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

Yes, there was. There was an open cheque available to all of them to take up, which is better than an increase in indexation or any five per cent. It was a case of saying, ‘You come back to us about meeting unmet need.’ Whilst the CSTDA is an 80-20 split in round figures—80 per cent state and 20 per cent Commonwealth—and has been since 1991, we are prepared to pick up 50 per cent, which is exactly what Minister Della Bosca from the New South Wales Labor government had asked us to do in a letter to me in March of this year when he was representing all ministers, before he changed portfolios. That was the offer that was put on the table and that is the one that only the ACT has picked up. We will have a look at how much that is and whether we can do it, and you can extrapolate from that the percentage increases. That was real additional new money, but only on the basis that people would actually come up with new targets for unmet need that would be met.

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