At dawn most mornings, a convoy of tour buses idles in the dark at the sunrise-viewing car park outside Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park while a ranger's voice, recorded for the park app or spoken live on a guided walk, reminds visitors why they are asked to stay on the path around the rock's base rather than climb it. Most of the passengers flew into Yulara, a resort town built from scratch in the early 1980s that remains the only accommodation base for one of the most photographed places on Earth. Three hours by sealed and unsealed road further north-east, in Kakadu, a family that planned a full day at Jim Jim Falls instead finds the turn-off gated: the access track has been closed for the season, again, because the funding to grade it after the wet season did not stretch that far. Both scenes are true at once. The Northern Territory's two greatest tourism assets are simultaneously a rare economic success story and a case study in how easily a government can under-invest in the thing it markets hardest.
Uluru-Kata Tjuta and Kakadu are Commonwealth national parks, not Territory-run reserves — both sit on Aboriginal land handed back to Traditional Owners and then leased back, under joint management, to the Director of National Parks in Canberra. That distinction matters for who is accountable for what follows. But the Northern Territory Government owns the marketing, the surrounding roads, the airport gateways and the servicing of Yulara township, and every NT administration for forty years, Labor and CLP alike, has built its visitor-economy pitch around these two parks as the drawcards that get international travellers to fly into Darwin or Alice Springs at all. The Finocchiaro CLP Government, elected in August 2024, inherited that framing wholesale and has kept promoting both parks as the centrepiece of the Territory's push to grow visitor spending, while inheriting too the joint-management funding disputes and the Kakadu decline that predate it by years.
A marketing engine built on two parks it doesn't run
Tourism NT, the Territory's tourism marketing and events agency, spends the bulk of its public campaign budget promoting the "Red Centre" (Uluru, Kata Tjuta and Alice Springs) and the Kakadu-Arnhem region as the two pillars of the NT visitor economy alongside Darwin. The Territory's long-standing tourism strategy has targeted growing visitor expenditure toward several billion dollars a year by 2030 (approx.), a target both the former Labor government and the Finocchiaro CLP Government elected in August 2024 have continued to cite in Budget Papers and Tourism NT corporate reporting. Because neither park is a Territory asset — both are declared under Commonwealth legislation and run by the Director of National Parks (Parks Australia) in partnership with their Traditional Owner boards of management — the NT Government's direct levers are narrower than the marketing suggests: it funds the roads connecting the parks to the rest of the Territory, subsidises some regional aviation routes, and negotiates jointly with Canberra on the one piece of park-adjacent infrastructure it does control, the former uranium-mining town of Jabiru on Kakadu's northern edge.
Jabiru's future has become the clearest test of the current government's follow-through. Energy Resources of Australia's Ranger uranium mine, an enclave excised from Kakadu for four decades, stopped processing ore in January 2021 and is now under a legislated rehabilitation program; both the Mirarr Traditional Owners, represented by the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation, and successive NT governments have committed to turning Jabiru into a tourism-based gateway town once the mine's lease area is rehabilitated and, Traditional Owners hope, folded back into the park. The NT and Commonwealth Governments jointly committed transition funding for Jabiru — reported at more than $200 million combined (approx.), covering housing, an upgraded visitor centre and civic infrastructure — a commitment the Finocchiaro Government has continued rather than originated.
The strongest case
Two parks the rest of the world studies as a model, not a warning
The steelman case starts with the handbacks themselves. Uluru was returned to its Anangu Traditional Owners on 26 October 1985, and Kakadu's land was returned in stages from 1979, at a time when almost no other country gave Indigenous owners legal title to a national park and then wrote them a majority seat on the board that runs it. Both parks are still governed that way: Boards of Management with a Traditional Owner majority set policy jointly with the Director of National Parks, and both carry the rare dual UNESCO World Heritage listing recognising Aboriginal cultural value alongside natural value, a global rarity reflecting genuine, not token, Traditional Owner authorship of how the parks are presented to the world. The 2019 climbing ban is the clearest proof the model can absorb a hard call without wrecking the asset: the Uluru-Kata Tjuta Board voted unanimously in November 2017, gave operators two years' notice, and ended a practice Traditional Owners had asked visitors to stop since the 1985 handback — when an estimated three-quarters of visitors still climbed, a figure that had already fallen to roughly one in six by 2015 (approx.), evidence the education campaign, not the ban alone, had already done most of the work. Total visitation held up in the ban's aftermath, before COVID-19 shut down international travel in 2020. And Yulara, the resort town that houses almost every Uluru visitor, has been owned since 2011 by the Indigenous Land and Sea Corporation, whose National Indigenous Training Academy has put hundreds of trainees from remote communities through hospitality qualifications — tourism infrastructure built to funnel profit and jobs back to Indigenous Australians by design, not as an afterthought.
