No power, no backup, no store, no food. Business as usual for a remote general store

This is part two in a series. Read the full series here.

Cracks always show in a crisis. The furious weather system that hit the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands and intermittently knocked out power and phone service in seven Indigenous communities for four days exposed a series of shortcomings, oversights, and operational vulnerabilities to food supply and security in remote Central Australia.

In the remote Indigenous community of Pukatja, about 452 kilometres southwest of Mparntwe (Alice Springs), Mai Wiru food store manager Patrick Vaisima scrambled to play handyman, community liaison officer and emergency service personnel. Backup power failed, fresh food deliveries piled up in mid-30-degree heat, and he was forced to shut up shop, jump in a car and drive to the next community to try to verbally enlist an electrician.

The source of Vaisima’s problems? An unserviced and faulty generator reported to head office over two weeks before. This was the third time in a month it had buckled during a power outage, and despite written confirmation from upper management that they would send someone in to “have a look”, Vaisima told Crikey and reporting partner Indigenous Community Television (ICTV) he hadn’t received any support.

“We managed to get some locals from another community to come in and sort it out for us,” he said, moments before a worker came over to notify him that the generator was out again.

The message from Dennis Bate, head of Mai Wiru Regional Stores Council Aboriginal Corporation (the Aboriginal-controlled and owned company that manages general stores in the APY Lands) was that these not-so-smooth-running operations were a business inevitability in the desert. The only thing within Mai Wiru’s control, he said, was who they employed to deal with it — someone “reliable and resilient” with the capacity to “adapt and cope”.

But a four-day Crikey/ICTV reporting trip through six Northern Territory and South Australian remote Indigenous communities and an equal number of general stores (both Mai Wiru and Commonwealth company Outback Stores) found a revolving door of staff thrown into vulnerable and culturally sensitive communities without training, support or adequate resources. 

There were no Indigenous store managers, few Indigenous employees, a high staff turnover rate (with all managers between one and three months in the job) and big chasms between store managers and community members. The consensus from locals, service providers and Indigenous organisations was that these operational hiccups and rifts were not the product of “difficult” and “hard” day-to-day work, but rather a pattern of top-down mechanical negligence, dedicated but unqualified workers, and a deeply entrenched power imbalance that stemmed from stores being the sole source of food, goods and funds in communities.

On Wednesday, November 15 in Pukatja community, the morning after the first wild electrical storm, Emperor refrigeration and air conditioning technician James Cormack waited outside the Mai Wiru store, pliers in hand, for Vaisima to return from neighbouring Umuwa (20 minutes down the road). The hope was that Vaisima would return with at least a jerry can of diesel and at best a qualified electrician.

Cormack was dispatched to Pukatja from Alice Springs on Tuesday to fix a malfunctioning display freezer, and by virtue of being there he was Vaisima’s first port of call when the power went out and the generator did not come on.

Although unable to make the fix himself, Cormack was unsurprised that the machine had buckled: “There’s a service logbook on there and all it says is that it was commissioned in 2019. There’s no service history after that.”

Cormack said it was business as usual for him to go out to a store (both Mai Wiru and Outback Stores) and repair broken equipment not properly cared for. He budgeted the cost of dispatch for a single day of travel, labour and parts to be a “bare minimum” of $5,000 (travel for the 1000km return trip from Alice Springs to Pukatja community was $3,500 alone) and said that most of these fix-it runs were for dirty and unserviced products.

“You fix it. But you also go, ‘Why is nothing clean?’ It’s because they don’t get anything serviced,” Cormack said.

Despite sit-down meetings between Emperor and company heads pitching detailed service plans, Cormack said there was little appetite for “preventative maintenance”.

“When we first started doing Outback Stores, my boss had a meeting with the chairman and my boss said, ‘Here’s a six-month service schedule, it’ll cost you this much every year’. And he was like, ‘Nah, I can’t see the value in it’,” Cormack said. 

“So that just means that every time something breaks down, it’s going to cost them more.”

Outback Stores CEO Michael Borg told Crikey and ICTV that his company’s safety and electrical equipment is tested and tagged every six months by Remote Area Group, while Bate said that Mai Wiru stores do a twice-a-year run on electricals and refrigerators and a once-a-year service for generators. However he added that this doesn’t always happen: “With new store managers and what have you, that sometimes gets dropped by the wayside.”

Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council CEO Liza Balmer — one of the original partners who set up Mai Wiru and is now independently involved in monitoring food availability, price and nutrition in their stores — said there is huge turnover and a lot of movement for managers. During a one-year pilot program, an NPY Women’s Council nutritionist worked with six different store managers across two community stores.

“Store managers notoriously just get up and leave. There’s no warning, there’s no anything, they’re just gone,” Balmer said, adding that the moment they do, the priority shifts to finding someone to fill that role “ASAP”. As a result, new managers often bypass the necessary “gentle introductions” to both community and store operations.

According to Cormack, any mechanical issues that fall through the cracks are caught by insurance. Bate would not comment on Mai Wiru’s policy, but according to the company’s 2022 financial report, $90,924 was spent on general repairs and maintenance and $420,987 on business insurance (more than four times the previous year). They received $396,816 back, up from $342,929 in 2021.

For Outback Stores, Borg said that each shop operates as an independent entity and therefore manages its own insurance. According to its 2022 annual report, $469,880 was spent on insurance, but the total amounts recouped by the company were not disclosed. Borg told Senate estimates in March this year that 30 communities had stock flown in during the 2022-23 wet season due to bad weather. He did not provide Crikey and ICTV with the total number of claims made by Outback Stores for damaged equipment in the year 2023: “The number would vary between stores.”

Cormack told Crikey and ICTV that both stores lean heavily on insurance, information he is privy to because the insurance companies routinely call him as part of their assessments.

Cost aside, he said the problem with a policy that waits for mechanical issues to arise is that it creates an urgency to repairs. 

“If you’ve got a backup system, at least we don’t have to come at a moment’s notice to fix something. We can wait a week,” Cormack said.

“Most of the time we do go at the drop of the hat. It’s like, ‘Oh, freezer’s down in Kiwirrkurra’, which is 700km away. ‘Yep, no worries, I’ll go and fix it tomorrow’.”

As for communities, they remained on standby until a fix was made. For store managers, the onus was on them to figure out temporary solutions and mitigate any tensions that arose in the community as a result. 

“We run around this morning and make sure that we have our backups up and running, otherwise, our next option is to try to send all our food to the closest community. But I don’t think that will be an option because we have a fair bit of stock,” Vaisima said, adding that even if power was reinstated and he could open the store, his problems don’t end there. 

“We don’t have any network and without network, we’re only able to pay cash at the tills. Most people in community, they always rely on the card.”