Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission - Abolition

Abolition

For some time after Geoff Clark's appointment, the Howard Government had been expressing doubts as to the value of continuing to have ATSIC at all. Following Mark Latham's election to the leadership of the (Labor) Opposition in December 2003, Labor also accepted that ATSIC had not worked. In March of election year 2004, both parties pledged to introduce alternative arrangements for indigenous affairs.

The government's plan was to abolish ATSIC and all its regional and state structures, and return funding for indigenous programs to the relevant line departments. Labor's view was that ATSIC itself should be abolished, but many of the regional and state sub-organisations should be retained, to continue to give indigenous people a voice in their own affairs and within their own communities. It rejected the notion of merging indigenous funding into funding for Australians generally as 'tried and failed', but had not announced its alternative proposals.

John Howard announced the agency's abolishment on 15 April 2004 saying that "the experiment in elected representation for indigenous people has been a failure". On 28 May 2004 the Howard government introduced into the Federal Parliament legislation to abolish ATSIC. After a delay the Bill finally passed both houses of Parliament in 2005. ATSIC was formally abolished at midnight 24 March 2005.

The policy and coordination role is now the responsibility of the Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination in the Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs from 27 January 2006 (previously with the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs).

The dismantling of ATSIC was seen by many people as harmful to Aboriginal people in Australia. In 2009, Lowitja O'Donoghue expressed her opinion that reform of the agency would have been better than establishing a new agency which has been costly and might suffer similar problems as its predecessor, such as nepotism.