The debate about collective ownership of land was linked to the issue of the viability of small, remote outstation communities. On a number of occasions, Ministers (see Brough 2006a; Vanstone 2005) and the Prime Minister took the opportunity to emphasise that they perceived Aboriginal people living in remote settlements as enduring a second-rate existence in undesirable segregation from mainstream society:
The right of an Australian to live on remote communal land and to speak an Indigenous language is no right at all if it is accompanied by grinding poverty, overcrowding, poor health, community violence and alienation from mainstream Australian society. Reconciliation has little meaning in a narrative of separateness from that society (Howard 2007a: 2).
Support for these views came from the book Lands of Shame (Hughes 2007), a Centre for Independent Studies publication, which argued that ‘exceptionalist’ policies that enabled Indigenous people to subsist in ‘living museums’ had left Indigenous people illiterate, without economic sustenance, welfare dependent and without access to the protections and standards of living expected by other Australians. But while conditions may be inadequate, evidence about homeland outstations suggests that relative to larger Indigenous communities, housing is less crowded, median income is similar, employment and health is better, and most have good access to essential infrastructure services, such as clean water and electricity (Altman 2006). Customary wildlife harvesting is also likely to be greater, thus livelihoods may be better than income data would reveal, while natural and cultural resource management activities associated with homelands contribute significantly to positive health outcomes (Burgess and Johnstone 2007).
Furthermore, it became clear that if Aboriginal people choose to remain on the lands to which they returned so determinedly two or three decades before, the Australian Government was no longer going to support them (Howard 2007a). Nor were State/Territory Governments clear about how they would move forward from a legacy of several levels of government conflict about, and abdication of, their responsibilities to Aboriginal citizens, particularly in remote regions (EHSC 2007b). The Law Reform Commission of Western Australia (2006: 352) was one of the most recent organisations to recognise this:
The rhetoric of self determination has, in the past, allowed governments to abdicate their responsibilities to provide services that are an entitlement of citizenship and which non-Aboriginal Australians take for granted.
Community governance in such remote locations was clearly going to be squeezed, with poorly-funded organisations attempting to provide continuity of services in such a shifting policy and funding environment.