Giving people a chance to own their own home is an important step towards having the same standards. We also need to look at treating Indigenous communities as what they are – small towns.
If we called the larger Aboriginal communities towns instead of communities, it might help put the difference in perspective. You might be confronted with questions like:
Why doesn’t the Council look after things like water, rubbish and sewerage in this town?
Why do kids in this town not go to school?
Why do the authorities not seem to care?
Why can you not buy your own house in this town?
Why do people not pay rent for their houses?
These are ordinary questions about ordinary things that do not happen in these places because they are dealt with differently. We want that to end.
Why should essential services in these towns be provided by annual grants from the Commonwealth and not through the same sort of arrangements that work in hundreds of other little towns around Australia?
People in communities should not have to be burdened with responsibilities for town infrastructure which most of us in this room would struggle to manage. Community councils should be able to concentrate on tackling local issues and building capacity and hope in the future. Then they should not be worrying about next year’s power contract. Indigenous community structures are fragile enough without being ground down by being landed with responsibilities for delivering services that are rightfully the responsibility of governments.
Some jurisdictions are moving in the right direction. In the Northern Territory, for example, we are working quite closely with the Territory government to establish Regional Authorities that essentially extend local government arrangements to remote Indigenous people. In other words, normalisation and delivery of government services.
This normalisation relates to the major townships. However we need to think about the large numbers of very small settlements or homelands. There are around 1,000 communities with less than 100 people, and of those, more than 80 per cent have less than 50 people. Despite the higher rate of population growth of Aboriginal people, it is unlikely that many of these homelands will grow to become viable towns. We have started talking to the Northern Territory and other governments about these issues.
They raise some important issues for the future such as:
How viable are they?
While some are doing OK and helping with drug rehabilitation and maintenance of culture, others may be risky environments, particularly for women and children
What level of amenity can be expected to be provided to small settlements in some cases hundreds of kilometres from each other?
All Australians living in remote areas of the country have less access to services and support than those in more populated areas. There is an acceptance of a level of self-dependence. Perhaps we need to explicitly draw a line on the level of service that can be provided to homeland settlements.
We need a wider debate about this. Listening to Indigenous Australians does not mean blindly accepting, for example, that services – such as education, health and housing – can be delivered at equal levels and equally well in townships and the homelands for the same people. We have to be realistic and we have to be honest.