Julia...
Families in the Pit lands and surrounding areas are indeed going without food but it has nothing to do with the extreme cost of food. $3 a piece of fruit, maybe he was buying bananas, typically an apple, orange, pear, etc costs 50c, as do spuds, onions etc, and only because those who run the stores charge in 50c increments for all items, (incidentally you won't see any scales in any store.)
$48 million to to make the stores more like Coles and Woolies will lower the cost of food....how? Nganampa Health now helps manage 10 community stores in the north of S.A, with a total population of around 2500-3000 people spread between them, so I guess you could say each store services on average 300 people. How is a Coles or Woolies setup going to lower prices. Throwing $48 million at the "perceived extreme cost" problem will do nothing. Get rid of the highly paid consultant, replace him with a purchasing officer, and use the bulk buying power of the 10 stores to purchase your food etc. Work out a deal with a trucking company, have them collect the stuff in the Alice or Adelaide and run it through to the communities, dry goods one week and freezer/chiller goods the next. That will help bring down prices, if you cross the border into W.A you will find the Ngaanyatjarra lands of the western desert do this, even to the extent of owning their own warehouse in Perth, incidentally their lands and distances dwarf those that the Nganampa Health are involved with, and with a smaller population to boot.
One of the main reasons Nganampa Health is getting involved is that most of the stores are running at a loss! The store, fully fitted out and ready to run is given to the community when it starts up (so no rent), being a community store their are no taxes,the store managers pay is met by an ATSIC grant and any of the mob who work there are paid from CDEP (so no wage bill), the only overheads are electricity and plant repairs/maintainence, and there is no competition within usually a couple of hundred of kilometres. All goods, food, TV's, clothes, fridges, you name it, are sold on a cost plus system, so how do they run at a loss? And no, the mob rarely run the stores themselves, store managers are hired from the city, the only qualifications you need are that you don't mind working in a community in the central deserts. Maybe instead of a consultant a forensic fraud accountant would be more relevant!
Money being spent on alcohol and drugs, alcohol is a big problem in the town camps around Alice, drugs... hardly a problem. But what has that got to do with what he is talking about, namely the problems in the communities many hundreds of kilometres away anyway???
And on a lighter note.... "May Weir days"??? .... Try Mayi Wiya
.. Mayi ..(My-e = food).
....Wiya ..(Wee-ah =no).