• “You can’t call yourself a subbie until you’ve been right royally screwed by a managing contractor.”
• The mining executive who walks straight past Traditional Owners to catch a plane, and what IBA’s chair calls it
• Why Darren Godwell flew 72 hours from a Chilean copper mine to a room in Broome

Indigenous Business Australia put a record half a billion dollars into Indigenous businesses, homeowners and Traditional Owners in a single financial year. Its chair says up to a billion dollars more is coming from Māori investors.Darren Godwell came back to the AEMEE Conference in Broome on Thursday, a year after he laid out IBA's new direction to the same sector in Darwin last year. He started his report card with the money.

"There's a level of accountability I feel I owe to you," he said. "So a year on, how are we going?"

"IBA in one financial year has put out a record half a billion dollars in capital. Half a billion dollars in just one year, a record number, all for economic purposes. These are not grants and giveaways."

About $350 million of that went to home loans. Direct support to Indigenous business went from $30 million to $80 million in a year.

"And we are going to continue very fast," Mr Godwell said. "But I need your help as Indigenous companies and businesses."

The scorecard

In Darwin last October, Godwell said IBA had a $2.3 billion balance sheet, funded almost 90 per cent of its budget from client repayments, and wanted a Commonwealth bond of about $1 billion for Indigenous economic development.

On Thursday he put self-funding at 91 per cent and said IBA was "on our way towards a $3 billion balance sheet".

"The credit for creating an economic development agency to support Indigenous economic participation goes to Indigenous peoples," he said. "So that racism about how we don't have s***? Well, we actually do."

That bond has not yet arrived.

"For all of the Treasurer's great words, he still hasn't moved anywhere near a billion dollars into IBA. So we've had to do that, and we're going to continue doing that."

Capital from across the Tasman

IBA went offshore to fill the gap. Mr Godwell said IBA finished negotiations with five iwi last month and signed an investment partnership worth about $1 billion.

"They are going to make up to a billion dollars available to invest into Indigenous-led enterprises and businesses in Australia, and IBA is going to help them do it," he said.

Waikato-Tainui signed a memorandum of understanding with IBA in Hamilton in September. Mr Godwell called the framework "the first of a kind Indigenous-to-Indigenous investment" and said it restores trade relationships "that our peoples had around the world anyway". He added the disclaimers himself: IBA is not raising a fund and is not making any offer.

The iwi have named three sectors: infrastructure, renewables and mining. Mr Godwell said Pacific Island nations are looking at a sum "approaching 3 to 4 billion", that Alaska Native Corporations have about $10 billion in investment funds and "are looking to Indigenous partners in Australia", and that Canadian First Nations "are really off and running fast".

"Indigenous peoples around the world are managing and building wealth in the hundreds of billions of dollars," he said. "They want to invest into Australia with people that share their values."

The business owner decides whether that money comes in.

"If you want to go buy another company, if somebody said they want to retire and you want to pick up their business, you come to IBA and say, 'This is what I need moneywise.' If it fits, IBA staff will say to you: 'Would you be interested in a co-investment from the Māori?' You can say nope, or you can say yes by all means. It's us putting you in the driver's seat."

IBA has also changed its own structure. Five of its nine board members are now Indigenous women, a first. Mr Godwell said that matches the 56 per cent of new business customers who are Indigenous women. IBA has appointed its first Chief Investment Officer, an Indigenous person with capital markets experience. It has partnered with NAB for its business book and CBA for its mortgage book.

"So that's racism"

Godwell's argument for mining is simple. The money exists, and Traditional Owners are left out of the room where it gets raised.

He described a junior miner with a gold deposit on Traditional Owner country, a "four or five person operation", needing $50 million to $100 million.

"Chances are those executives will walk straight past the Traditional Owners who they had a reconciliation morning tea with. They will go to the airport. They will fly to Melbourne or to Sydney and they will sit down with a capital advisor, and those advisers will go to total strangers and ask them for money," he said.

"They never even stopped with the Traditional Owners to ask them: 'Did you even want to have a look at the information?' They will do that every time as long as we keep on talking about disadvantage."

Later he named it. "So that's racism."

Mr Godwell's answer is to give Traditional Owners the information memorandum on the same terms as investors, and to build partnership into projects from the start. He cited OECD work released last week that found projects with Traditional Owners as co-owners carry a lower risk profile and are more likely to proceed.

He used a copper project his private firm, i2i Global, reviewed. Out of $1.8 billion in operating costs over the first seven years, his team found $800 million to $900 million of work Traditional Owner companies could do, spread across about 10 businesses. Tyres alone came to $80 million to $100 million.

"So you go, 'Well, Jesus, maybe we can find a tyre company.'"

Mr Godwell said buying capability beats spending seven years building it.

"Inorganic growth through mergers and acquisitions is standard for this sector. It happens every Friday night at some pub somewhere in regional Australia," he said. "How the hell did Indigenous peoples never get introduced to that conversation?"

If Traditional Owners are in from the beginning, Mr Godwell said, their companies could be on site 30 days after capital close.

"I hope you don't come to the award dinners because you're working your phone so hard to buy a business," he said.

Pressure on contractors

Mr Godwell did not pretend the sector is easy. He said the current model "transfers a lot of costs onto your shoulders" and told the room about his own business, when he went 18 months on three hours' sleep a night.

"You can't call yourself a subbie until you've been right royally screwed by a managing contractor. And you can't call yourself a big contractor until you've been done over by a Tier 1 company," he said.

Mr Godwell called diesel costs a threat to the whole business model.

"Right now the model is really under strain and I'm not sure it's going to work," he said.

AEMEE CEO Jyi Lawton, who interviewed Mr Godwell before his keynote, said ownership brings risk and Indigenous organisations need to prepare for it.

"None of these projects are risk-free. There's no guarantees," Mr Lawton said. "We need the right structures in place to attract that type of capital, but also to manage the risk that comes with it. That's for us to do, because no one can do that for us."

Mr Godwell told Traditional Owners to start building "their own treasury department". He also warned against any sense of entitlement to IBA's money.

"You don't get to come in with some claim that 'I'm entitled to this money because you're a government agency and it's taxpayers' money.' It's not taxpayers' money," he said. "It's black homeowners repaying their mortgages and black businesses repaying the finance."

Mr Godwell said time is short. Investment that goes to British Columbia, Ontario or Mexico is gone.

"If you can see a deal, get on the phone, both with IBA and who you're trying to buy it from," he said.

He had a message for Tier 1 miners under production pressure too: "Get your damn Indigenous partners in there to be part of the solution, because the relationship you build with them may be the relationship you need when you go back to them with an expansion of that asset."

The number he wants halved

Mr Godwell said mining has rescued the Australian economy six times and critical minerals will do it a seventh. He measures IBA's success by a different figure: the 420,000 of Australia's one million Indigenous people he said live at or below the poverty line.

"When we piss-fart around and say we're going to take time on this, what we're actually saying is those 420,000 stay in poverty," he said.

"I don't want to be here in five years' time and have that number for you. I want to be here in five years' time and talk about how we've cut it in half. And that is not going to happen through data centres, ladies and gentlemen. That's going to happen through the work that you do in communities and in regional Australia."