Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to be able to participate in this debate on the appropriations. I will start by saying it is ironic that Australia’s commodity resources are located, mined and processed in regional Australia, yet these areas—the source of the significant tax revenue windfall that has benefited the government—have the least to celebrate from this 2006 budget. I note the contribution of the member for Leichhardt but, as the member for Hotham said, there is not one word in this budget about regions. The government has missed a golden opportunity to address the unmet social, educational, transport and communication infrastructure needs of regional Australia in this budget. The workers and families in regional Australia, who contribute directly to Australia’s commodity boom, deserve full and better access to the services that other Australians take for granted.

Regional areas like the Northern Territory face the highest fuel prices in Australia and have the least access to communications, child care, health services and higher education and training facilities. With a huge budget surplus and commodities tax revenue set to continue, now would have been the ideal time to act. If Australia is to take full advantage of a prolonged commodity boom, riding on the resource-hungry Chinese and Indian economies, it would make sense that regional Australia is fully equipped to be the engine room for that wealth creation. At the same time we could ensure regional sustainability well into the future. This vision, sadly, has escaped the government yet again.

I want to refer particularly to the issue of roads—and this is no coincidence. The member for Leichhardt waxed lyrical about the significant benefits that the increased road funding will make. It will not make a significant benefit to my electorate. Apart from the AusLink program—which is, after all, the program used to maintain the national highway system—the Victoria River Highway, a significant highway in the Northern Territory, was allocated $30 million for flood mitigation. This has been on the agenda for some time, and as a result of Cyclone Monica this funding is even more necessary.

Local councils will, of course, welcome the Roads to Recovery windfall and no doubt already have projects that can benefit from the extra funding. But we in Northern Australia do not have much to celebrate when it comes to looking at the 9,000 kilometres of roads on unincorporated lands in the Northern Territory which have not obtained any benefit from this budget. There has been no corresponding increase in funding to match the Roads to Recovery windfall. The $15.5 million for the Stuart Highway, which is the spine of the highway system in Australia, running as it does from Darwin to the Great Australian Bight, was simply necessary maintenance to keep the road up to standard.

The issue of roads is significant for us. The live cattle trade across the Darwin wharf brings enormous wealth to Australia, yet those people moving the cattle from properties across the north of Australia on the beef roads through the Northern Territory have a great cost imposed upon them because of the failure of this government to allocate resources to improve that road infrastructure. Territorians understand the need for these roads, whether it is for a pastoral lease on the Barkly or an Indigenous community anywhere in the Northern Territory, because they are all off the main roads and are all dependent on dirt roads, many of which are inaccessible for months of the year as a result of the wet season. These people suffer, yet there is nothing in this budget to give them any hope that this government appreciates or understands their isolation or the costs that they have to incur because of where they live.

We have seen the government neatly abolish the Fuel Sales Grant Scheme, which was referred to by the member for Hotham. The government says this will be channelled to increased road funding. The impact of this will be to increase the price of fuel in remote parts of the Northern Territory by up to 3c or 4c a litre. Let us bear in mind what fuel prices currently are in the Northern Territory, because not only do Territorians miss out when it comes to the funding of roads but also they pay the highest fuel prices in the country. On 22 May—that is yesterday—the price of unleaded petrol in Darwin was 142.9c a litre. In Tennant Creek today the price of unleaded fuel is 165c a litre and for diesel 167c a litre. At Ti Tree, a couple hundred kilometres up the Stuart Highway from Alice Springs, the price of unleaded petrol is 175c a litre and 179c a litre for diesel. This is nowhere near the costs that people pay who live in the remoter parts of the Northern Territory. This is what people pay up and down the Stuart Highway. Imagine what would happen to this government should the people of North Sydney be paying 179c a litre for their fuel.

This government says that it has done a great service to the people of Northern Australia through this budget. Demonstrably it has not. This budget for regional Australia is but a sham. The people of Northern Australia, the people of the Northern Territory and the people of my electorate cannot point to one area of government activity and say that they have had a substantial benefit accrue to them as a result of this budget. One significant area where they have got it in the eye is child-care funding. Nothing in this budget will address the capital and operational funding requirements to support community based child care and family day care programs in my electorate. This is significant. It means that in places such as Katherine, Nhulunbuy, Tennant Creek or Alice Springs, where there are limited private providers—there is one private provider in Alice Springs—there will be long queues of people waiting to get into these centres. This has a flow-on effect: it will be very difficult to attract workers with young children to the community because they will not be able to access a child-care place.

As a result of the changes to the funding arrangements of these centres, they are under severe threat. Ultimately, they will have to increase their prices to maintain the service and, as a result, they will become less attractive. People who require child care—many of whom are on low and medium incomes—will not be able to meet the increased costs and may well drop out of the work force. That is an outcome which I believe is inappropriate and again demonstrates the lack of understanding by this government of the costs involved in living in regional and remote Australia.

Let me go to another indicator of these costs. We all appreciate that health care is of primary importance. Recently I was told—and I stand to be corrected—that there are 22 vacant positions for doctors in remote parts of the Northern Territory. Nothing in this budget will attract more doctors to those positions. I am aware that the Northern Territory government had to stump up a wage of $300,000 a year to attract a doctor, a GP, to work in a particular community. I do not begrudge a person that money, but it indicates the costs involved in attracting employees to these areas. That applies across the board where there are obvious shortages of professional staff and it demonstrates the very huge cost involved.

