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

I fear that this is part of a valedictory by my friend the previous speaker, the member for Cook. He made it very clear to us in his final remarks that he will not be here after the election. I have to say, as someone who has known him in my capacity as a member of one of the committees on which he serves, he will be a loss to the parliament. I hope whoever wins his seat is a Labor Party person but, in the event that it is not, whoever takes his place has a lot to live up to. I want to thank him for the work he is doing on those committees.

I do not want to thank him, however, for supporting all the things the government does because, clearly, they err and they err often. Although many of the announcements within this budget are welcome and long overdue, what we have seen is an election year budget, as we all know, which is full of cash and promises. We have seen the debate in the last couple of days about how the government is prepared to spend millions upon millions of taxpayers’ dollars seeking to advertise its wares to the Australian community. During question time today we heard about the market testing of correspondence from the Prime Minister to Australian citizens on the issue of water. I would have thought that if the Prime Minister was genuine he would not have to market test a letter to people. Clearly, the reason he is market testing it is that it is not about giving people information; it is about election prospects. Unfortunately, that is the way in which this particular budget has been framed.

I want to address my remarks to the contribution that this budget will make to the electors of Lingiari, those I am privileged to serve in this place. I have to make the observation that there is very little in this budget to provide for a better future for regional Australia—very little at all. In the context of my own electorate, I think we have been absolutely neglected, no doubt because we are not a marginal National Party or Liberal seat. And that is unfortunate but it is the way in which we know now that this government goes about its business.

As I said, some things in this budget are welcome. The tax cuts announced will offer welcome relief to working Australians. These are tax cuts which Labor proposed in 2005 and we are glad to see they have been delivered by the government, but I make this observation: I wonder how far these tax cuts will go. If you look at the impact upon ordinary Australians, Australian working families or single-parent families, I would say to you that, given the additional costs that people are confronting in their normal daily lives, these tax cuts will be rapidly eaten up. Today in Alice Springs the price of fuel is over $1.50 a litre. As you know, Alice Springs is an urban community and the further you move away from Alice Springs, the higher the costs of fuel. So of the many people in my electorate there will be some who are paying up to $2 a litre. In that context, you would say that the government’s tax cuts ain’t going to go far. For all the largesse that the government says it is delivering, there is clearly a real issue here about the cost of living that people are confronting. Fresh, nutritious food in many parts of rural and remote Australia is difficult to get at the best of times and people in remote areas can pay almost twice what the average food basket costs in a city like Darwin. For the people who live in these communities, whilst the tax cuts are welcome, they will not deliver a great deal.

For people who live in the bush—and this of course is an old National Party argument, which you would be conversant with, Mr Deputy Speaker Scott—it is a little hard to swallow that, while tremendous growth has been achieved throughout our economy as a result of the mining boom or indeed in my own case in the electorate of Lingiari with the expansion of live cattle exports, both of which have a tremendous impact on our export earnings and on the economy generally, it is the areas where this productive activity takes place that are the most obviously neglected when it comes to government expenditure. I make that observation, as I am sure you have done in the past, Mr Deputy Speaker, although you are not in a marginal National Party electorate. I do support the drought assistance measures for farmers in this budget. They are building on the previous federal Labor government’s national drought strategy and are of course necessary. It is worth noting however, given the state of rural industries across Australia, the deathly silence in the budget on the issue of climate change. It is the biggest issue really for the longer term which is confronting our community, yet it is something which this government fails to address in this budget.

This budget also fails to deliver any initiatives to empower regional communities. There is no new funding for area consultative committees. As you would know, Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, properly resourced, these bodies are important in developing our regional economies if used effectively. I will not go into the regional rorts, because I am sure—or I at least hope—that the government has now learnt its lesson and that we will see a great deal more transparency. But I do note that some of the heads of these area consultative committees around Australia have been replaced by government lackeys, so their independence of government can now be questioned. Of course, their very virtue in the past has been that they have been able to be of independent mind and put up proposals that are in the best interests of the community and not just in the best interests of members of the National Party or the Liberal Party. However, it is now very clear that, as a result of the changes that have been put in place, we are more likely to see sycophantic approaches made by some of these area consultative committees on the basis of the change in membership which has been orchestrated by the government.

Again in this budget there is nothing to increase broadband across the bush. People in the bush remain underresourced and underserviced when it comes to telecommunications. I am sure you are only too well aware of that, Mr Deputy Speaker. The government is not trying to match the broadband commitment of the Labor Party, which would see broadband rolled out to all of the Australian continent, to all of the people in Australia. For the two per cent who cannot receive or will not be able to receive the benefits of the fibre-to-the-node network which we are proposing, we will ensure that Australians living in regional and remote areas not covered by the fibre-to-the-node network will have a standard of services, dependent on available technologies, which as far as possible approximates that provided by the new network—the fibre-to-the-node network.

We have seen no equivalent commitment from the government, and I think that raises very serious questions. Mr Deputy Speaker, I hope that you, as a member of the National Party, will be raising in your party room why it is that regional Australia is neglected so much by this government. We note that there has been great discussion in your party room about AWB. I will not give you the benefit of what I think about that, Mr Deputy Speaker, but I will say to you that there are other important issues that are worth fighting for, and it is about time you started fighting.

We know that the lack of broadband is a serious impediment to local government, small businesses and individual citizens because it affects the way they do their business with suppliers, funding bodies and other government agencies or the way they address their own communications needs. The absence of effective broadband removes a vital lifeline, for example, for defence families who want to keep contact with loved ones who may be on hazardous overseas deployment. It stops families in remote areas from keeping in touch with families in the southern states, and that is a vital element of their wellbeing. Labor’s fibre-to-the-node network will bring vital infrastructure to regions and it will meet the needs of business, government and families, and it will do so because it will not be dictated by market forces. It will not be something that is fobbed off with statements that it is properly only the business of private enterprise to deliver these services. It is the government’s job to see that regional and remote areas have decent and equitable levels of service and infrastructure, and Labor will make sure that no region misses out.

