Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence Science and Personnel) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the previous speaker, the member for Forde, for his contribution in this debate on Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2009-2010 and associated bills. It is always good to see someone who appreciates good budgets. Unfortunately, our friends in the opposition do not appear to be so supportive—which is a shame, given that this budget is about protecting jobs and providing opportunities for business in our communities.

Through this budget, the government has a massive national infrastructure spending program that delivers for regional Australians and, indeed, all Australians into the future. My electorate is the seat of Lingiari, which is, as I have explained on a number of occasions in this place—too many to remember even—1.34 million square kilometres. The government is delivering new and improved community health and education facilities and programs for the families in electorates across regional and remote Australia. My electorate of Lingiari is vast and has a population that is very widely dispersed. There is expenditure in this budget that goes to schools. There are 123 primary schools in my electorate. We have diverse population centres. The major population centre is Alice Springs, which is where I live. Thankfully, the investment in the Northern Territory will go to address many of the needs that we have for physical infrastructure—most notably, in dealing with the issues of those most marginalised of all Australians, Indigenous Australians who live in remote communities. I will come to a lot of the detail of that later on.

The expenditure in the Northern Territory, and in Lingiari, in particular, will have a tremendous impact on those communities—on all communities—not only in terms of providing infrastructure but also in providing job and business opportunities. I have visited a number of schools over recent weeks and I have spoken to a number of small business people. It is very clear that, whilst many parts of Australia have been experiencing issues to do with increased unemployment and problems with business viability, that is certainly not the case where I live. That is largely as a result of a very vibrant Northern Territory economy, which is underpinned by Commonwealth government outlays.

Whilst the Northern Territory general budget gets around 80 per cent of its revenue directly from the Commonwealth government, the items in this budget provide enormous additional stimulus to that economy. They also provide the sort of infrastructure that will assist the further development of business and allow the further exploitation of our resources, particularly in the mining and pastoral industries, while at the same time providing the social infrastructure that the community most needs.

A very good example of this sort of investment is the investment in the port of Darwin. The government has made an announcement of $50 million to be spent on the Darwin port. This will allow major expansion of the port’s capacity, including new berthing and ship-loading facilities. We already know that resource and live cattle exports through the port are growing rapidly. There is growth of iron exports from Territory Resources’ Frances Creek mine near Pine Creek. Bootu Creek manganese also continues to be exported through the Darwin port and the huge Wonarah phosphates deposits east of Tennant Creek are also likely to go through the bulk loading facility at the port. That is an enormous opportunity. It will provide ongoing investment opportunity for small business and jobs for Territorians and others, who are increasingly travelling to the Northern Territory looking for opportunities.

I will not go into detail of the road expenditure in the Northern Territory, but it is significant. We continue to have an obligation to invest in our national highway system. That is carried through in this budget. The main transport links into and across the Northern Territory are the Stuart Highway, north and south, and the Barkly Highway, east and west—east from the Stuart Highway just north of Tennant Creek and west from Katherine. There is also the Victoria River Highway. They are the major highway arterials and they carry the bulk of the cattle which traverse the Northern Territory to eastern markets and to the Darwin wharf to become live cattle exports. It is important that those opportunities remain. They will only remain whilst ever we have the transport infrastructure that meets their needs—hence the importance of the expenditure on roads.

There is quite a deal of money allocated in this budget not only for those major highways but also for significant arterial roads which have previously not been funded significantly enough. The Tanami Road, for example, is but one and the Plenty Highway is another. The Plenty Highway, which travels east from the Stuart Highway just north of Alice Springs across to close to Boulia, provides an opportunity for people travelling into and out of the Northern Territory and provides significant potential for the pastoral industry.

In this budget, the Rudd government continues to focus on improving health outcomes for the Territory. Some very, very important investments have been made as a result of this budget. The Menzies School of Health Research is the only Australian health and medical research institution with a primary focus on the health of people living in tropical parts of the country. They, like me, welcome the government’s $34 million investment in the school, providing a solid foundation for significantly improved long-term health outcomes for those Australians living north of the Tropic of Capricorn.

