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

I am not sure whether I am looking forward to another debate about permits. I thought we had been through that, but no doubt we will deal with that when you are prepared to. I will speak to the opposition’s amendments and the effect of those amendments. With respect, I have to accept that this is a bit of a Clayton’s amendment. I can understand, perhaps, how difficult it must have been to try to find some sort of balance in this.

The effect of the proposed amendment is pretty much to allow government related persons and journalists access to areas as a designated person. I have been quite familiar with the permit system for very many years. When you work in a community as a government officer, you actually get a permit that has ‘ongoing’ on the bottom of it. It is just a once-in-a-lifetime thing whilst you are associated with a government department. I think that is pretty much the case at the moment. Allowing journalists is certainly something new. Journalists have often complained that they do not get access to communities, and I certainly support that part of the amendment, whilst it is generally caught up in the government legislation. I think Senator Crossin made my case very well: if people come to these communities—some of these communities are in a pretty poor state—they will know and they will travel back to their homes on the east coast and, as Senator Brown and others in this place have said, they will be part of the appropriate public outrage. If it is not right, people need to know about it, and that has been part of the problem, Senator Evans.

So what are the real changes here? There are a couple of changes. We sort of agree to the permit system as long as it does not really change anything. I really appreciate the difficulties you must have with this, Senator Evans, but effectively these limited changes would fail to open up the communities to the outside world. And they will not remove the climate of fear and intimidation in those communities. Senator Crossin reflected on a submission that we made that the minister had said to me both publicly and privately that people were coming up to him not only to say, ‘We think you should scrap the permit system’; they were saying: ‘I’m afraid. The reason I have to talk to you here is that I cannot stand up and say something in a public arena when other people in the community may not like what I say.’ That happens a lot in Indigenous communities, and it makes the consultation process very difficult.