Principles ensuring that First Nations participation and benefit is real, measurable and enduring should be embedded directly in the Ministerial rules and reflected in eligibility criteria, Future Made in Australia Plan requirements, monitoring frameworks and enforcement mechanisms, according to a new submission by the First Nations Clean Energy Network.

The legislative intent is very clear.

Support under the Future Made in Australia (FMIA) Act is conditional on delivering Community Benefit Principles (CBPs), and decision-makers must be equipped with clear, enforceable rules to assess whether outcomes for First Nations communities and Traditional Owners are genuinely achieved.

Read our submission

The Network strongly supports the intent of the Community Benefit Principles as a core accountability mechanism to ensure that significant public investment under the Future Made in Australia framework delivers genuine, measurable and durable benefits to communities. 

However, intent alone is insufficient.

For the Community Benefit Principles to give effect to Parliament’s intent, they must be operationalised through clear, enforceable and outcome‑focused rules and requirements that shape project behaviour and capital allocation decisions. 

Framing First Nations participation as an investor and commercial benefit - evidence snapshot

Evidence compiled by EY and the First Nations Clean Energy Network demonstrates that projects with meaningful First Nations equity or revenue participation: 

• experience materially lower social and regulatory risk profiles 
• benefit from faster and more predictable development timelines 
• attract a broader pool of patient and values-aligned capital, and 
• show stronger long-term operational performance. 

From an investor perspective, First Nations participation is best understood as a value creation and risk mitigation mechanism, not a cost. 

The Community Benefit Principles are a critical lever to embed this value proposition into Australia’s industrial and clean energy policy architecture. 

Principles to anchor the rules

The Network strongly recommends that rules made under the FMIA Act be anchored in a clear set of principles that decision-makers must apply when assessing eligibility for, and compliance with Community Benefit Principles.

They include:

• Principle 1: Rights and Free, Prior and Informed Consent 
• Principle 2: First Nations priorities 
• Principle 3: Best-practice participation and benefit-sharing 
• Principle 4: Monitoring, reporting and influence 
• Principle 5: Enduring partnerships
• Principle 6: Cultural competency and organisational capability 

These principles reflect the intent of the FMIA Act, international best practice, and the Network’s prior advice to the Commonwealth on a range of matters.

They are essential to ensuring that First Nations participation and benefit is real, measurable and enduring, rather than procedural or symbolic.

These principles should be embedded directly in the Ministerial rules and reflected in eligibility criteria, FMIA Plan requirements, monitoring frameworks and enforcement mechanisms. 

Making Community Benefit Principles more effective going forward

Community Benefit Principle 4 - First Nations and Traditional Owner participation and benefit

Community Benefit Principle 4 is the primary mechanism through which the FMIA framework must give effect to the statutory requirement to support First Nations communities and Traditional Owners to participate in, and share in the benefits of, the transition to net zero.

The Network is concerned that the minimum requirements proposed for Community Benefit Principle 4 in Appendix A of the draft guidance are framed almost exclusively through a narrow employment lens. In particular, the sole minimum requirement for Community Benefit Principle 4 is a target for First Nations employment.

The Network strongly recommends that the minimum requirements for Community Benefit Principle 4 be expanded beyond employment to reflect its full economic scope.

Community Benefit Principle 4 is distinct from, but complementary to Community Benefit Principle 3

Community Benefit Principle 3 focuses on how proponents engage with communities, including the quality, timing and resourcing of engagement and benefit-sharing processes. Community Benefit Principle 4, by contrast, is concerned with what communities ultimately receive in economic terms.

In practical terms:

• Community Benefit Principle 3 should ensure that engagement is early, continuous, culturally informed and capable of influencing project design and commercial decisions, and
• Community Benefit Principle 4 should ensure that this engagement translates into material economic outcomes for First Nations communities and Traditional Owners.

Conflating Community Benefit Principle 4 with Community Benefit Principle 3 risks reducing First Nations outcomes to process measures rather than economic results. 

Material economic participation 

To give effect to Community Benefit Principle 4, FMIA rules must require proponents to demonstrate pathways for First Nations communities and Traditional Owners to participate economically in FMIA-supported projects, in forms determined by those communities and Traditional Owner groups.

This should include, where sought by communities:

• equity or ownership interests, providing long-term revenue streams, governance influence and intergenerational benefit
• revenue-sharing arrangements, including fixed or variable payments linked to project performance
• hybrid models that combine early revenue with longer-term equity pathways
• governance rights, including decision-making authority over defined aspects of the project, and
• local economic development opportunities, including procurement, business development and investment pathways.

These mechanisms are central to First Nations self-determination, enabling First Nations communities and Traditional Owners to set their own priorities and determine how economic benefits are used over time.

Minimum floors and tiered expectations under Community Benefit Principle 4

The Network emphasises that the proposed minimum and tiered participation levels are deliberately calibrated to be both credible and aspirational.

International experience demonstrates that significantly higher levels of First Nations equity participation — including minimum minority interests of 25 per cent or more — are achievable and financeable when supported by clear policy signals and appropriate financing mechanisms.

The tiered approach proposed here is intended as a foundation that can scale over time, not as a ceiling on ambition.

At a minimum, proponents should be required to demonstrate outcomes for affected First Nations communities and Traditional Owners, including:

• verified and demonstrable processes enabling Free, Prior and Informed Consent and self-determination
• compliance with cultural heritage, land rights and anti-discrimination laws (NB. additionally and as noted above, the Network considers that any evidence of prior non-compliance with cultural heritage, land rights, native title or anti-discrimination laws must render a proponent ineligible for any FMIA support)
• respect for First Nations data sovereignty, and
• a minimum 5% equity or equivalent revenue-sharing interest for Traditional Owners and/or relevant First Nations communities, structured in a way that reflects the preferences of the relevant Traditional Owner groups and communities (including gifted, financed, phased or hybrid models).

Proposals that deliver stronger outcomes should be explicitly recognised and preferred.

This includes:

• 5–10% equity or revenue participation, accompanied by defined governance rights over specified project elements; and
• greater than 10% equity or revenue participation, supported by co-governance arrangements such as board representation or equivalent mechanisms providing meaningful influence over project strategy and operations.

It is critical that the minimum participation requirement is framed as a floor rather than a ceiling.

FMIA rules and guidance should be designed to avoid market clustering at the minimum and to reward proponents that support deeper, community-led economic participation where this is sought by Traditional Owners and First Nations communities.

Where proponents propose alternatives to equity or revenue sharing, they should be required to demonstrate — with evidence — that the proposed arrangements deliver equivalent or superior long-term economic outcomes, consistent with community priorities and aspirations.

Read our submission

The Network has responded to the Australian Energy Regulator's Retail Guidelines Review which directly affects every aspect of First Nations energy experience—from billing and concessions, to hardship pathways, to protections for prepayment customers, to conditions for meaningful participation in the energy transition.

The Network has responded with a submission to the Australian Energy Regulator’s 2026 Rate of Return Instrument (RORI) Review.

Persistent inequities that prevent First Nations households—especially in remote and regional areas—from accessing safe, affordable and reliable energy must be corrected.

Every aspect of First Nations energy experience — from billing and concessions, to hardship pathways, to protections for prepayment customers, to conditions for meaningful participation in the energy transition — is directly impacted by the Australian Energy Regulator’s (AER) Retail Guidelines Review and the consolidation of the Benefit Change Notice Guidelines, Better Bills Guideline, Customer Hardship Policy Guideline and Retail Pricing Information Guidelines. 

The Network strongly supports this review as a critical opportunity to align retail regulation with recent significant national reform, including the First Nations Clean Energy Strategy as a whole-of-government blueprint for achieving equitable First Nations participation and outcomes across the energy system; the National Energy Equity Framework (NEEF) which establishes a nationally consistent equity standard for all energy policies and programs; major reforms to customer protections under the Better Energy Customer Experiences (BECE) program; and growing evidence of energy inequities affecting First Nations peoples (as evidenced in the recent Original Power The Right to Power report). 

Overarching recommendations 

The Network recommends that the combined Retail Guidelines include: 

1. A dedicated “First Nations and Equity” section — Setting out obligations regarding accessible communication, cultural safety, translator services, community engagement, and support pathways. 
2. Inclusion of prepayment customers across all guideline elements — The current exclusion of prepayment customers is inequitable, inconsistent with the NEEF, and produces harmful outcomes. 
3. Automatic concessions and rebates — Manual application processes are a structural barrier. The NEEF explicitly endorses auto-enrolment where friction exists. (see NEEF, “Accessibility barriers and friction”, p.12). 
4. Proactive hardship identification — Using hardship indicators such as payment patterns, missed bills, inactivity, or involuntary self-disconnection (recognised in NEEF as a valid hardship indicator; p.15). 
5. A Priority Services Register — To ensure identification and protection of customers with medical, cultural, technological or geographic vulnerabilities. 
6. Mandatory data collection and reporting — Including First Nations status (self-identified), postcode-level analysis, and prepayment disconnection events. 
7. Clearer, simpler, more culturally appropriate communication standards — Drawing on behavioural insights, First Nations languages, visual design and trusted communication channels such as Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations (ACCOs) and community radio. 

Read our submission

For many First Nations households who experience disproportionately high energy hardship, limited access to consumer energy resources (CER), and structural barriers to switching or reducing consumption, Rate of Return Instrument (RORI) decisions can have immediate and severe affordability consequences. 

The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) has an opportunity in this 2026 Rate of Return Instrument (RORI) review to acknowledge and respond to the lived experiences of First Nations consumers, to adopt a cautious and consumer-protective approach to rate-of-return settings, and to help ensure that the energy transition delivers fair and affordable outcomes for all. 

In 2024, all Australian Energy Ministers endorsed the First Nations Clean Energy Strategy as a priority action under the National Energy Transformation Partnership. The Strategy commits governments to ensure First Nations people are not left behind in the energy transition, to improve affordability and essential service access, and to reduce structural energy disadvantage. Given the Strategy’s ministerial endorsement and its explicit relevance to consumer outcomes, it should inform the AER’s interpretation of the long-term interests of consumers in this RORI review. 

The evidence is clear: First Nations households are more vulnerable to energy price increases, more exposed to network charges, and less able to mitigate costs through CER. For these reasons, the AER must adopt a cautious, equity-focused approach to rate of return settings. Past examples of network over-recovery — including the substantial uplift received by Ausgrid under the introduction of the trailing average cost of debt, and widespread over-recovery under earlier inflation methodologies — demonstrate how technical regulatory choices can have unintended but very real consequences for affordability. The AER should avoid repeating this pattern. 

The Network’s view is that the AER should apply a distributional lens to the RORI review, carefully assess affordability impacts on First Nations consumers, and recognise that strong First Nations engagement reduces risk and improves investment certainty. In which, we recognise that network businesses are highly responsive to financial incentives and that the RORI could be a lever for embedding better and more equitable outcomes for First Nations customers if reviewed and audited. However, the long-term interests of consumers, particularly those experiencing structural energy hardship, must be central to the AER’s decisions. 

Read our submission

The clean energy transition must be a vehicle for First Nations justice, enduring cultural protection, and real economic participation — not a repeat of earlier patterns of dispossession. 

We support VicGrid’s intent to create a predictable, orderly approach to grid access. Despite these intentions, we feel the draft companion documents as released do not yet deliver the binding protections, resourcing or decision-making roles necessary for Traditional Owners to exercise meaningful consent over outcomes on Country.

In particular, the Grid Impact Assessment (GIA) and Access and Connections proposals must explicitly recognise Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) for transmission corridors and Renewable Energy Zone (REZ) siting that materially affect cultural values and Country, and the Community Engagement and Social Value Guidelines must be elevated from guidance to enforceable eligibility criteria for grid access. 

In our submission, we have identified key issues, recommendations and drawn on international examples that actualise FPIC, co-design, meaningful engagement and benefit sharing. We have also provided in the Appendix a range of international examples drawing on embedding FPIC, co-design and benefit sharing. 

The Network’s core recommendations are: 

1. First Nations decision-making and consent — require FPIC for actions that materially affect cultural heritage, Country and First Nations economic interests and embed Traditional Owner decision-making and rights into VicGrid processes; 
2. Binding benefit-sharing and economic participation — require legally enforceable benefit-sharing arrangements, procurement targets, and long-term revenue streams for Traditional Owners; 
3. Cultural heritage and Country protections — statutory spatial exclusion zones, rigorous cultural heritage assessment protocols, and prohibitions on activities where consent is refused; 
4. Capacity — guaranteed, up-front capacity and technical support for Traditional Owner groups to participate effectively; and 
5. Transparency, monitoring and enforcement — clear performance indicators, public reporting, and a fast, culturally appropriate dispute resolution mechanism. 

Absent explicit legal status for FPIC, binding benefit-sharing and adequate resourcing, the Victorian Access Regime risks repeating historic patterns of extractive development that exclude First Nations people. 

Read our submission 

By sidelining First Nations outcomes, the Nelson Review of the National Electricity Market risks undermining both Australia’s renewable energy goals and the equitable transition that First Nations communities expect.

The Network supports recognising First Nations outcomes through optional attributes on renewable electricity Guarantee of Origin certificates. However, Free, Prior and Informed Consent must be embedded as a core policy principle and a condition of access to government programs.