Newcastle, NSW Local Governments and Indigenous Interests in Australia’s Northern

Australia’s Northern Territory has three categories of local government referred to as municipal, community government and association councils. This paper explores the historical development of these three categories of local governing body since Northern Territory self-government in 1978. Through more contemporary demographic analysis, and some minor spatial analysis, the paper also explores the different relationships of these three types of local governments to Indigenous interests. The most important piece of background information here is that roughly one quarter of the Northern Territory’s population of 200,000 is Aboriginal and that outside the major urban areas this proportion is much higher still. A later section of the paper looks at the contrasting financial positions of these three types of local government in the Northern Territory and again relates this to the very different service roles they play in the lives of remote area Indigenous people and others