I particularly enjoyed having a few drinks at the Royal Hotel, where there was seldom any trouble like I experienced in larger cities. And I liked the bush walks, where the rivers were still clean and the fishing was good.

Overall, it was quite an impressively run corporation, and many mainstream organisations could learn a lot from it’s business model.

The government should consider re-establishing the CDEPs for Aboriginal people, and perhaps even using the model for the generally regressive CDP work-for-the-dole schemes, which have proved to be a failure.

With the Voice to Parliament now being almost a certainty, perhaps this program is worthy of consideration again.

Craig Hill is a Brisbane-based Social Justice Campaigner, Writer, Teacher and Business Consultant. He has campaigned for social justice in Australia, promoted human rights in China and worked with the homeless in Honolulu. He holds a Graduate Certificate in Education and a degree in Management.