Another issue concerns the government’s talk about how magnanimous it is in making these tax cuts. Let us just understand a couple of things. I have already talked about the price of fuel; let me now talk about the price of food. The Northern Territory government undertook a market basket survey in April to June of 2005. It discovered that the cost of a food basket in remote communities was on average 32 per cent more expensive than for the same food basket in a Darwin supermarket. In the Barkly region, that food basket was 52 per cent more expensive. For every dollar that the people in Darwin spent on food, the people in the Barkly region were spending 52c more on their tucker. Mr Deputy Speaker, you tell me why the people of the Northern Territory or people elsewhere in Australia who live in remote communities should be jumping up and down about this budget. They know that this budget will not address the increased cost of living that they have to endure—and, of course, we have had the double whammy of increased interest rates.

The other area which I think bears contemplation, given the recent events in Central Australia and the publicity sought and achieved by the visit of the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs to Alice Springs, is the Indigenous affairs budget. Sadly, despite the rhetoric which we have heard from the government and the ‘hand clapped on heart’ undertakings to address injustice and child abuse in Indigenous communities, examination of the budget shows that, prior to the events of the last fortnight, the government was not even aware of these issues. Yet in 2003 the Prime Minister held a summit with Indigenous women on the issue of family violence. You might just ask the Prime Minister the next time he arrives in this place what resulted from that summit and how the government has addressed the issue of family violence in successive budgets. This issue has been on the agenda for some time; it is not a new phenomenon.

The minister stood up here today and told us about the $30 million he will spend in Alice Springs on town camps. Let us go through that $30 million. He said that $20 million is from the Commonwealth and $10 million is from the Northern Territory. We need to understand where this money is coming from. There is $10 million from the Aboriginal benefit account, which is money set out under the Aboriginal land rights act as mining royalty equivalents, which comes from consolidated revenue, for the use and benefit of Indigenous people, to be administered by them; $10 million comes from a program previously announced in 2004; and $10 million is the Northern Territory’s contribution, which comes from their housing budget and would otherwise have been spent on remote community housing. Let us not think that somehow or other the government has used its resources wisely in this budget to improve the lot of Indigenous Australians, because it has not. Indeed, the changes which it has introduced have been largely on the margins.

There is a major indicator of the poverty suffered by Indigenous Australians. Let us appreciate the items discussed over the last week or two in relation to family violence and the sexual abuse of children, brought to light by a very courageous woman in one case, and the events at Wadeye, which is the site of a COAG trial that has been going on for three years and which today the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory admitted has brought no success in addressing the endemic needs of that community. And what do we see? We see the government saying that they want to have another summit.

In the case of housing, people who understand the nature of poverty and disadvantaged communities and the dysfunction that exists in communities understand only too well that we have to address a whole range of activities in those communities if we are going to address the question of dysfunction and family violence. We have to address the issues of the social determinants of health and the very poor infrastructure in remote communities. The Centre for Remote Health, in Alice Springs, put out a report in 2005 entitled Indigenous populations and resource flows in Central Australia: a social and economic baseline profile. The report said:

In a sense, health services ‘pick up the tab’ for inadequacies in other sectors ... Poor levels of educational achievement, overcrowded houses, sub-standard environmental health conditions and high levels of unemployment are the main drivers of the relatively poor health status observed. Some health issues, such as ‘inside injury’—a deep psychological or spiritual harm—are closely related to the recent, violent history of the region and continuing interaction with the criminal justice system.

This report goes through the issues in a very coherent way. I commend this document from the Centre for Remote Health entitled Indigenous populations and resource flows in Central Australia: a social and economic baseline profile to the chamber and, indeed, to the government. I hope they have read it, because it highlights what I have been saying for some years—that is, if you want to fix these problems in Indigenous communities you actually have to spend money. If you want to fix the issue of housing, you actually have to invest. There is nothing in this budget which will effect a change to community housing in Indigenous communities. We know already about the overcrowding housing in Indigenous communities. In Central Australia the highest average occupancy recorded in Indigenous communities in this survey was 23 people per house. Understand that: 23 people per house. We know that it is not uncommon to find up to 30 people per house.

We know that the shortfall in housing infrastructure across Indigenous Australia, identified by ATSIC in 2003, is $2.3 billion. In the Northern Territory alone it is about a billion dollars. What do we see in this budget to address that issue? What do we see in the budget to address the $400 million shortfall identified by the AMA for primary healthcare in Indigenous communities? What do we see? I do not take umbrage at the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs coming into this place to raise these issues—I am pleased that he has raised many of these issues—but he has to understand that we have to have some sincerity here and we have to have some belief that the government is fair dinkum. Instead of just identifying justice as an issue, important as it is, instead of insulting the work done by the police in the Northern Territory, as the minister has done, and instead of insulting the work done by the child protection people in the Northern Territory, as the minister has done, what he ought to be doing is not only talking about those issues but going back to the cabinet table and getting the hundreds of millions of dollars required to address the issues of structural poverty that exist in the Indigenous communities across Australia.

If he does that I will applaud him. I will say, ‘That’s fantastic,’ because then we might get an outcome. The minister cannot do this alone; he has to do it in partnership with state and territory governments. But, most importantly, they have got to sit down with the Indigenous communities and work out resolutions to these problems and provide the funding required. (Time expired)

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