Kerrynne Liddle (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Everyone here would have slept with a roof over their heads last night. I share with you now, with the permission of this family, a story of a family who didn't. This is a cruel eye-watering example of a family being invisible but living in plain sight in Alice Springs. In Alice Springs, for around two years, a family has endured living on a concrete slab, where temperatures are either 40 degrees in summer or in minus figures in winter—no roof, no toilet, no running water. In those conditions is a young woman with renal failure requiring dialysis three times a week. It's the reason they went to Alice Springs. There are also nine children. The school-age children actually go to school. I watched them get on the school bus. They are visited, too, by a family member with profound disability in a wheelchair. The family does not drink or gamble; they are not a consequence of the grog war in the NT. But, like in the swiss cheese model, they are a casualty of what in this case is a seemingly unaccountable service delivery model.

This family's terrible, unsafe, cruel predicament must inform future responses, especially in light of the hundreds of millions of dollars in financial and resource investment intended for Central Australia. There are lessons here for service delivery, accountability, responsibility and transparency in other areas across Australia. It's not always about the money. It's about how that money is managed. They didn't need a Voice; they needed bureaucrats and service providers not to drive on but to take action necessary to end their terrible predicament. Meanwhile, today—yes, today—they remain on that slab. This is not their shame. The shame is that, every single night that passes, they are still on that slab and we, as Australians, haven't seen the necessity to act to ameliorate the situation. (Time expired)