Uploaded December 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
In Queensland, there’s a group called the Ngoonbi Community Services Indigenous Corporation. It kind of looks boarded up in this recent photo, but who am I to judge? They’re based in the small rural town of Kuranda that has a population of around 3,200 people in the rainforest of Far North Queensland. From the 8 reviews on Google, Ngoonbi have got a perfect 5 stars. They must be doing good work. If you click on their website, it looks like it’s no longer available.
Doing a bit more digging, there’s an organisation called TRACQS also based in the small forest village of Kuranda who provide employment and training services. On their site they list Ngoonbi, stating: “Ngoonbi’s objective is to eliminate social disadvantage for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and to increase their participation within the community. Ngoonbi has a workforce of 97 staff,” of which “59% are local Indigenous community members.” Again, they have a link to their website, but again, it seems to be offline.
Well, you can’t blame a poor Aboriginal Corporation for not maintaining their website, or even their buildings. I mean, they probably don’t get much funding, right? Well…
If you look on the Australian Government’s Grant Connect website, which lists how much goes to various groups around Australia, you soon see that our poor Aboriginal Corporation perhaps isn’t as poor as first thought. Thank you to the viewer who did all this investigation.
In the search criteria, we’ll put in “Ngoonbi” as the keyword, and in the date range we’ll just select all of this year 2025. So here’s the search criteria that we used, and here are the results. I’ve sorted them by ‘value’ just to make it more suspenseful.
• In April, they got some funding for “Transition System Support Funding for Support at Home” from the Department of Health and Aged Care to Ngoonbi for $11,000. Okay, sounds reasonable. But we’re just getting started.
• In July they got $42,090.73 for the Commonwealth Home Support Program.
• Then they got $98,423.77 for the Fair Work Commission Boost,
• $99,967.47 for more Commonwealth Home Support,
• $168,617.79 for Commonwealth Home Support,
• $232,848.51 for Commonwealth Home Support—yes, this only keeps going… up!
• $260,174.34 for Ngoonbi Sport and Recreation,
• $302,456.00 for Emergency Relief,
• $350,980.06 more for Commonwealth Home Support,
• Ngoonbi Jobs for our People $522,350.64,
• more Commonwealth Home Support $576,831.99,
• the Bibi Yungan Great Start to Great Learning $744,442.18!
• Ngoonbi Community and Youth Empowerment $869,361.04!
• More Commonwealth Home Support $1,166,743.20!
• Jobs for our People again $1,436,337.61.
• Next page, Commonwealth Home Support $1,773,290.38,
• and more Commonwealth Home Support to the Ngoonbi Community Services Indigenous Corporation $2,672,719.68.
Yes, in this year alone, a small Aboriginal Corporation in the small town of Kuranda has received more than $11 million in taxpayer-funded grants alone, which is getting up towards the annual budget of a small country, but for some reason, they can’t maintain their website.
According to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC), Ngoonbi haven’t filed any financial documents since around 2016 with their Annual Information Statement 2015, nor do they have to as they now report to ORIC—the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations.
On the ORIC website, you can ‘Find a Corporation’, “Ngoonbi” in this case, where we can see that their latest Financial Report was lodged in December last year. In the document, under ‘Payments to suppliers and employees’ for 2024, there was payments made of approximately $6.6 million.
Interestingly, “Receipts from customers $8,727,697,” noting that you are the customer—the taxpayer.
I don’t mean to pick on a single organisation, so I thought in the name of openness, I better search for other Indigenous organisations on Grant Connect. We’ll use the keyword ‘indigenous’ over the same date range. As you can see, there are 2971 records, way too many to analyse in this video, so I’ll restrict it to Indigenous grants over $100,000. As you can see, there are still 1937 records! Okay, let’s restrict it even further to grants over $1,000,000. There are still 712 records! Okay, let’s play hardball. Let’s change it to $10,000,000. So, in 2025, there have been 81 grants so far to Indigenous organisations over $10,000,000. What the actual f?
For example, TRACQS, well, they received, or will receive, $35,690,470.20 over the next three years for Indigenous Employment and Business. The Ashburton Aboriginal Corporation will receive $46,404,139.10 of free taxpayer money.
Perhaps instead of funding people based on their race, we should ensure all funding is based on genuine need and measurable outcomes that benefits the entire Australian community.
