Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Minister for Community Services) Share this | Hansard source

I will try to cover all the issues. There have been quite a number of questions. I commend Senator Evans on the majority of his submission. I think it very articulately deals with the reasons that the government will not be supporting the Democrats motion. We keep hearing from the Democrats and the Greens that there is no scientific or empirical evidence about the connection between child abuse and infrastructure. Perhaps we could look simply to safety. This is not only about houses. Particularly in Northern Australia, much of the entertainment happens in the evening because it is the coolest part the day. Most of the communities, in fact the vast majority of the communities that I visit quite often, are characterised by having lots of kids outside playing, and there are no lights—there is no electricity—on the streets.

We know that in the current circumstances, or the circumstances before the intervention, particularly if you had domestic violence or substance abuse in the home, the kids would flee. They would go out and see each other and they would be outside of the home because that is the only place to be. But we know that when even outside of the home you do not have the basic safety of lighting it is very hard to observe inappropriate behaviour. So it is not just about houses; it is about simple normalisation.

For the benefit of Senator Siewert, I was not talking about the town camps. The 14 months of negotiation was in other places that we were attempting to put in infrastructure. The simple governance arrangements that are in place at the moment clearly inhibited us from doing that. Fourteen months of negotiations still could not get something done. Someone may be saying in some circumstances, and I am certainly familiar with this: ‘Yes, you can do that, but you’ve got to build me a house, although I’ve already got two and I really don’t fit the principle of most need.’ The people in most need are those who are staying in someone else’s house because they do not have a house themselves. If we are going to deal with this issue, we have to deal with it in a fair dinkum sense—dealing with the people who are most vulnerable and most in need, and the existing arrangements do not cater for that. What we are saying is that, as we did with the Public Works Committee, we know that there are aspects that we want to avoid—not because we are trying to avoid scrutiny but simply because they could be an impediment to the timing for rolling this intervention out.

We will be building homes and we will be building infrastructure. Senator Bartlett indicated that he could not see where the money for housing was in the appropriation bills attached to this legislation. I will repeat, as I did last night, that there is $1.6 billion in the budget for dealing with that issue. Whilst that is a generic sum for all of Australia, I believe that much of those funds would flow through the intervention to the Northern Territory.

It is interesting that it is said we are somehow tearing up rights. It needs to be understood that the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act will continue to apply. Briefly, for the benefit of Senator Siewert, I will provide some more information, and hopefully we will not go through this again in another part of the debate. In terms of the continuation of rights of traditional owners to use or occupy land as they always have done, the Commonwealth five-year leases are in fact subject to the traditional rights that Aboriginal people have to use and occupy land under section 71 of the Aboriginal land rights act. That is going to continue, because that aspect of the land rights act has not been removed at all. This means that Aboriginal people can continue to use and occupy the land subject to the lease, provided that it does not interfere with the use and enjoyment of the Commonwealth lease. Consistent with section 71, it is the government’s intention to allow Aboriginal people to continue to exercise their traditional rights where this is consistent with the emergency intervention.

On this notion that the Commonwealth would somehow change that, I do not understand why we would possibly wish to achieve that when it is our clear intention to assist these communities, to provide normalisation and to provide infrastructure that will clearly help people’s wellbeing, whether it relates to crowded houses or completely failed and retarded infrastructure. These are absolutely essential elements of the intervention. The current governance arrangements have proved to be almost impossible to deal with. We know that that is an impediment, and it is an impediment this legislation removes for a five-year period so we can go in and build infrastructure to help the lives and the wellbeing of these communities. The notion that we are there to do anything else is false.