Most CIOs, when they’re contending with the weather, are only dealing with flight delays – and even then they can usually put their feet up in the Qantas lounge and wait it out.
Not so for Brian Wyborn, whose job as chief investment officer of Aboriginal Investment NT (AINT) takes him far from the air-conditioned high rises that most CIOs habituate, and deep into the Northern Territory.
“I was up there recently and we went out to Kakadu. On a good day, when it’s not flooded, you can get there in three hours,” Wyborn tells Investment Magazine. “We came to a water crossing and we had about 20 centimetres of water, so we thought we’d give it a crack. It gets a bit dicey when you’re going through.
“It rained the night after while we were still in Kakadu, and so you do run the risk of doing the seven-hour track back. [In investing] you make assumptions about seasonality and businesses, but you can learn all of that just by doing the drive.”
AINT was established in 2021 as the Northern Territory Aboriginal Investment Corporation with funding from the Aboriginal Benefits Account (ABA), which was set up to receive royalties from mines on Aboriginal-controlled and owned land in the Northern Territory. It’s the first time that decisions about ABA funds have been made by an Aboriginal-controlled body, and its purpose is focussed around three key areas: economic self-management, economic self-sufficiency, and cultural and social wellbeing. The fund is led by CEO Nigel Browne, with Barbara Shaw as chair.
“We were set up by [former Minister for Indigenous Australians] Ken Wyatt when the Libs were in power, off the back of the advocacy of Aboriginal Territorians asking how we can get this corpus of capital back into the Territory for the benefit of our people,” Wyborn said.
“You can take it all the way back to the [Yirrkala bark] petition and the Land Rights Act… and the royalty streams from the profits made from mining on Aboriginal land. This is Aboriginal money and we’re putting it back into the hands of Aboriginal people.”
AINT has turned to JANA Investment Advisers for guidance on how to manage its Commercial Investment Portfolio (CIP), which is made up of a $500 million “Future Fund” that is eventually meant to fund the more liquid $155 million Community Ready Fund, which dispenses grants and makes “nation-building” investments.
“We went to market looking for institutional insight… It was about getting expert advice on strategic asset allocation and manager selection – the breadth and depth of the JANA team gives that sense of comfort to Aboriginal Territorians that we’ve got a prudent approach and we’re working with managers and an asset consultant that have seen different market cycles and do this for a lot of Australians – particularly in the world of super.”
Michael Maher, head of not-for-profits at JANA, says the AINT Future Fund is structured along the lines of the classic endowment model, with a 70/30 growth defensive split and invested largely in listed markets but with a mandate to begin exploring unlisted asset classes. Meanwhile, the Community Ready Fund has a chunky allocation to straight cash – circa 40 per cent – as well as fixed income instruments.
“We’ve also put some work into developing a distribution policy for this fund – though there’s no requirements for this at present, you can set yourself up for success into the future if you do it nice and early,” Maher tells Investment Magazine.
“It’s an interesting thing; we see this across the whole NFP sector. Many organisations do have a good understanding of what their upcoming obligations or liabilities are going to be, and some don’t – and you need to have an investment strategy that can cater for those sensitivities or movements so you can meet your obligations to your community.”
AINT thinks about its nation building investments in two ways. One of them is “place-based investment”, ideally in entities that are Aboriginal-controlled; the other is strategic investment, the settings of which AINT is still thinking through, but which could involve, for example, investments in a logistics operation that gives a place-based investment a closer connection to a port.
There’s also a “really strong direction” from AINT’s board that nation building investments are about impact first. It will take an “acceptable return” while looking at investments in a mid- to high-risk range; some of the sectors it wants to support haven’t had a capital injection in the past and “need a catalyst”.
“If we look at the landmass of the Territory, 50 per cent of that has some form of Aboriginal legal title across it,” Wyborn said. “So how do we support communities to participate in their land as an asset to generate economic self-sufficiency and economic participation?
“If we think about land-based activations, there’s a bunch of opportunities in the Territory that we’d be in early-stage consideration of. When I think about land I think about agriculture and renewable energy. There’s critical minerals as well, and tourism is a big sector in the Territory.
But $155 million only seems like a lot of money, and Wyborn says AINT will have to think deeply about how it deploys it.
“Sectors like these can soak up a lot of capital,” he says. “Imagine buying a station in the Territory; really quickly you can soak up $20-$30 million. It’s a lot of money, but it’s not a lot of money when you think about the sectors we’re trying to activate. What that will look like is an exposure to each investment that wouldn’t leave us overexposed to a single investment type or asset class.”
One way of making it go further is by investing alongside other asset owners. Wyborn thinks that AINT can help other investors that want to build out their impact portfolios – but which have so far shied away from the Northern Territory – to get involved.
“[The NT] is very unique,” he says.
“So how do we provide an insight that will help others think about investment in the Territory differently? There’s not a lot; I can think of a couple of large exposures from big institutional managers like Palisade or IFM, which are in the Darwin Airport, but then it really quickly starts to dwindle after those really large infrastructure type opportunities.
“We get the sense that there’s a growing wall of capital that’s looking for purpose as well as a return. Some of the insights we want to garner from people JANA are who are these other managers and what is their appetite when it comes to, let’s say, agri-investment in the Territory, and how do we play a role to crowd other investors in, and where do we sit on the capital stack that will encourage others who historically haven’t wanted to play here?”
