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The engagement of Indigenous Australians in economic activity is a matter of long-standing public concern and debate. Jon Altman has been intellectually engaged with Indigenous economic activity for almost 40 years, most prominently through his elaboration of the concept of the hybrid economy, and most recently through his sustained and trenchant critique of policy. He has inspired others also to engage with these important issues, both through his writing and through his position as the foundation Director of The Australian National University's Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy research from 1990 to 2010. The year 2014 saw both Jon's 60th birthday and his retirement from CAEPR. This collection of essays marks those events. Contributors include long‑standing colleagues from the disciplines of economics, anthropology and political science, and younger scholars who have been inspired by Jon's approach in developing their own research projects. All point to the complexity as well as the importance of engaging with Indigenous economic activity — conceptually, empirically and as a strategic concern for public policy.

Electoral success of independents and minor parties is often interpreted as indicating a weakening of two‐party systems of political competition. This paper, on all thirteen elections for the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly since 1974, observes that independents have enjoyed far more success than minor parties. It argues that independent success has reflected a continuing strong two‐party system, not a weakening one. Six of ten successful independents in NTLA elections have been "splitters" from the Country Liberal Party in times of intra‐party turmoil. Their subsequent electoral success as independents in divisions previously very safe for the CLP leads to development of a "lopsided seats" hypothesis; that independents succeed in electoral divisions where the two‐party contest has become lopsided, with one major party attracting twice the votes of the other or more. Two successful "non‐splitter" independents in the 2016 election also contested such divisions — one lopsided to the CLP and one to Labor. This latter successful independent ran with the support of a Yolgnu First Nation organisation, which re‐opens questions in the literature about Aboriginal candidates and Aboriginal voters, including turnout levels. A jurisdiction‐wide graphic technique of "proportionality profiling" is applied to all thirteen NTLA elections and contextualises the later division‐level analysis.

This paper identifies two periods of punctuated change in the content and style of Australian Indigenous policy in the last fifty years. It also identifies a third period in which attention to Indigenous policy was heightened through the nationalisation of land issues already well‐established on the agendas of sub‐national jurisdictions. The paper relates all three periods to the changing federal institutions of Australian Indigenous policy, with the Commonwealth slowly exploring its post‐1967 role as a national government in Indigenous affairs. In later sections, the paper identifies some more conceptual bases of changing policy agendas, through ideas of the competing principles of equality, choice and guardianship and the generational moral dynamics of Indigenous affairs.