MUSIC
Allégro by Emmit Fenn
In Queensland, there’s a group called the Ngoonbi Community Services Indigenous Corporation. It kind of looks boarded up in this recent photo, but who am I to judge? They’re based in the small rural town of Kuranda that has a population of around 3,200 people in the rainforest of Far North Queensland. From the 8 reviews on Google, Ngoonbi have got a perfect 5 stars. They must be doing good work. If you click on their website, it looks like it’s no longer available.
Doing a bit more digging, there’s an organisation called TRACQS also based in the small forest village of Kuranda who provide employment and training services. On their site they list Ngoonbi, stating: “Ngoonbi’s objective is to eliminate social disadvantage for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and to increase their participation within the community. Ngoonbi has a workforce of 97 staff,” of which “59% are local Indigenous community members.” Again, they have a link to their website, but again, it seems to be offline.
Well, you can’t blame a poor Aboriginal Corporation for not maintaining their website, or even their buildings. I mean, they probably don’t get much funding, right? Well…
If you look on the Australian Government’s Grant Connect website, which lists how much goes to various groups around Australia, you soon see that our poor Aboriginal Corporation perhaps isn’t as poor as first thought. Thank you to the viewer who did all this investigation.
In the search criteria, we’ll put in “Ngoonbi” as the keyword, and in the date range we’ll just select all of this year 2025. So here’s the search criteria that we used, and here are the results. I’ve sorted them by ‘value’ just to make it more suspenseful.
• In April, they got some funding for “Transition System Support Funding for Support at Home” from the Department of Health and Aged Care to Ngoonbi for $11,000. Okay, sounds reasonable. But we’re just getting started.
• In July they got $42,090.73 for the Commonwealth Home Support Program.
• Then they got $98,423.77 for the Fair Work Commission Boost,
• $99,967.47 for more Commonwealth Home Support,
• $168,617.79 for Commonwealth Home Support,
• $232,848.51 for Commonwealth Home Support—yes, this only keeps going… up!
• $260,174.34 for Ngoonbi Sport and Recreation,
• $302,456.00 for Emergency Relief,
• $350,980.06 more for Commonwealth Home Support,
• Ngoonbi Jobs for our People $522,350.64,
• more Commonwealth Home Support $576,831.99,
• the Bibi Yungan Great Start to Great Learning $744,442.18!
• Ngoonbi Community and Youth Empowerment $869,361.04!
• More Commonwealth Home Support $1,166,743.20!
• Jobs for our People again $1,436,337.61.
• Next page, Commonwealth Home Support $1,773,290.38,
• and more Commonwealth Home Support to the Ngoonbi Community Services Indigenous Corporation $2,672,719.68.
Yes, in this year alone, a small Aboriginal Corporation in the small town of Kuranda has received more than $11 million in taxpayer-funded grants alone, which is getting up towards the annual budget of a small country, but for some reason, they can’t maintain their website.
According to the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC), Ngoonbi haven’t filed any financial documents since around 2016 with their Annual Information Statement 2015, nor do they have to as they now report to ORIC—the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations.
On the ORIC website, you can ‘Find a Corporation’, “Ngoonbi” in this case, where we can see that their latest Financial Report was lodged in December last year. In the document, under ‘Payments to suppliers and employees’ for 2024, there was payments made of approximately $6.6 million.
Interestingly, “Receipts from customers $8,727,697,” noting that you are the customer—the taxpayer.
I don’t mean to pick on a single organisation, so I thought in the name of openness, I better search for other Indigenous organisations on Grant Connect. We’ll use the keyword ‘indigenous’ over the same date range. As you can see, there are 2971 records, way too many to analyse in this video, so I’ll restrict it to Indigenous grants over $100,000. As you can see, there are still 1937 records! Okay, let’s restrict it even further to grants over $1,000,000. There are still 712 records! Okay, let’s play hardball. Let’s change it to $10,000,000. So, in 2025, there have been 81 grants so far to Indigenous organisations over $10,000,000. What the actual f?
For example, TRACQS, well, they received, or will receive, $35,690,470.20 over the next three years for Indigenous Employment and Business. The Ashburton Aboriginal Corporation will receive $46,404,139.10 of free taxpayer money.
Perhaps instead of funding people based on their race, we should ensure all funding is based on genuine need and measurable outcomes that benefits the entire Australian community.
MUSIC
Allégro by Emmit Fenn