The other issue which I think is of almost equal relevance in the context of my part of Australia, the part of Australia that I live in and represent, is the issue of roads. They are, of course, as you would know, Mr Deputy Speaker—coming from a country rural electorate—a crucial infrastructure, the lifelines of our country. This is particularly the case in Lingiari, where the bitumen is scarce and fallen bush roads between scattered remote communities and pastoral properties are the norm. In this budget, the money that has been provided is money which in the old days would have been provided for the national highway network—money for the Victoria River bridge on the Victoria Highway; $10 million for upgrading the Outback Way; and $4 million for widening and fixing up bits of the Stuart, Victoria and Barkly highways.

In the wake of the budget, we have found out through the Senate estimates process that Lingiari will get an additional $1.7 million from the AusLink Strategic Regional Program out of the $250 million that the government needs to spend by the end of the financial year. We will get $700,000 for all-weather access to Batchelor and $1 million for local roads around Gunbalanya. This money is welcome, but I would have to say that it is not strategic, and I am concerned that it does not address the priorities that would otherwise have been set in consultation with the Northern Territory government and other sectors of the economy. I know it does not address, for example, the needs of the pastoral sector. We had members of the Northern Territory Cattlemen’s Association in this parliament only yesterday talking with the member for Batman, Martin Ferguson, and me about their transport and road infrastructure needs. This government can spend $1.7 billion in advertising—seven times more than the entire AusLink Strategic Regional Program—but it cannot supply decent roads to isolated pastoral properties and remote communities in the north while it pork-barrels its mates in marginal seats. I think that is a national scandal, and it shows what the priorities of this government really are. There is a backlog that is piling up year by year, budget after budget.

Housing is another area. I have spoken in this place on many occasions about Indigenous housing—particularly about overcrowding, affordability, dwelling conditions, homelessness and connection to services. On figures published in the Northern Territory government paper titled National issues on Indigenous housing 2004-05 and beyond, rates of Indigenous homelessness and overcrowding in the Northern Territory are three times the national average. Unmet housing needs in the Northern Territory are estimated to be about $850 million, while it is $2 billion nationally. To this end, $294 million in additional Indigenous housing funding is a positive step, but it is clear that the government does not appreciate the immensity of the problem. According to the Ministerial Council for Aboriginal and Torres Islander Affairs, MCATSIA, Aboriginal communities will be short 18,000 houses by 2009. The amount provided in the budget does not go anywhere near meeting the shortfall. From the additional money provided, we can expect that around 700 extra houses will be able to be built.

The government has taken the emphasis away from community based housing. We have seen the responsible minister parading around Northern Australia, making promises about housing in exchange for people giving up their title to land and providing leases back to the Northern Territory government. The government has moved to dismantle CHIP and replace it with the Australian Remote Indigenous Housing Accommodation Program, which looks like little more than rebranding except for the fact that it now includes a homeownership scheme. Homeownership is regarded as a right by all Australians, and it is now being seen as something which Indigenous Australians should take up. They have had that opportunity previously, and I have to tell you that it has not been taken up. It may well be, but it has not been.

The minister responsible made much of four new houses built at Wadeye at Wadapuli, at the outstation. We now know that the real cost of building these houses is somewhere around $700,000 to $800,000. In this particular instance, the government offered the people who were living in these houses the opportunity to buy them after renting them for two years and meeting certain obligations set down by the government. The obligations were that their kids had to go to school, they had to keep the place clean and they had to pay their rent. Then they would be given the opportunity to purchase the house at the end of the two years at a concessional rate. There is no way on God’s earth that, if the true cost of these homes were to be retrieved from the purchasers, Aboriginal people living in that community would be able to afford to buy any of these houses. That is the simple fact of it.

What we need to know is what proportion of the cost of these houses the Commonwealth is prepared to write off before it offers a price to these people to purchase these dwellings, and what will they do into the future in similar sets of circumstances where they so grossly underestimate the cost of provision of infrastructure such as in this particular instance for these houses?

There is much that needs to be done, but the simplistic approach adopted by this government, which is seeking to impose its will upon people, has not, in my view, been the best approach. And whilst I believe that the minister responsible, Mr Brough, has good intentions, I do not believe he has any understanding of the way he should properly be dealing with Indigenous Australians. Imposing artificial time lines on negotiations and imposing conditions that they will find extremely difficult to meet or that they will be unwilling to meet is not the way ahead. The way ahead is to sit down and negotiate outcomes and sets of arrangements which all people can live by, while at the same time giving people the opportunity to debate with government their own priorities. We need far more additional money for Indigenous housing and other infrastructure.

The other area that I want to address briefly is the question of health. In this budget, $37.4 million was provided for Indigenous health initiatives. Similarly, this goes nowhere near addressing the inequity in health outcomes for Indigenous Australians. It is well short of the $460 million that the AMA says is needed for Indigenous primary health care. It is also well short of what the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, NACCHO, estimates is required to achieve funding equity. NACCHO has called for an increase of between $350 million and $500 million per annum. So what the government has delivered is less than 10 per cent of what is needed and it is simply not good enough. It is not my intention now to repeat all the indices of Indigenous health.

One final area that I want to address, but time has run out, is education. In my view this budget goes nowhere near addressing the education needs of people who live in rural and remote Australia, particularly the people of my electorate of Lingiari. (Time expired)

See this speech in context