Since the abolition of ATSIC in 2004/5 the Indigenous policy space has encountered new public management practices of market competition to a far greater degree than before. Service providers favoured by mainstream government tendering and contracting processes have often been large non-Indigenous private sector and not-for-profit organisations, in direct competition with the Indigenous community controlled sector. In order to retain any role in service provision, Aboriginal community organisations have had to compete within mainstream systems which take no account of their cultural contexts or their histories and origins as Aboriginal self-determination initiatives. This ultimately enables government to have greater control over them, and changes their relationships with their communities due to the mismatch of cultural values. This paper will discuss how this change in public administration, through a national partnership agreement on Indigenous housing, has shifted one major Indigenous housing provider in the Kimberley from its earlier role of supporting community councils in its service area to manage local Aboriginal housing, to one where it directly manages all the housing in these communities and supervises individual housing tenancies. These new public administration arrangements are not only in conflict with Indigenous cultural governance knowledge and practice in the region, they do not lead to optimum public policy outcomes.