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

Of course, nothing has happened. It was a very cold and crowded Christmas. In February, we started asking some questions again: ‘What’s happened now?’ The Northern Territory News on 25 February said that construction had not commenced on a single house, but what the government did was to put another media release out. Territory Labor decided that this was all getting a little bit awkward for them, so the Chief Minister decided to release the first annual report card on the Closing the Gap initiative. It says how much money they spent. It talks about the recruitment. But there is not a single benchmark outcome in health or education or anything like that. Labor believes that if they spend a lot of money—if they put a dollar sign there—it equals an outcome. Well, we can see there is no outcome. There are no houses. The parlous state of the welfare of our first Australians in the Northern Territory remains largely the same.

Whilst they are delivering illusions of actions, and broken promises, we can see that there is now a very clear series of steps. We fast-forward to May 2009. A further announcement was made by the government on the construction of houses. Again, it was an admission of a delay in construction. We were told that work was due to start in a few months time, in May 2009—seven months after the announced start date. I have to say, the Tiwi Islands inform me that there are still no houses today. I had a photo of a 50-millimetre peg in the ground. That is the sum of the new housing construction.