Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Can I start off by joining the other members of the House in expressing my deepest sympathy to the family and colleagues of Phillip Hughes, and also to say that our thoughts go out to Sean Abbott in what must be a very difficult time.

When I first became a minister in 2001, I had representations come to me from a group of people wanting justice for the people of Moola Bulla in the Kimberley. This was a group of people who had been on a big Aboriginal property in the 1950s when a government decision was made that this was a dysfunctional community and it was going to be closed down. Subsequently, these people, in the middle of the night, were put on cattle trucks and moved into Halls Creek and into Fitzroy Crossing. The level of dysfunction that followed from that dreadful move was far worse than the problems that were existing at that time on the station of Moola Bulla, and it is a legacy that we still live with today. Unfortunately, it appears that we are about to go down exactly that same path again. The federal government has unilaterally decided that it is going to bail out of its municipal funding of these remote communities. That is 164 communities in remote Western Australia, largely in the Pilbara and the Kimberley, that will no longer receive that funding.

Now, a bucket of money has been handed over to the Barnett government in order to do some transition—no planning, just a bucket of untied money has gone over to the Barnett government. What we know is that Mr Barnett has absolutely started no planning. Just yesterday, finally, with only seven months to go, the local authorities get a letter telling them that a committee is going to be set up and that this committee is going to work out how we are going to deal with this problem.

The local government and the Aboriginal communities are desperately worried about the impact of this movement to close down all of these remote communities and move people into towns like Derby, Halls Creek, and Broome. Some of the projections that have been done in a study in 2009 on what might happen indicate that in Kununurra, you could see family households going from 4.7 per house to 17.8. In Halls Creek, it could go from 7.3 persons per household to 19.7. There has been no thought given about what happens to schooling. Money is currently being invested in a whole range of remote area schools to try to bring them up to standard. Suddenly, if you close these communities down and move these thousands of people into the larger centres, it is going to create absolute chaos.

Brian Sampson, for example, who is the chairman of WDLAC and the head of the Martu people, is desperately concerned about what will happen to his community of Jigalong if the surrounding communities of Punmu, Cotton Creek and others are closed down. He says: 'We are already struggling trying to manage this. If you bring in other people from outside, our ability to manage is going to be severely compromised.' We have got local authorities like Port Hedland that are very concerned about the health, welfare and safety of Indigenous communities. We have Kerry White from the Shire of Ashburton say she is very scared about what the impact of this is going to be on their towns and their Aboriginal communities. We have people like Bishop Saunders expressing his concern that the state and federal governments are turning their backs on the need of our nation's First Australians, and promising a new dispossession that can only result in further injustices and great suffering.

This is something that we really need to address. We cannot depend on the state government to get this right. Just this morning Mr Barnett said, 'I am not going to close down any communities; I am just going to turn off their water and power.' What is going to happen to these people if he turns off their water and power, and closes down their schools? What are these communities going to do? This is a national disgrace. We are repeating the tragedy of the 1950s.