Speeches

Native Title Amendment Bill

Monday 23rd November 2009

The coalition supports the Native Title Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2009. The bill makes amendments to the Native Title Act 1993 by the insertion of a new subdivision into part 2 of the act. It facilitates the construction of housing and associated community infrastructure in Indigenous communities that are or may be subject to native title. The bill seeks to consult meaningfully with the native title parties through a legislated consultation process of up to four months. The new process ensures that the representative Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander body, or any registered native title claimants in relation to an area of land or waters, are notified and afforded an opportunity to comment on future legislation—future acts—that could affect native title.

The purpose of this bill is to simplify the process by which tenure issues can be resolved to enable the construction of public housing on native title lands. The reason for this is to ensure that the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been allocated to building housing in remote communities for Indigenous Australians might build an actual house at some point in the future. To date this program has been, I would argue, one of the sorriest chapters of the government’s administration. This is a program that has failed at every single point. The coalition, who support this program and the investment of these funds and have done so right from the outset, will do what we need to do to ensure that the government has the support to get this program working. But we remain horrified and disappointed, as do Indigenous Australians and Indigenous communities right around the country, at the incredibly poor progress that has been made with this program.

It is also my hope that the consultation processes that are set out in this bill will indeed involve talking to the native title custodians of these lands and that we will not have the situation where this process, as we have seen too often, particularly in Central Australia, is hijacked by land councils. I recently visited Central Australia with my shadow ministerial colleague, the member for Warringah. We met with quite a number of Indigenous native title custodians who had been shut out of many consultations by the Central Land Council, and that was cause for great concern. I hope that what we see and pay for in this bill will actually translate into some genuine consultation with those who have a long-term interest in these lands and they will not just be subject to some sort of bureaucratic process overseen by the Central Land Council in particular—ticking boxes rather than carrying out the purpose of this bill. The purpose of our support for this bill is to provide genuine consultation with the traditional owners.

Where a future act is covered by these amendments and certain procedural requirements are met, the future act will validly affect native title. These amendments will operate for 10 years, which matches the 10-year funding period under the national partnership agreement entered into between the Australian government and the state and territory governments for remote Indigenous housing and service delivery. The key issue here is that when you undertake an activity like this type of construction on these lands it has the effect of extinguishing native title. So it is important in order to guarantee the faith of this process that we put in place a measure that will guarantee the security of the title while at the same time trying to provide much-needed services to these communities.

I have referred to some of the significant problems that have occurred with Indigenous housing programs in debates in the House of Representatives on numerous occasions but I will repeat them here again. In September 2007 the former government signed a memorandum of understanding with the Northern Territory government as part of the Northern Territory intervention. The delivery of housing formed part of that landmark action, an action which coalition members were and remain keenly supportive of and proud of. In April 2008 the Rudd government announced a funding package of $647 million over four years to deliver 450 new houses, 233 builds on existing houses and the refurbishment of 2,500 existing houses spread across 73 remote communities. The announcement, made by the minister, indicated that work under this program would begin in October 2008. The October 2008 deadline passed by and no work had commenced. A further $25 million was allocated to the program between October and December 2008 and a new start date of February 2009 was announced. It too passed by. In response to a question about the start date for the program on 20 August, Minister Macklin avoided answering why no new homes have been built under the program. She just repeated her government’s previous announcements. We have had many announcements and many start dates that have passed but sadly we have had very few, if any, houses built. This was particularly so back in August.

A review of the program undertaken by the Commonwealth and Northern Territory governments found that the program had been slow to deliver housing. That is not a great revelation. It found that the structure of the program is too bureaucratic and costs associated with the program are too high. It recommended a refocus of the program in order to achieve the desired targets. It found that the objectives were working against one another—design and consultation against cost—and that this was caused by the lack of effective oversight at the delivery level.

It was found that the program’s governance and management arrangements would need to be restructured. The program is clogged up with unnecessary bureaucracy. There are unresolved leadership and capacity issues that have affected the ability for outcomes to be delivered under the program. Continuation of the program structure without change would cause unsustainable unit costs and result in future targets not being met. Most significantly, the review found that more than $45 million had been spent under the program without a single house being built. That finding alone has, in my view, not really attracted the same level of profound accountability in the minister that I would expect for such a profound failure. We are talking about $45 million being spent when not one single house has been built, and without an answer or explanation for that and...

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