The evidence
Set side by side, the two parks' visitor numbers show both the scale of the asset and the divergence in its trajectory. Uluru-Kata Tjuta drew approximately 300,000 visitors a year in recent Parks Australia reporting (approx.), a number that has generally trended upward over the past decade outside the COVID-19 shutdown years. Kakadu's visitation has moved the other way for far longer: Parks Australia annual reports and evidence given to a 2019-2020 Senate Environment and Communications References Committee inquiry into the management of Commonwealth national parks both describe a decline of roughly a third to a half from Kakadu's mid-1990s peak (approx.), driven by changed travel patterns, competition from other Top End destinations, and — the inquiry heard directly — chronic under-investment in roads, campgrounds and visitor infrastructure inside the park itself.
The joint-management funding model works by treaty-like design: the Director of National Parks pays Traditional Owners lease rent under the original 99-year head leases (1985 for Uluru-Kata Tjuta, running from the staged handbacks of the late 1970s and 1980s for Kakadu), and both boards have negotiated a share of park entry-fee revenue back to Traditional Owner trusts in recent years on top of that rent (approx.; terms renegotiated upward from their original 1980s levels after Traditional Owners argued the first agreements undervalued the asset). What that revenue does not obviously fix is the gap between the parks' global profile and the community that lives inside one of their boundaries: Mutitjulu, the Anangu community a few kilometres from the base of Uluru, has for decades ranked among the most disadvantaged communities in Australia on ABS Census and Productivity Commission Closing the Gap indicators — overcrowded housing, low Year 12 completion, and a health and life-expectancy gap that mirrors remote communities with no tourism economy on their doorstep at all.
The critique
Kakadu's on-ground experience is the sharpest test of the "world-leading model" case. Jim Jim Falls and Twin Falls, two of the park's signature attractions, have been closed to visitors for extended stretches in recent dry seasons because the unsealed access roads were not graded in time after the wet, a maintenance backlog the 2019-2020 Senate inquiry heard was a direct product of funding that has not kept pace with the park's upkeep needs. Gunlom's upper pools have also been closed for extended periods. None of this is a Finocchiaro Government failure in the narrow sense — grading roads inside Kakadu is a Commonwealth, Parks Australia responsibility, not an NT Budget line — but the Territory Government spends heavily promoting Kakadu as a must-see destination in the same campaigns that ask travellers to fly into Darwin, and has not, on the public record, pushed hard or visibly for Canberra to fix the maintenance backlog that undercuts its own marketing.
Where the Territory Government's own money and decisions are directly in play, Jabiru's transition and the broader visitor-economy strategy, progress has been slower than promised. The Ranger mine's rehabilitation, and with it the timeline for folding the excised lease area back into Kakadu and Jabiru's pivot to a tourism economy, has faced repeated schedule slippage since ore processing ended in January 2021 (approx.), and the Mirarr Traditional Owners, through the Gundjeihmi Aboriginal Corporation, have publicly pressed both the NT and Commonwealth Governments to move faster and be clearer about the town's post-mining funding beyond the initial transition package.
The deeper structural critique is about who captures the benefit of the visitor economy both parks generate. Traditional Owner boards of management set policy and receive lease rent and a share of gate revenue, but most of the commercial activity around the parks — coach tours, retail, much of the accommodation outside Yulara itself, fuel and food service along the access roads — is run by non-Indigenous operators, and reviews by the Central Land Council and others have long argued that Indigenous employment and business ownership across the wider tourism supply chain lags well behind the share Traditional Owners hold in the land itself. Voyages' training academy at Yulara is a genuine exception, not the rule across the visitor economy the NT Government promotes. Put plainly: the parks are Aboriginal land, jointly managed by Aboriginal-majority boards, generating tourism revenue in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year across the Territory economy (approx.) — and the community with the shortest walk to Uluru is still one of the poorest in the country.
Mutitjulu sits closer to Uluru than any resort room the park sells, and further from its benefits than almost anywhere else in Australia.
The risk to the future
A model that only works if both governments keep funding it
If Kakadu's access roads, campgrounds and waterfalls keep closing for want of maintenance funding while Tourism NT keeps selling the park as a Territory must-see, the gap between the marketing and the on-ground experience risks doing to Kakadu's reputation what neglect has already done to its visitor numbers: driving repeat and word-of-mouth travellers elsewhere in a global market with plenty of substitutes. That is a Territory-economy risk as much as a Commonwealth one, since Tourism NT's own visitor-expenditure targets assume both parks keep pulling their weight. The deeper risk sits with the joint-management model itself. Traditional Owners agreed to lease their land back to government precisely because it promised a genuine partnership and a fair share of what the parks generate; a widening, well-documented gap between Uluru and Kakadu's global earning power and the living standards of the Aboriginal communities at their gates is the kind of evidence that erodes Traditional Owner confidence in that bargain over time, not overnight. A Territory Government that keeps marketing the parks hard while treating their maintenance and benefit-sharing gaps as someone else's problem, Canberra's roads, the Commonwealth's lease, risks inheriting the reputational and political cost of a model breaking down on its watch, even where it does not hold every lever to fix it.