Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Member for Murray, I will respond as well as I can to each of the many questions that you just asked. I will just work backwards. You would be aware that the boarding colleges that we announced in the election campaign, which are funded in this budget, are additional, so they are extra. They are for three extra places in the Northern Territory. I agree with the member that this is an important program, one that I think there is strong bipartisan support for. We recently also announced—not as part of the budget but separately—that we would fund the new college at the secondary school in Weipa. We have taken a slightly different approach in the Kimberley, where I have announced funding for four hostels. Those hostels will be targeted not at secondary school students but at young people who are in training who need to be in places where they can study and be closer to their places of training—the TAFEs or the employers that they may be training with. So we are certainly embarking on that approach.

I acknowledge that the previous government also had programs—in the education portfolio, not in this portfolio—for supporting children to go to boarding schools. We support that approach. Some of the land councils are putting their own money into supporting children to go away to boarding schools. We want to work with the boarding schools and the Indigenous leadership, who are really supporting these approaches in many, many parts of Australia. We will continue to do so. It is something we feel very strongly about.

You have asked some very detailed questions on the issue of CDEP, and I will have to get back to you about those. We will take those on notice and I will make sure we get a response back to you on those detailed points. I would just like to say that, in general, we strongly support the movement of people off CDEP into properly paid jobs and, like the previous government, I have been very critical of many previous Commonwealth governments, state and territory governments—this is not a peculiarly Northern Territory problem—and local governments, for that matter, who have used CDEP to basically pay people on the cheap. We recognise that there is a need to fund those positions properly. In the case of the Commonwealth, it might be childcare workers. In the case of state or territory governments, it might be health workers or teacher aides. In the case of local government, it could be road workers. There are a range of different jobs where, unfortunately, governments of all persuasions have done the wrong thing by these people. I certainly acknowledge the money that was put into last year’s budget to help us transfer people off CDEP wages onto proper wages. That is proceeding and proceeding quite well in the Northern Territory. We agree with the opposition that this needs to be pushed ahead with our state and territory colleagues and with local government.

On the issue of the Northern Territory intervention, the member for Murray asked whether or not we have initiatives in the different areas the Northern Territory intervention went to. I refer the member to the ministerial statement: we have initiatives in early childhood, supporting both playgroups and creches. There is money in education, both continuing the initiatives of the previous governments, such as the school—

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