Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

I withdraw that word, Mr President. The minister responsible for this complete mess, Mr Rob Knight, has come out to destroy the action and has said that the government has met every deadline for the project. This beggars belief. We again sneak forward and we know that, in April 2008, 750 houses will be built. But by June 2009 in Tennant Creek we have the promise of new houses become no houses. On the Tiwi Islands we saw that the promise of 90 new houses and a 62-lot subdivision has been revised to 25 houses and no subdivision. Do you know what the excuse is? The excuse is that somebody forgot to calculate the old GST—terribly sorry about that! We will just sneak an article into the Tiwi Times and say sorry about that! None of it adds up. None of it makes sense and something genuinely needs to be done.

So here we are after two years of Kevin Rudd’s Labor, after the apology statement that I thought at the time was such an important tribute. To be frank, I thought the apology would have to be made by those on that side. It was one of those symbolic things, and the time was right with the people on the Labor side. From the coalition—and I think they tried it on several occasions—it just would not have gone down as well. I believed what the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, said: that he would close the gap. He promised to do that. Health and education are very hard to measure. It is hard to know without looking intergenerationally how education and health are going. But it is not hard to measure how many houses have been built. The Prime Minister has promised 750 houses. He has promised relief for our first Australians, the most vulnerable of Australians, and he has delivered absolutely nothing. (Time expired)