Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

The coalition supports the Native Title Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2009. The bill makes amendments to the Native Title Act 1993 by the insertion of a new subdivision into part 2 of the act. It facilitates the construction of housing and associated community infrastructure in Indigenous communities that are or may be subject to native title. The bill seeks to consult meaningfully with the native title parties through a legislated consultation process of up to four months. The new process ensures that the representative Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander body, or any registered native title claimants in relation to an area of land or waters, are notified and afforded an opportunity to comment on future legislation—future acts—that could affect native title.

The purpose of this bill is to simplify the process by which tenure issues can be resolved to enable the construction of public housing on native title lands. The reason for this is to ensure that the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been allocated to building housing in remote communities for Indigenous Australians might build an actual house at some point in the future. To date this program has been, I would argue, one of the sorriest chapters of the government’s administration. This is a program that has failed at every single point. The coalition, who support this program and the investment of these funds and have done so right from the outset, will do what we need to do to ensure that the government has the support to get this program working. But we remain horrified and disappointed, as do Indigenous Australians and Indigenous communities right around the country, at the incredibly poor progress that has been made with this program.

It is also my hope that the consultation processes that are set out in this bill will indeed involve talking to the native title custodians of these lands and that we will not have the situation where this process, as we have seen too often, particularly in Central Australia, is hijacked by land councils. Many of those I recently visited in Central Australia with my shadow ministerial colleague, the member for Warringah. We met with quite a number of Indigenous native title custodians who had been shut out of many consultations by the Central Land Council, and that was cause for great concern. I hope that what we see and pay for in this bill will actually translate into some genuine consultation with those who have a long-term interest in these lands and they will not just be subject to some sort of bureaucratic process overseen by the Central Land Council in particular—ticking boxes rather than carrying out the purpose of this bill. The purpose of our support for this bill is to provide genuine consultation with the traditional owners.

Where a future act is covered by these amendments and certain procedural requirements are met, the future act will validly affect native title. These amendments will operate for 10 years, which matches the 10-year funding period under the national partnership agreement entered into between the Australian government and the state and territory governments for remote Indigenous housing and service delivery. The key issue here is that when you undertake an activity like this type of construction on these lands it has the effect of extinguishing native title. So it is important in order to guarantee the faith of this process that we put in place a measure that will guarantee the security of the title while at the same time trying to provide much-needed services to these communities.

I have referred to some of the significant problems that have occurred with Indigenous housing programs in debates in the House of Representatives on numerous occasions but I will repeat them here again. In September 2007 the former government signed a memorandum of understanding with the Northern Territory government as part of the Northern Territory intervention. The delivery of housing formed part of that landmark action, an action which coalition members were and remain keenly supportive of and proud of. In April 2008 the Rudd government announced a funding package of $647 million over four years to deliver 450 new houses, 233 builds on existing houses and the refurbishment of 2,500 existing houses spread across 73 remote communities. The announcement, made by the minister, indicated that work under this program would begin in October 2008. The October 2008 deadline passed by and no work had commenced. A further $25 million was allocated to the program between October and December 2008 and a new start date of February 2009 was announced. It too passed by. In response to a question about the start date for the program on 20 August, Minister Macklin avoided answering why no new homes have been built under the program. She just repeated her government’s previous announcements. We have had many announcements and many start dates that have passed but sadly we have had very few, if any, houses built. This was particularly so back in August.

A review of the program undertaken by the Commonwealth and Northern Territory governments found that the program had been slow to deliver housing. That is not a great revelation. It found that the structure of the program is too bureaucratic and costs associated with the program are too high. It recommended a refocus of the program in order to achieve the desired targets. It found that the objectives were working against one another—design and consultation against cost—and that this was caused by the lack of effective oversight at the delivery level.

It was found that the program’s governance and management arrangements would need to be restructured. The program is clogged up with unnecessary bureaucracy. There are unresolved leadership and capacity issues that have affected the ability for outcomes to be delivered under the program. Continuation of the program structure without change would cause unsustainable unit costs and result in future targets not being met. Most significantly, the review found that more than $45 million had been spent under the program without a single house being built. That finding alone has, in my view, not really attracted the same level of profound accountability in the minister that I would expect for such a profound failure. We are talking about $45 million being spent when not one single house has been built, and without an answer or explanation for that and with no great sense of responsibility or accountability for what is an appalling outcome.

