Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Native Title Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2010. The purpose of this bill is to amend the Native Title Act 1993 so that the procedural rights of native title holders are curtailed when land is required for public education, health facilities, public housing and a wide range of other public facilities. Between the previous government being prorogued when this bill was first presented and this new government being formed there was one small alteration to the bill and that was to include, amongst the previous categories of public housing, an explicit reference to staff housing provided in connection with housing or facilities that benefit Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders—facilities which the legislation nominates as covering public education facilities, public health facilities, police facilities and emergency facilities.

It is the fact that in Australia we have Third World conditions in many parts of the Northern Territory, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and, indeed, even in parts of more remote New South Wales. A lot of those conditions are being experienced by the first Australians—our Indigenous Australians. We lament the very great differences in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, we are concerned about the levels of deafness experienced by Indigenous children and we are concerned about the exposure to pornography of young children, which, too often, is simply blaring out into a community where houses have no walls. We have to be concerned about the part that decent housing plays. Quite obviously, if you do not have decent shelter, if your sewerage system does not work, if you do not have running water in your house, if you do not have access to warm or hot water, if you do not have screens on the windows of your buildings so there is no chance to keep disease-carrying mosquitoes at bay, if you have housing that is so overcrowded that there is no chance for a family to have privacy and if dysfunctional families are almost a given because of the numbers of individuals—adults, children and babies—that are trying to sleep each night in shocking conditions, then, I repeat, you have Third World conditions.

It is very important that we do whatever we can in this federal parliament to increase the chance that the dollars put aside, first by the coalition government and now by the Labor government, are actually spent and spent well on building and refurbishing houses. I would like to be able to say that there is now a strong record of housing construction going on and that houses are being refurbished at a great rate, but that is not quite the case. Despite, I am sure, the very good intentions of this Labor government, this is a government that, unfortunately, is not known for being able to manage projects. It has had a series of disasters since coming into power. I remind the Australian public of the pink batts debacle, the squandering of funds under the Building the Education Revolution program, the Green Loans debacle and so many cases of literally billions of dollars not being spent appropriately, not delivering value for money. Now we are facing a similar outcome with the National Broadband Network.

Perhaps the saddest, I would say desperately unfortunate, example of projects not being properly managed amongst all of those I have mentioned is the Aboriginal housing program. To quote from the Australian of 31 August 2009:

A report into a remote Aboriginal housing scheme in the Northern Territory has found it was behind schedule and over budget. Outrage over the lack of progress of the $672 million Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP) prompted the NT and federal governments to review the scheme. Rebel MP Alison Anderson walked out on the NT Labor government last month after she was told only 30 per cent of the money would actually go towards new homes. She was also told less than half of the 750 homes promised almost 18 months ago would be delivered by the scheme, which is yet to produce a single new home. The report, released in both Darwin and Melbourne on Monday, has found the program is not on track to meet its targets.

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Fast forward 10 months to 22 May 2010. One would hope that there would have been a different story of cooperation and outcomes between different territories, states and the federal government on building decent housing or refurbishing houses for Aboriginal families. Ten months later, on 22 May, the Australian wrote:

With only 11 houses completed during the program’s first 2½ years, The Weekend Australian has undertaken a detailed analysis of the progress under the nation’s largest single investment in remote housing.

A confidential document detailing progress under the SIHIP reveals that only seven of the 16 communities that were to receive 750 new houses among them have signed long-term leases with the federal government.

It went to say:

Those seven communities - Nguiu, Groote Eylandt townships, Wadeye, Maningrida, Gunbalanya and Galiwinku, as well as the Alice Springs town camps, - are set to receive 629 houses by 2013.

It then said:

A further nine communities…are yet to sign the long-term leases, which give security of tenure for housing investment.

Clearly there is something terribly wrong when it comes to the delivery of housing using the dollars that have been committed to this program. We have to ask why, and we have to see if there is some impediment in the legislation. Let us hope that this Native Title Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2010 has within it some better way to proceed.

On the surface, you could wonder why we need a bill that changes the arrangements of the Native Title Act. A previous version of this bill was referred to the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs for inquiry. That committee reported on 24 February this year. Many issues were raised in the committee’s report, including that many Indigenous organisations, academics and indeed some state agencies argued that the amendments in the bill were unnecessary and paternalistic or racist and that the framework was already in place to facilitate the construction of facilities such as the bill had in mind. In particular, the report examined the evidence given by the federal government, in the form of the Attorney-General’s Department and the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, and by the Queensland and WA governments. They argued that the measures were necessary, were beneficial to Indigenous communities and should be seen as special and not, therefore, a breach of the Race Discrimination Act 1975. The opposition made a special contribution, saying it supported the recommendations of the majority report but also recommended that Indigenous land use agreements be given support and that a template for such agreements should be developed.

We in the coalition are saying that, yes, we believe there needs to be special measures when it comes to Indigenous housing. There have been literally decades of good intentions leading to nothing in the way of a significant change in the numbers or quality of housing available to Indigenous Australians. As I said, we see dysfunctional families, disease, the failure of children to thrive and an exacerbation of kids being unable to be properly cleaned, dressed and prepared to go to school. If you have spent the night going from place to place looking to sleep and then you are expected to be bright and shiny to go to school the next day, it is very hard.

I want to refer to our Liberal Country Party senator for the Northern Territory, Senator Scullion. He is very well versed in the inadequacies of housing in the Northern Territory. He is a man who I regard very highly as a person who knows exactly how it is in the Northern Territory. He has spoken in the parliament about the inadequate housing supply, commenting that it is not uncommon for 15 to 20 people to be sharing a totally inadequate dwelling in remote territory communities. They have non-functioning bathrooms and toilets and there is misery associated with their day-to-day living, to the point where some choose to abandon their hovels altogether and go and live in old cars, under tarpaulins or under sheets of tin.

As we all know, the very special report Little Children are Sacred, which was released in 2007, identified poor housing as one of the most significant factors contributing to child abuse and neglect. The coalition government was most concerned to make sure that we moved quickly on the business of putting in place better housing. We also understood the importance of Indigenous workers being upskilled and being able to work on those projects themselves so they would become more likely to find employment after the housing work was completed. It is a very sad situation—an indictment on this government—that that Indigenous workforce has not come forward. It has not been supported into place and, indeed, a lot of the excuses have blamed the failure to do the work or to build and renovate houses on the fact that there were no Indigenous workers to be found. You really have to wonder just what this government is doing.

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