In Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a charismatic Edinburgh teacher enchants her chosen students with tales of art, love and - most dangerously - Mussolini’s marching columns. The novel is remembered for Brodie’s charm, but it is really a warning: what happens when authority decides what others must think.
That same temptation exists today, far from Edinburgh’s stone classrooms - inside the schools, agencies and programmes that claim to serve Australia’s remote communities.
Miss Jean Brodie believed she was shaping her girls for greatness; in truth, she was funneling them into her own ideology. Australia has its modern equivalents. No marching columns, no fascist posters - just well-funded agencies, city bureaucrats and consultants convinced they know what remote communities “should” think and how they “should” live.
History has shown where this path leads. Nazi and Soviet classrooms turned children into instruments of the state.
The ideology changes; the temptation to mould rather than mentor does not. Today the battleground is subtler – social-justice curricula, climate alarmism, identity politics - but the risk is the same: adults with power deciding what young minds must think before they have learned how to question. Just think of EKaren.
The Power of Restraint
The opposite approach was modelled by my unassuming teacher in a small rural New Zealand school in the 1960s. Chalk dust, creaky desks, open windows. When we argued about fairness or welfare, he never told us the answer; he simply asked, “What if someone can’t work?” or “Does equal always mean fair?”
We left buzzing, wrestling with ideas we had forged ourselves. Years later, I asked him his political views. He smiled: “That was never my business to impose on you.”
“Restraint is the greatest gift a teacher can give.”
Expensive Programmes, Failing Outcomes
That same contrast - imposition versus genuine empowerment - explains much of what is going wrong in one of Australia’s most expensive and least successful policy areas: programmes for remote communities.
Australia now spends roughly $40 billion a year on programmes targeted to these communities - more per capita than on any other group. Yet the 2025 Closing the Gap report shows almost every education, health, and safety target either stagnant or sliding backwards.
The problem is not lack of money. It is lack of delivery.
It is not Sufficiency. It is Inefficiency.
Too much of the $40 billion never reaches the people it is meant to help. It is absorbed by administration, consultancy fees, and inflated contracts from firms that suddenly discover a “community director” only when the contract is advertised.
In November 2025, a major construction company - certified “majority community-owned” - had its offices raided over a $71 million contract fraud. The director facing charges was not from the community; the community-listed name on the paperwork was nowhere to be seen. Earlier this year, a community benefit fund was fined $3.5 million for selling worthless insurance to vulnerable families while executives retired to waterfront mansions.
“These are not anomalies. They are the system functioning exactly as it is designed.”
Voices That Go Unheard
Meanwhile, the loudest voices shaping national policy are often those with the least experience of life outside the cities. Many professional advocates, executives, and media commentators have never spent meaningful time in remote communities. They attend conferences, deliver keynotes, fly home, and then tell the country what people “need.”
The people who actually keep these communities running - teachers, nurses, rangers, night-patrol workers, and their colleagues - are rarely invited into the conversation. When they do speak, and when they call for practical measures - curb alcohol supply, enforce school attendance, reduce violence - they are swiftly labeled racist, conservative, or “inauthentic.”
Here is what community workers actually say when no one is watching:
From 2024
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“Give us the night-patrol money directly instead of sending it to an NGO that skims 38%.”
“Link school attendance to family payments again - it worked, lifting attendance from 63% to 89%.”
“Stop the alcohol dealers before you spend another $2 million on consultations that end up as Sydney salaries.”
You will not hear these voices on talk shows or at writers’ festivals. You will hear them in staffrooms, on verandahs, or in local clinics - if anyone from the cities ever stays long enough to listen.
Simple, Effective Governance
The fixes are straightforward:
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Every grant paid into an independently administered trust account.
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Mandatory annual forensic audits published online within 90 days.
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Contracts over $500,000 requiring genuine majority community ownership.
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School attendance linked to family payments in communities that vote for it.
These measures are denounced as “paternalistic” by the same city advocates who cheer funding for ethnic- or religion-specific aged-care homes on the grounds of cultural safety. The double standard is clear.
9 months ago
“Miss Jean Brodie believed she was liberating her students; in truth, she imprisoned them in her own image.”
Today’s policy class believes it is liberating remote communities; in truth, it imposes an ideology that protects consultants, opportunists, and city reputations while children continue to fall behind.
Real empowerment, as my New Zealand teacher knew, comes from restraint - from trusting people to wrestle with hard questions and find their own answers. Remote communities deserve nothing less: trust accounts, transparent audits, local control, and the freedom to say “this isn’t working” without being silenced.
A Call to Listen
Until policymakers stop listening to the VIP tent and start listening to the local verandah, the budget will keep rising, the consultants will keep prospering, and another generation will keep paying the price.
Communities have been speaking for decades. It is time the cities finally shut up and listen.
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