Key points:
- The home loan book is 50 years old and now in its fourth generation of repayments
- $2.8 billion under management, 5,618 customers, and legal powers finally unlocked to raise outside capital
- First Nations business owners nearly tripled in 15 years. IBA backed 56 per cent of the growth.
Half a century of mortgage and business loan repayments by Indigenous customers now underwrite an agency that generates 89 per cent of its own annual budget, Indigenous Business Australia Chair Darren Godwell told the Broome Chamber of Commerce and Industry's Indigenous Business Forum.
"It is your effort in repaying those mortgages and loans that created the budget for our operating expenses every year," Godwell said. "Indigenous people have been so supportive of Indigenous economic development. We've self-funded our own damn economic development agency."
IBA holds $2.8 billion in assets under management and serves 5,618 mortgage and business customers. The home loan program turns 50 this year, with Indigenous families now into their third and fourth generation of repayments.
"It is the most successful Indigenous economic initiative that we have at the moment. You don't get credit for that because that's not the deficit and disadvantage conversation."
A development bank in the making
Godwell, who is from far north Queensland, took over as IBA Chair in January 2025. He inherited an agency with a 33-year legacy, a mixed reputation, and a narrow remit. Within months, the Federal Parliament passed amendments to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Act 2005 that removed long-standing restrictions on IBA's ability to borrow and raise capital on the open market.
The reform, the most significant in IBA's history, allowed the agency to act more like a public investment corporation than a retail lender. A new Chief Executive, former banking executive David Knights, was appointed soon after. A 2030 Strategy followed, built on four pillars: Raising, Deploying, Patient and Shaping Capital. The agency is now in discussions with the Federal Government about a Commonwealth bond issue worth approximately $1 billion, and aims to mobilise between $5 billion and $7 billion over the next five years.
In Broome, Godwell put the reform in plainer language. The previous arrangement, he said, was a deliberate handicap that kept the agency boxed into the 40% of the Australian economy that sits inside the public sector.
"For those that want you to fixate and focus on government and getting money out of government, they want you to ignore the 60% of the economy which is outside of that. I'm going to invite you to turn your attentions to the private sector, to turn your attention to sourcing capital from other places."
Where the money is
IBA analysis points to a roughly $100 billion-a-year opportunity across sectors that match Indigenous interests, are growing, and can return at or above the cost of capital. Extractives sit at $30 billion. Carbon markets at $20 billion. Renewables at $10 billion.
Indigenous botanicals, things like Kakadu plum and native cereals, sit alongside extractives at $30 billion, and Godwell flagged them as the standout opportunity for a specific reason.
"Many nations' knowledge around Indigenous botanicals is women's business. If we support and activate wealth creation and commercialisation of Indigenous botanicals, we will disproportionately be supporting the wealth and the creation of wealth with Indigenous owners that are women."
Intellectual property and tourism sit at the bottom of the list at $500 million and $250 million respectively, despite both being heavily promoted in Indigenous economic policy circles. Godwell was blunt on why IP is so often oversold.
"Lawyers that want to run around with patents and trademarks have little to no idea about what is the true cost of commercialising IP. But have a guess who gets paid a lot in commercialising IP? Lawyers."
Legal strategies, he said, produce legal outcomes. Commercial strategies produce commercial ones. "If you want a commercial outcome, you need a trade strategy."
Why now
IBA analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics census data shows First Nations business owners and managers nearly tripled between 2006 and 2021, from 10,500 to 29,200.
IBA estimates it supported around 56% of that growth.
The fastest-growing group of new business leaders are First Nations women. The demographic timing reinforces the trend. By 2030, around 2.8 million Australian workers will retire out of the workforce, many of them owner-operators of regional businesses looking for a buyer. Two-thirds of the Indigenous population is under 30. The handover is sitting there.
Godwell also took aim at the politics of the moment. Reducing 60,000 years of habitation to a 100-metre race, he said colonisation occupies the last 40 centimetres.
"There are some big and serious fans of the last 40. They want to celebrate that last 40 cm. They want everybody to ignore the previous 99.6 metres. When I talk about there's some challenges, some tensions, I'm talking about the fans of the 40 and they are coming again for us and they're coming for what we're talking about here, which is economic development, because it's about wealth."
The challenge to the room was direct. "If not you, then someone else will, because money does talk. And when people see that make money, some of them are really motivated. If that's not you, do not get upset when someone else comes in and starts to cut up your lunch."