Just as important for Northern Territorians, and indeed all Australians living in remote and rural areas of the country, is the great news that the Australian government will develop a new medical school at Charles Darwin University. This is absolutely imperative. It is important in making sure that we not only attract young people into the medical profession but at the same time give them an opportunity to train in the north of Australia in remote communities. Then, hopefully—and I am sure this will happen as an outcome—young doctors who would otherwise not be thinking about a career in the north will actually stay in the north.

Charles Darwin will work in close collaboration with James Cook University in North Queensland and Flinders University in South Australia. The upshot, of course, is that many more students will be acculturated into the ways of the north. This will hopefully attract them to stay there and further their careers.

One of the most significant investments that I am really pleased about is in my home community of Alice Springs, where there will be a $13.6 million investment to build a new emergency department at the hospital, including 35 treatment cubicles, a 10-bed short-stay unit, paediatric and psychiatric assessment areas as well as isolation and procedure rooms. This will also provide an opportunity I think to develop a purpose-designed surgery for ophthalmic surgery, which is obviously very important in terms of eye health in and around remote parts of the Northern Territory but most importantly around Central Australia. This facility is long overdue.

The Australian government will also, as result of this budget, fund a new 50-unit accommodation complex in Darwin that will help house those remote Territorians who need to accompany family members who have serious medical problems. The complex will also house recovering patients still too ill to return home. This $18.6 million investment will seriously reduce bed-block at Royal Darwin Hospital. We need to understand how important this is. The investment in this hospital infrastructure in Alice Springs and Darwin services remote parts of the Northern Territory, and many of the clients that will be using this new facility at the Darwin Hospital will be constituents of mine. They will not be residents of Darwin; they will be people who live outside of Darwin in the seat of Lingiari, primarily Indigenous people, who suffer acute health problems, as we know. The treatment is available for them at these two hospitals, Darwin and Alice Springs, and they do a very good job. But, importantly, one of the ongoing issues has been accommodation for people travelling into these major centres for health reasons.

Education has been a major beneficiary, as we know, from this Rudd budget. In the case of Charles Darwin University, it has been the beneficiary of $30.65 million allocated for the establishment of the Australian Centre for Excellence in Indigenous Knowledge. A total of $191 million over four years, including $102 million this financial year, has been allocated for education infrastructure in the Northern Territory.

I have said on many occasions in this place how important education is to alleviating the poverty that many of my constituents experience. The investment which the Rudd government has made in school infrastructure alone will have a tremendous impact on the opportunities for young Territorians, but of course young Australians generally around the nation. But in my own case, where we have very low levels of educational attainment and very poor educational outcomes, not only do we need the opportunities provided by new infrastructure but we also need more engagement with the education profession to ensure that we get the best possible people teaching our kids in the bush.

Interestingly, as part of an election commitment, the government has already provided additional money for an additional 200 teachers in the Northern Territory. That will have a measurable outcome in terms of improving the educational status of many Aboriginal Territorians who live in remote communities. As I have said on many occasions in this place, the key to unlocking the opportunities for Indigenous Australians is through education. In remote communities, this is particularly so. If we are to address poverty, then we must be dedicated to the expenditure that the government has made in this regard.

Unfortunately, and sadly in my view, the expenditure has been opposed by our opponents. It is a bit of a shame, really. They could not see the wood for the trees—political expediency and opportunism defeated the need for a higher moral vision about what is good for Australia, and what is good for Australia is this investment in education. I applaud the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister as well as the Treasurer and the other cabinet members who are responsible for determining these outcomes, because they will have, as I have said earlier, a measurable impact, a significant impact, on schools and students across the Northern Territory.

