Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

In last year’s historic apology to the Indigenous people of this country, the key commitment for the future was the establishment of nothing less than a war cabinet to address the problem of housing. It was not business as usual. It was not just another government program. It was something as dramatic as a war cabinet to address this crisis. At the time of the intervention, we were told by the NT government that there were no fewer than 4,000 houses missing in the Aboriginal communities of the Northern Territory. So, having promised on this great day in the life of our country, this historic day for all of us, a war cabinet to address, amongst other things, the 4,000 missing houses in the Northern Territory, what did we get? We got the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program to give, it was said, 750 new houses, 230 rebuilt houses and 2,500 renovated houses for the cost of $670 million.

So we had the apology in February and we had the strategic housing program announced in, I think, September last year. One year later, what do we have? Not a single new house has been built. According to a private briefing by a senior officer of the Northern Territory housing department, about a half a dozen slabs at most have been laid. Already, $45 million has been spent, and nothing of substance has been done. I will tell you what has happened, though: a very fine Aboriginal person, a great servant of her people and her country, Alison Anderson, has resigned from the Northern Territory government. This is what she said:

Late last year I began to receive briefings about the program. I knew things were going wrong. I raised my concerns with my colleagues. I struggled to get action. I appealed to them. I could see the disaster in the making. I could see the money being swallowed up: on consultation, on training costs, on administration. At meeting after meeting … I did everything I could to resolve this matter inside the party.

I was unsuccessful. There was no urgency. They didn’t care. I came to understand then that they were quite content to just continue administering Aboriginal communities, taking the money from Canberra. It was just business as usual for them.

She went on to say:

I want to tell you what is wrong at the heart of the Labor government. It is not so much the weak ministers, the constant fighting or the worry about the interests of the party and its friends. It is Labor’s problem with truth.

The Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, who just spoke, is a person of goodwill. She is a person of decency and goodwill. But she knew that there were problems, because she was warned by none other than her own parliamentary secretary, Senator Ursula Stephens. Senator Stephens warned:

… that the construction sector had likened the scheme to a “shoddy defence procurement model”, which was likely to lead to the “insidious” alliances between contractors that sparked a royal commission in NSW over high-level corruption in public tenders.

Senator Stephens also predicted:

… it would inflate the cost of housing in remote communities and was unlikely to deliver a single house before 2011, or to meet its target of 20 per cent of indigenous jobs in construction.

Senator Stephens said many months later that her ‘concerns had been addressed’ and she ‘had not had any cause to raise further issues with Ms Macklin’. Senator Stephens, to her credit, raised the problem; Minister Macklin, to her discredit, dismissed the problem—and Senator Stephens, to her discredit, has accepted that falsehood from her senior colleague.

What disappointed me so much about the speech that we just heard from the minister was this: confronted with a social disaster of horrific magnitude and confronted with these kinds of concerns from her own colleagues, did we hear any urgency in her speech? Was there any note of real anxiety in her speech? Did she tell us about all of the things that she was personally doing to make things different? No. There was the complacent assumption that sending a bureaucrat to the Territory was going to make it all come right. This was the speech of a public servant—not of a real public servant but of a bureaucrat. It was not the speech of a leader. I will bet that those words that were read out to this parliament in such a desultory fashion had been drafted for her by the bureaucrats who have led her to the predicament which she is now in and which is leaving the Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory in such a sad situation.

Again, I am not questioning the minister’s goodwill; I am questioning the competence with which this program is being administered. I am not trying to make a partisan political point here. I accept that all of us have failed over the years in this area. But there was a promise, concurrent with the apology, that things would be different. It is just that today, and since, there has been no evidence of anything other than business as usual on the ground. I am raising these matters not because I want to make a fine moral fellow of myself but because I want to mitigate the unfolding disaster and I want us all to learn from the mistakes of the past and the present.

The fundamental problem is that this government has gone into this program with a whole bunch of conflicting objectives. The short-term objective of getting houses built has been radically undermined by the long-term objectives of consulting with local people and getting the title right. We have to get the title right but, by going about it the way she has, the minister has guaranteed that, in the process, we do not get the housing right. We have unhoused people because this minister is worrying about too many objectives at once. Get them housed and then worry about the title. That would be the best way to proceed.

Then we saw a program that was structurally unsound—six layers of management and the private sector engaged without a specific job to do. Is it any wonder that the private sector are now padding out the payments for their work with, according to the same senior official of the Northern Territory housing department, a 20 per cent mark-up for profit and 20 per cent mark-up for ‘corporate overheads’—whatever that is. So at least 40 per cent of this money, even on the briefing of the Northern Territory housing department, is not going to deliver houses on the ground.

So the current situation is that we have a Commonwealth officer embedded but no idea of what difference these Commonwealth officers are making or what their precise role is. We have the promise from the minister that administrative costs will be reduced from 11 per cent to eight per cent but no statement as to what they were, no statement as to why they were so high when this thing was put into place and no explanation as to how we can have more bureaucrats put into the system and the program and at the same time cut the administrative costs. We have had housing costs go up from $350,000 per new house to $450,000 per new house. To cover these new houses at their higher costs, we have had the infrastructure component ripped out of the program, so there will be no adequate sewerage, roads or water for these new houses. I still think that, on the most optimistic possible assumptions, they are $50 million short, at least.

I will tell you what will not happen: we will not get the promised houses, we will not get them built any time soon and we certainly will not get them built for the $670 million. The opposition is going to return to this. This is too important to be just business as usual in this parliament. We will keep the closest possible eye on this program. Someone deserves to be held to account for these failures. It is not all the minister’s fault, but she is the person with the political carriage of this program and she must make it right.

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