Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I will do my best for the chamber and for the member for Blair. I will firstly address the municipal funding issue, which the member for Blair raised. As he would know, we have been working with state and territory governments to transfer the responsibility for municipal services from the federal government to the state governments. And we are doing that on a cooperative basis, where we will sit down with them and they will only agree to take on those services if they feel they have got a good deal out of it. Otherwise they will not sign up to the deal. That is the bottom line. But we have been able to have those constructive arrangements. The reason we are doing it is, in some respects, quite simple. When you look across Australia at everywhere else that municipal services are done, they are done by local councils, or by state governments, or by local councils on behalf of state governments. This is a peculiarity where municipal services have been funded and implemented by federal governments. We are just changing that arrangement so that the level of government closest to the ground in terms of the state governments—

Mr Neumann interjecting—

The member for Blair is interjecting saying he did not ask about MUNS. He did refer to the MUNS funding, so I am addressing the particular point he has raised.

He has then raised a series of questions in relation to housing. He is right that the government is committing $1.13 billion over three years to remote housing, from 2015-16 to 2017-18. And $95 million has been redirected to the RJCP Work for the Dole program, in part to include activities such as working on housing construction. One of the problems with the former NPARIH system was that so few Indigenous people locally were getting employment out of it. From memory, on average the housing costs were something in the vicinity of $600,000 or $800,000 per house constructed, but very few people were getting work out of it. Often it was people who were flown in, or drove in, from the major capital cities to work on these projects. We are unashamedly saying that we would like to see local people working on local housing construction. That, absolutely, is one of our priorities.

Another priority is to move away from an exclusive focus on social housing, so that in the ideal world Aboriginal people, be they in urban Australia or remote Australia, have the same opportunities and the same choices in relation to their housing as anybody else has—so that their only option is not to be put on the waiting list and to wait for a social house to come up, but rather they can also have the option to construct their own house and to own it on a home ownership basis. That is also what we would like to see. I am certainly pleased that the former Newman government put through some important 99-year lease legislation that enables those home ownership opportunities to continue.

I will address the final point, and this does get directly to his questions about why we were thinking about urban and regional locations, at the same time as remote locations, in relation to housing. Part of it is for employment, because as we know there can be significant economic impediments, on top of other impediments, to people leaving a remote community to get a job elsewhere. One of the economic impediments—

Mr Snowdon interjecting—

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