Mal Brough (Longman, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, I am extremely keen because, subsequent to us not being able to come to an agreement, it has been reported to me that another person was murdered in the town camps—a 23-year-old woman. That is an unacceptable circumstance. Unfortunately, it is not an isolated incident. The Chief Minister flew down to Alice Springs to try and conclude the negotiations. I know that she was as upset as I was that she was unable to persuade the membership of the Tangentyere Council to see sense in this matter. The Chief Minister and her Minister for Housing, Mr McAdam, and perhaps others, are continuing to pursue the matter. As we said in the main chamber today, the town camps are in fact under special purpose leases and they are the full jurisdictional responsibility of the Territory government. But I acknowledge that (a) this is a human suffering of an extraordinary degree, (b) it is totally unnecessary and (c) the Territory government, I do not believe, would have the resources to be able to do this. Hence, we are putting that money there. I have made it very clear, though, that I think it is unacceptable to put that money there and have it managed by the same organisation that has overseen the management of the houses, seeing the state they are in, when they receive municipal funding from the federal government to maintain those places.

I will inform you here that I have made the decision that, as part of normalisation, in all town camps—Darwin, Tennant Creek, Alice Springs and Katherine, as well as two in Victoria, one being Framlingham—I have requested the department to look at the adequacy of the provision of municipal services that the Commonwealth is currently paying for and to give me a report on those. Clearly it would be unacceptable in any other part of the country if your local council, which is responsible for your municipal services, was to provide them in such an inadequate way as to cause harm to its locals. I am asking for an independent report. I asked for that today—just to let you know—to find out what the standards are and what the state of such services is, considering that at the moment I believe the Commonwealth pays to Tangentyere $1.3-something million per year to undertake its municipal services; but it is not the only one. So I want all of those communities looked at because it is part of our overall package of trying to normalise services and increase and improve the services.

I never got the chance to clear the issue up for you earlier today, but the member for Jagajaga made the statement that it had taken considerable time to make that offer. That in fact is totally incorrect. We made an offer of $30 million which was going to upgrade the town camps to what I subsequently learnt would be a second-grade standard. We were utilising Connecting Neighbours money, and I learnt that that would mean you would have a cul-de-sac—called Abbott’s Camp, for argument’s sake—literally in the heart of Alice Springs. Its municipal services, its power and water supply, would not be as underground as far as they were down the road, which, of course, raises other issues. If any of us are serious about ensuring that we treat everyone equally, you do not have a second-class system for Indigenous people. Hence the further injection of funds—and you can see the magnitude of it—to be able to achieve an equitable level of service provision for all of those town camps, as is required everywhere else in Alice Springs. That allows for everything else to flow from it, including appropriate public housing and public housing tenant arrangements.

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