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

Tragically, from all of the conversations that I have had with people who live in those circumstances, they quite clearly see that the provision of infrastructure—housing, roads, gutters and environmental health, like garbage disposal so that people actually have a garbage bin and someone picks their garbage up—is not something that they are afraid of. I do not want to get into a debate about what is in the wider benefit, but I would have thought that, yes, it is normalisation. We stand by that. It will be just an ordinary place where people live, not a dark place that is completely different from the surrounding suburbs because of some particular difference in the way that it is governed. You can say that $18 million was nothing to do with Tangentyere Council, but obviously someone had their eye off the ball. They were responsible. They were paid the money to provide the services in that area and they have not been provided, so they have to take some responsibility for it. But at the end of the day this is just simply normalisation, and normalisation means a huge improvement in the living standards of those people. It will be for the benefit of the Indigenous people who currently occupy the town camps.