Video: Ngemba elder protests billions of Aboriginal affairs funding mispent by government. YouTube/GreenLeftOnline.
For the last five days, Feli McHughes, Joel McHughes and Gregory Coffey from the Ngemba Billabong Restoration Project in Brewarrina, NSW, have been trying to hand over a $260,000 cheque to the head of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs.
"We are not going to play this silly game any more: where they pretend to give us money and we end up giving it back to them to mispend", Feli McHughes told Green Left Weekly, referring to the recently unearthed secret federal government report that $25 billion of government spending on Aboriginal affairs over the last 40 years had failed to narrow the huge social and economic gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities.