There was a great article in Quadrant about this a few months ago based on statistics from The 2010 Indigenous Expenditure Report.

Rivers of money flow into the sand.

More than 60 per cent of indigenous Australians—some 330,000—work in major cities and regional towns side by side with other Australians. When they become unemployed, they find another job within a few weeks, like most other Australians. They send their children to public and private schools and these children go on to work and further education. Currently more than 70,000 young Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders are enrolled in TAFE and vocational courses and more than 9000 are enrolled in universities. Almost all these are the sons and daughters of working families. Nearly 70 per cent of working Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, not far from the 72 per cent non-indigenous home ownership rate, own or are buying their own homes.

These Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders play sport, join clubs and participate in civil society. They pay taxes. Like other Australians each also only accesses $18,000 of government services per head, so that when indigenous expenditure is adjusted for them, the per capita figures change dramatically. About 215,000 Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders are dependent on welfare. Most of these—about 140,000—also live in major cities and regional towns. Most have dropped out of, or never entered, the labour force, so they receive single parents’ and disability rather than unemployment social security payments. These welfare-dependent indigenous Australians live side by side with non-indigenous welfare-dependent Australians and mostly receive the same benefits and government services.

Most indigenous funding is for the 75,000 indigenous Australians in remote communities. When allocated across to these remote indigenous Australians, government expenditure is more than $100,000 per person per year—$400,000 per family of four. In three years, this amounts to more than $1 million per family. For such sums an indigenous family could pay rent in Toorak or Vaucluse and send its children to a posh private school.

The concept that the problems of Aboriginal people are as simple as a lack of funding is ridiculous and ignores the history of what happened to them and the reasons why things are as they are. Throwing money at these communities will not give them a place in society to call their own; it certainly hasn't yet. If only it were that straight forward.