As I have visited schools, there is no doubt about the delight there is about the infrastructure investment. But in this budget not only are we talking about school investment; we are also talking about VET opportunities. Remote VET students will benefit from a $7.89 million investment in fitting out two road trains to act as mobile trade training facilities to take VET training to wherever there are students in the Northern Territory. That is a significant opportunity. People who currently have to travel away to get educational opportunities will now in many instances see an opportunity to be trained in their home communities. And that is what we should be looking for.

As I have said previously in this place, people in these remote communities in particular do not want to relocate if they can avoid it; they would rather see the service in their home communities. There are opportunities in these communities—real opportunities. Unfortunately, people do not have the skills that are normally required to take advantage of these opportunities. This investment, as well as the other investments in education that I have spoken about, will have a significant impact in that regard. As we know, the government has separately invested $807 million in closing the gap. That money alone is very important, but it will not work without the cooperation of the Northern Territory government and the communities whose needs this investment is designed to address. I am pleased to say that there has been a great deal of cooperation not only from the Northern Territory government but also from the communities. It is significant that one of the positive outcomes of the Commonwealth intervention in the Northern Territory has been the increasing number of policing and substitute programs which now operate. This budget will provide $156.6 million for the training of new police, five permanent police stations and the continued operation of 10 existing remote police stations.

Primary health care in Indigenous communities will be boosted by $131 million over four years. In addition to targeted prevention activities, this will assist in reducing the burden of chronic disease and provide greater access to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. These are features of the Closing the Gap in Indigenous Health Outcomes National Partnership.

Significantly, $45 million in this budget has been allocated to assist the delivery of literacy and numeracy programs in Indigenous schools to augment the investment that I spoke about previously. Also, $11 million has been provided for an additional 22 houses for teachers. One of the issues which I think escapes many people who do not know this part of Australia is that they think that you get a school, you put it in place and, presto, you have educational outcomes. It does not work like that. What you need to do is make sure that people are being looked after, that there is proper primary health care, that public health issues such as housing are properly addressed and that the educational infrastructure provides those professionals who want to teach in these communities with appropriate accommodation. Frankly, in the past, this has not been the case. As I have said on numerous occasions in this place, this has not been the case because successive Northern Territory governments have failed in their obligations to invest in the provision of educational opportunities for Indigenous Australians. We now have to redress that. Closing the gap is part of that but, importantly, that will take a long time. In my view, it will be a generation before we see really positive outcomes.

At least two generations of Indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory have suffered because of disinvestment in educational, housing and transport infrastructure—you name it—in these communities. Now we are left with the burden. It is now up to us, in this government, to redress this very poor outcome. It has been a real shame that the previous administration in this country, the Howard government, did not do this job properly. Cheap politics was what they were about—not actually listening, talking and working in partnership with communities to get the outcomes that these communities needed to make sure that all citizens in Australia got a real opportunity for education and jobs. As I said earlier, the Northern Territory is largely immune from the current financial crisis, except people in these bush communities. The employment market in Darwin and Alice Springs is buoyant; but, if you are an Indigenous person without skills, you have got next to no hope of getting a job. That is why this investment is so important.

I could go on and on and on about the importance of this budget for the Northern Territory, but my time is about up. I see an aspirant sitting over here. The member for Eden-Monaro is a colleague of mine and he is very keen to speak on the bills. However, before I finish, I want to highlight one measure which is very important to the town of Katherine. Through the Community Infrastructure Program, we have allocated $3 million towards the $7.8 million Katherine Regional Cultural Precinct. The precinct will provide Katherine with a quality regional facility to hold conferences, functions, exhibitions, performing arts events and ceremonies. It needs to be understood that this is a true partnership—a partnership with the local Indigenous community, the Katherine Town Council, the Northern Territory government and the Commonwealth. If we work collaboratively like this, we will get the outcomes that we all need. I am sure that if we see the positive opportunities that exist in this budget do exactly that then all Australians will benefit.

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