Natasha Griggs (Solomon, Country Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise this morning to speak to the Prime Minister's Closing the Gap report and to put on record my commitment and that of the broader Solomon community to improving conditions for Indigenous people across the Territory and Australia more broadly. I grew up in Alice Springs in the seventies and eighties, have lived in Darwin since the mid-1980s and have seen firsthand some of the social issues that are raised in the Closing the Gap report. I want to say, though, that while there is enormous disadvantage in Aboriginal communities in the Territory, and more specifically in Solomon, a number of Indigenous people live fulfilling, contented lives in and around Darwin and Palmerston—and this is one of the models which the Closing the Gap targets are based on.

The 2012 census identified that 9,905 Indigenous people live in Solomon. It is not clear, though, how many of those were visitors to the electorate on the night of the census or how many permanently reside in Darwin and Palmerston. What is known, though, is that at any time a large number of people from all corners of the Territory come to Solomon to access services, predominantly medical treatments, provided primarily by the Royal Darwin Hospital. In addition, there are a number of town camps across the electorate where Aboriginal people live on special purpose leases. The underlying tenure is Crown land. These camps are occupied pretty much exclusively by Indigenous residents and in at least one of those, Bagot community in the Darwin suburb of Ludmilla, significant debate is being had about whether to open the community up to non-Indigenous residency.

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