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

I am glad that the member for Kennedy agrees with me, because I am sure he would agree that we need to have this as an objective. As long as we provide the opportunity to extend the type of interventions that we are looking at in this bill to broaden opportunities for Indigenous Australians to realise home ownership, then I think we are seeing only part of the picture. But it is consistent with this government’s focus only on public housing in this area, never looking beyond public housing to see where the opportunities are for achieving private ownership.

The International Real Estate Institute, or a variation thereof, runs a program in South America called the Strategic Housing Initiative. They have come to Australia and looked at the potential for the program’s application here. When the institute went into the slums of South America they discovered that the people in these slums had jobs. They were teachers, they were policemen, they were nurses—they had a regular income. What they did not have was the opportunity to buy a home that they could afford.

They have gone to the governments in these countries and said, ‘If you provide the land, we can build the houses.’ They have designed the homes so that they can be built and purchased at an extremely affordable rate, and micromortgages are offered to people so they can buy their own homes. So you now have in the slums of South America governments working with private industry. They are setting aside land on which to build homes and people are being taken out of the slums, where they are the victims of slumlords, and they can buy their own homes. If that can be achieved in the slums of South America, it can be achieved in this country. I would certainly support seeing that happen.

Secondly, dealing with the issues of native title and enabling these lands to be used by those whom they are entrusted for, it is important to develop commercial opportunities not just for the land councils—or not even for the land councils—but for the interests of private individual Indigenous citizens of this country. We need to find a way so that these lands, which are theirs, are able to be used for their private purposes in order to create wealth and opportunities for them. Whether it is supporting businesses or other endeavours, this is critical.

We see an example of this in the government’s ETS bills that are currently before the Senate. Most recently—on the weekend and over the last week—the opportunities for commercial abatement under that scheme that the coalition has been arguing for and how that might impact on individuals who live on those lands being able to utilise those opportunities and attract a commercial gain have been raised. This is something that is currently not resolved in those bills. I think it is something the government should be paying attention to.

Thirdly, there is the chronic need to see these lands that are affected by native title used to unlock land supply in remote regional centres. In particular I refer to Alice Springs. It is unthinkable that a town such as Alice Springs could be landlocked, but it is. Commercial rents in Alice Springs have literally gone through the roof. Companies are bidding against private individuals, they are competing against private individuals, to secure housing for people who come to work in that town. Their inability to do that is limiting the opportunities for that town to grow and for jobs to be created. Even worse for the citizens who live in that town, rents are going through the roof.

The federal government believes that the problems of housing affordability are limited to the availability of social housing. In a housing forum I conducted in Alice Springs the advocates for social housing sat next to the private real estate developers and sung the same tune: unless we release land supply in Alice Springs then this town is heading for a crisis, or in fact is already in a crisis. You have people living in tents in Alice Springs and that is not just in the town camps. That is the only form of accommodation available to them because of the inability of the Northern Territory government to deal with land supply. Alice Springs’s land supply is controlled from Darwin, which is further away than Adelaide. There is a great need for some master planning to be conducted for the township of Alice Springs that equally addresses the native title issues on the surrounding land and the other lands that are available to be freed up for housing development.

My recent visit to Central Australia revealed not only the chaos with the failure of the housing program but the frustration and the loss of hope that has followed the government’s lack of commitment to follow through on the intervention program. The failure of the housing program has really shattered confidence in the intervention. The intervention has produced some excellent outcomes in terms of nutrition, income quarantining and improved security with the placement of police, who have worked closely with communities. I think they have achieved some very good outcomes. Sadly, the failure of the strategic housing program has completely shattered faith and confidence in the program. Once faith and trust are shattered, they are very difficult to restore. So, while there have been successes, it is very important that we build some momentum again and have a renewed focus on where we go to from here.

There are some good things occurring, as there are in all places around Australia in this area. Those good things occur—from what I can observe—not so often due to good policy but due to good people. There is some good leadership, some good vision and some great commitment of individual Australians, Indigenous and otherwise, working in townships and working in remote outstations across the country. The presence of police, as I said, has created safer communities. These are the good lessons that we have learned from the intervention.

We need to learn more in terms of the design of accommodation in these places to ensure that the type of housing built is most appropriate to the needs and lifestyle of the communities for which it is intended. We need to ensure that we provide an ongoing and robust system of governance. The left hand simply, in a lot of these places, does not know what the right hand is doing. There has been a complete breakdown of the integration of the delivery of government services and support across many of these places. My colleague the member for Warringah and shadow minister for Indigenous affairs recently wrote in the Australian about this topic and made an excellent suggestion about the possibility of an expanded version of the Cape York system, where:

… an appointed administrator, advised by local elders as commissioners, can decide all local governmental matters not just ones to do with welfare. For such a system to work, decisions about land use would need to give rise to secure title at least in townships.

He said:

To work, the administrator would need general authority over all the local functions of government such as policing, health and education, as well as municipal services.

The integration of the delivery of services, the clear presence of accountability and the clear presence of authority to direct and act are something that is sadly lacking in these communities and are something that I believe they are desperately crying out for. They are something I commend to the government to consider.

Just last week in this place I talked about the kiaps, who worked in Papua New Guinea over a long time during the period in which Australia had some responsibility for that place. The kiaps had similar authority, not just for issues of law and order and security, health and various other things but for things like economic development, and they had some authority over the coordination and the delivery of government services right across those remote villages and communities. A model similar to that, as the member for Warringah and shadow minister for Indigenous affairs is suggesting, I think would put some real governance on the ground. And real governance on the ground, with the ability to direct traffic, to make decisions and to get actions, would ensure that the roofs of the four houses in Santa Teresa which were blown off over a year ago and for which funding was allocated would get on a lot quicker than the current system is delivering.

As long as we have the situation in the town camps in Alice Springs and in towns like Hermannsburg where children are simply not safe, we also need to ensure that the remote outstations have the opportunity to develop economically and to provide a viable community that can support their population. I am reminded and will always be reminded of young Shirley Ngalkin, a six-year-old who was killed in Hermannsburg in 1998. The subsequent trial for those who perpetrated that crime was the trigger for the Northern Territory intervention. We visited the remote outstation where she used to go to school before her family took that fateful decision to go into Hermannsburg, where she was raped and drowned. It was a very sobering moment to look at the plaque outside her former school. I wish she had been able to stay in that community. I wish her parents and those responsible for her had not felt the need to go and spend that time in Hermannsburg. Maybe Shirley would be with us today. Maybe she would not—there are many other problems in these communities, as we know. But, as long as the Shirleys of our country are at risk, I think it is critical that we get these things right.

I do believe the government want to get this right. I do not doubt their sincerity on the issue. I do not doubt the sincerity of the minister on this issue. It is not a question of sincerity. It is not a question of purpose. It is a question of being able to deliver on the ground. This bill should assist in the delivery of these programs, but, unless the significant bureaucratic problems associated with the delivery of housing to Indigenous communities in remote areas are overcome, this bill will offer little substance. Really, at the end of the day, it comes down to the government’s ability to deliver policy.

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