Stephen Parry (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In accordance with the provisions of the Auditor-General Act 1997, I present the following report of the Auditor-General: Report No. 12 of 2011-12: Performance audit: implementation of the national partnership agreement on remote Indigenous housing in the Northern Territory.

Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

I will keep my remarks brief because I know we are running out of time. This is a very important report because there has been a lot of controversy around this particular agreement and the delivery of remote Indigenous housing in the Northern Territory. Some of the key elements of this report quite clearly highlight that the federal government has not yet got its act together on delivering housing to remote communities. If you read through some of the rather complicated language in the report, it is quite clear that the Australian government needs to do more here. Take this statement:

... less attention has been given to the articulation of the operational role of the Australian Government, and to the development of robust program management systems and processes in the areas of master planning, risk management, budget control, financial reporting. Accordingly, further work is required to clarify the responsibilities and accountabilities …

It is quite clear that after all these decades of trying to provide housing to remote communities we still have not got the right.

Then we go to the issue of the delivery of infrastructure. Everybody knows that just putting houses in place in communities does not work. We have to have the infrastructure there as well. The report points out that the money for the infrastructure provision has been underestimated, which of course is then going to come off the program and mean we can build fewer houses. This is not satisfactory.

We should also note from the report that we are building the houses knowing full well there will still be 9.3 people in those houses. So not only are we not delivering this program properly, not delivering the number of houses, but we are still delivering circumstances that do not address the underlying cause of disadvantage in Aboriginal communities, and that is overcrowding. We are building houses knowing full well that we will still have overcrowding in these communities. Today the government released its report on the Northern Territory Emergency Response, trying to gloss over the problems with that. This is another problem in the failure to adequately address Aboriginal disadvantage in this country. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.