The initial unit cost for the program was revealed to be too ambitious. The average cost of projects was revised down from $560,000 to $450,000. It could be argued that, given the cost of delivering programs in these places and the way in which they are administered by, in particular, the Northern Territory government, it would almost be cheaper—in fact it may well be cheaper—and a better use of public money to simply give the homes away. Administration costs have been found to be more than 11 per cent of the program’s budget, and steps were recommended to reduce the proportion of the program’s budget devoted to administration. It was recommended that the layers of management involved in the delivery of the program be reduced from six to three.

On 31 August 2009 the minister gave the Northern Territory government a four-month deadline. Remember that this was a program where the MOU was first agreed in September 2007. By August 2009, almost two years later and following these catastrophic failures, we gave them a four-month deadline to lift their game on Indigenous housing. We are still in this deadline period. Unless the Territory government improves its management of the program, the Australian government may step in and take charge. I am flummoxed as to why we are not at that point already. A minister who was really in charge of this program would not have suffered such appalling outcomes and allowed them to drift and to continue. She was in fact warned by her parliamentary secretary at the time, Senator Ursula Stephens, that these programs were out of control. No action was taken effectively on this, because the poor outcomes continued. Both the minister and the then parliamentary secretary have been reported to have been subsequently comforted by the progress of the program and no longer as concerned as they might previously have been.

I had the good fortune recently when I was in Central Australia to meet Alison Anderson, who was the Northern Territory minister for Indigenous housing and Indigenous affairs. She is a remarkable person. She is an individual who has a real strength and inner conviction to pursue the interests of her people. She, frankly, was not going to cop it any longer—she was not going to sit there and watch this waste and this abuse of public funds, which were intended for the welfare of Indigenous Australians, continue. She called it. She said enough was enough. She called the Labor government in the Northern Territory for what it was. When you read her description of that government you could easily mistake it for referring to any Labor government in the country, particularly at a state and territory level. It may well be a prophecy of what the current federal Labor government will be like in the years ahead. Nevertheless, she called it as it was. She was prepared to ‘out’ this shameless waste and this shameless abuse of public trust in terms of the moneys that were available for this important program. She resigned, and in doing so I think Alison Andersen has been a brave advocate for her people because she has finally stood up—someone in that government finally stood up—for their interests and ensured that governments could no longer look away.

It is my hope that the federal government will not look away, that their four-month deadline period—and I understand they have embedded federal public servants into the process in the Northern Territory—will yield some results. But based on the form, I am not encouraged. The government’s failure to properly deliver this program has resulted in the need to scale it back. Just last week the Australian reported that four out of five proposed renovations were scrapped because of cost blowouts. A lack of funds has necessitated cuts to the scope of renovation works to be undertaken. Homes that required more than 50 refurbishment items would now have an average of only 10 items performed due to funds not being available.

I was in Santa Teresa not that long ago and I saw four homes whose roofs had blown off. I understood, from speaking to some of the residents and officials in that town, that more than $200,000 had been allocated to fix the roofs on those homes. That did not happen just last month; it happened one year previously. The roofs blew off, the money was allocated and, up to a year later, the roofs were still off those buildings: a year to fix four roofs. I would like to know whether those roofs have subsequently been fixed. I hope they have. The money was made available. The government was aware of the problem and I would hope that it had been fixed, because the people who were living in those homes have had to go and live in other homes. As we all know, overcrowding in Indigenous housing is one of the key problems facing these communities. In terms of closing the gap, as the government refers to it, one way of ensuring that the people who live in these homes in these communities do not suffer any greater disadvantage than they already suffer is, when a roof blows off a house and money is provided, you have a system that enables the roof to be put back on that house within 12 months. Within 12 months would be nice; within one month would be appropriate, but I think it would be the absolute expectation of any Australian in this country that we would be able to at least get that done within 12 months.

This bill seeks to ensure that there is a more streamlined process for making sure that these homes can be built where they need to be built. The coalition supports that. What we are troubled about is the complete incompetence and inability of the governments working in this area to actually deliver these homes, and this is a major concern. The broader issue of tenure—while we are talking about tenure—goes further than just the delivery of public housing. The broader issue of tenure is critical to resolving what can be a great opportunity for Indigenous people in this country, and that is the opportunity to own their own home. That should be a primary objective of any Indigenous housing program that any government in this country, particularly a national one, pursues. The opportunity to buy your own home and for others to see that opportunity not only existing but being achieved for Indigenous Australians has the very real potential to help people turn their lives around.

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