WA is expanding its prisons while Aboriginal-led prevention projects struggle for funding. Years of rejected grant applications expose a system that pays for imprisonment but neglects alternatives.
Two years ago, a Noongar Elder in Collie produced 10 hand-drawn prison pathway maps, tracing imprisonment from members of the Stolen Generations through their sons and grandsons. More than two years later, the circumstances behind one of those maps have deteriorated further.
The Elder has avoided prison but is homeless and living with chronic amphetamine dependence. All four daughters, each a mother, have now been imprisoned. Of two surviving sons – another died by suicide – one has returned to prison. Two grandsons have been released; 13 other grandchildren are seriously struggling.
This is not a morality tale about a deficient family. It shows institutional abandonment. A prison map is becoming a family tree. Without strong community alternatives, imprisonment fragments care and transmits disadvantage to the next generation.
Since 2018, I have co-prepared 25 grant applications seeking resources to address justice-related harm around Bunbury Regional Prison and Collie’s Aboriginal community. Five succeeded; four were below $5,000. The only substantial non-government grant pays for one Aboriginal facilitator in our prison program.
This miserable result exposes a policy failure. Governments invoke ‘place-based, community-led’ solutions, yet no dependable pathway allows local Aboriginal corporations to test and sustain an innovative justice response.
The usual answer is ‘keep going, try again’. Yet each application demands evidence, partnerships, governance, risk plans, staffing, budgets, evaluation and sustainability. Volunteers must prove capacity before government will fund the systems that create it. Large organisations employ specialists; small groups contribute nights, weekends, personal funds and hope.
Since 2014, I have worked virtually full-time and unpaid on these South West initiatives. I have also helped finance them, with support from a friend and my parents’ will. This should not be romanticised as admirable volunteering. When policy development relies on private sacrifice, government shifts responsibility onto those least resourced to carry it.
Assessment without assistance
The latest process repeated a familiar pattern. In early 2026, our Aboriginal corporation applied to the well-resourced Collie Futures Fund for a First Nations Workforce Activation Pilot. For six months, paid officials and an economic advisory body assessed work produced without pay. Rather than helping us develop a viable proposal, they sent a one-page rejection.
Grant-making should be developmental. Where a proposal addresses an acknowledged problem but its costing, governance or delivery model needs work, government should provide expertise, fund a design phase or negotiate a smaller demonstration. A binary funded-or-rejected contest wastes community knowledge and public-sector expertise while families continue to deteriorate.
The Collie Futures program exposes another mismatch. It supports economic diversification, jobs and the transition from coal. Those aims are legitimate, but Collie’s transition is not only a labour-market event for people already attached to industry. A liveable future also depends on families excluded from employment by imprisonment, homelessness, addiction, disability and intergenerational disadvantage. Ignoring these foundations leaves the most marginalised behind.
Target 10 without a budget
Closing the Gap Target 10 commits governments to reduce Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adult imprisonment by at least 15 per cent by 2031. WA’s rate was 3,302 per 100,000 in 2019. It is now about 4,306. It must fall by almost 1,500 in five years, yet there is no public, funded recovery plan.
A target without institutions, implementation authority and resources is not a policy. It is a press release with a reporting schedule. Governments endorse self-determination while continuing to make decisive choices about what counts as evidence, which organisations are ‘ready’, and what risks are tolerable.
The state’s real priorities are evident in prison expansion. The state government has committed to a multi-year prison expansion program investing over $300 million to deliver 480 new beds at Acacia Prison and advance planning for a 512-bed expansion at Casuarina Prison. Prison expansion receives capital plans, procurement expertise, recurrent staffing and cabinet authority. Community prevention receives short-term competitions and rejection letters.
That contrast reveals the real policy. WA invests overwhelmingly at the punitive end, after family, housing, health and community supports have failed or been withheld. Prison becomes the latest instrument in a much older history of controlling Aboriginal lives and separating families.
A wealthy state
WA cannot plead poverty. Its 2026–27 budget forecasts an eighth consecutive operating surplus – $3.5 billion in 2025–26 and $2.4 billion in 2026–27 – while the state will receive about $9.3 billion in GST revenue.
Any claim that there is no funding for community innovation is false. There is money. The question is what government chooses to build, which risks it finances and whose knowledge it trusts.
What must change
I will not prepare another major grant application unless the funding body works with us beforehand to develop a proposal capable of approval. That is not petulance. It is a boundary against a process that has extracted years of unpaid labour without creating a pathway from community knowledge to public investment.
WA needs a dedicated Aboriginal justice innovation and Target 10 fund, with a regional stream accessible to small Aboriginal community-controlled organisations. It should provide paid design grants, independent budgeting, evaluation assistance, and multi-year pilot funding. Decisions should be timely, reasons should be specific, and rejected proposals addressing an acknowledged need should be offered a structured development pathway.
More fundamentally, Aboriginal communities must share decisions about priorities, program design, funding and evaluation. Self-determination cannot mean inviting people to donate the design of solutions and then asking them to compete for crumbs.
The family represented on that prison pathway map needs coordinated, persistent support: housing, treatment, family work, youth intervention, peer assistance, cultural authority and continuity through prison and release. Other Collie families increasingly need the same to prevent their own family trees from becoming prison maps.
Target 10 is not credible while the state automatically resources the consequences of failure and makes prevention beg. If the WA government wants Closing the Gap to be more than a joke played on exhausted communities, it must place money, authority and institutional effort behind Aboriginal-led alternatives before another generation reaches the prison gate.
Jane Anderson is a social anthropologist and Adjunct Research Fellow, University of Western Australia. She works with marginal Noongar peoples of the South West to implement preventative and interventionist strategies needed for reducing individuals and families who are vulnerable to engagement in the criminal justice system.