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

Perhaps that's one of the challenges with question time: you're stuck with the same question. I provided the answer to that before, in my first answer to Senator Dodson. I'm not moving away from any of those things. If we're going to stop overcrowding, the refurbishment of a couch doesn't provide an additional bedroom or more houses. The only things that provide that are a rebuild or a new house.

Can I make it absolutely clear: we're not moving away from this, but we want to hold the states and territories to account. In the first five years of the program, under programs like CHIP, it was an absolute outrage, with jurisdictions taking 15 per cent and not putting a single cent into the process. So, yes, we have used our independent review into housing to look very carefully at those processes. I'll tell you what it means when a state says, 'Oh, we've exceeded our number.' That means: 'I didn't build a house because it was too hard. I took the money for that and I painted up a couple of others.' I can give you heaps of examples of the disingenuous approaches from the remainder of the jurisdictions of all political persuasions. I can promise you we are engaging, but we're ensuring that the states actually have funds on the table—rather than us just putting money into their budgets and the outcomes turning up in a whole variety of places, but not necessarily in remote communities—and are actually putting it towards reducing the number, which means investing in houses and in rebuilds. The refurbishments are a very small part of this, and they are far easier to do than going out and building a new house or rebuilding a house on a new site.