The first deposit our ancestors made wasn't into a bank, it was into Country, a system of law, reciprocity, and careful custodianship that sustained the world's oldest continuing culture. That original deposit is still paying dividends for this nation, yet the colonial, financial and legal systems that followed have extracted wealth and returned very little in the way of equity or opportunity.

Our land, the foundation of our economic and cultural sovereignty, was taken under the lie of terra nullius. That theft wasn't just moral or cultural; it was economic. Land is capital, it is leverage, it is security. And when land is stolen, so too is the capacity to build and sustain wealth.

Today, the banks tell First Nations businesses that they are "not credit-ready," "the risk is too high," or "you don't meet the criteria". On closer examination, a deeper truth emerges, the system was never designed for us, and it has never been made accountable for the ways it has profited from our dispossession.

In lending, banks use the 'Six Cs of Credit' to assess eligibility, namely Character, Capacity, Capital, Collateral, Conditions, and Credit history. While they appear objective, in practice, they reflect and reinforce the deep structural exclusions we've faced for generations.

Each of these "Cs" is a checkpoint designed without consideration for Indigenous people. They create barriers that block even the most visionary Indigenous entrepreneurs from accessing the capital they need to grow.

The rules of finance must be rewritten.

Access to capital is more than money, it enables control, opportunity, and self-determination. If Australia is serious about economic justice for First Nations peoples, it must go beyond acknowledgments and advisory panels and it must restructure how capital flows and its beneficiaries.

This means investing in Indigenous-led capital funds that reflect our values and priorities; reforming credit assessment tools to account for collective ownership, cultural assets, and non-Western economic models; embedding repair and redress into the DNA of financial institutions; establishing accountability mechanisms to track how much capital is actually reaching Indigenous businesses and at what terms; and partnering with community-controlled intermediaries to design solutions with, not for, us.

We don't need to be taught how to participate in the economy. We've always had economies — sustainable, place-based, and relational. What we need is for the financial system to unlearn its own biases and rebuild on a foundation that includes us not as exceptions, but as equals.

We've been investing in this continent for over 60,000 years. It's time the system started investing back.