Bouquets to Kieran Finnane from the Alice Springs News for once again shining the light of reason on Amnesty International’s “unhelpful” homelands campaign, and brickbats to Amnesty for refusing to publicly discuss the important points she has raised in her articles.
Funding for remote communities is a serious and complicated issue, and lumping five hundred “homeland centres” of all shapes, sizes, locations and levels of viability is another example of the “one size fits all” approach that still plagues indigenous affairs. Moreover, it overlooks the questions that many Aboriginal people themselves are asking about how they should provide the best possible future for their families. As Kieran’s article suggests, Amnesty would have benefitted from a chat with Bob Beadman, from whom she quotes extensively in the article. Beadman was appointed as the Territory government’s inaugural co-ordinator-general for remote services in May 2009. Here Alice Online publishes the entire chapter on the homelands movement from Beadman’s final report to the NT Government:
A torturous trail
The homelands/outstations movement gained momentum in the early 1970s, and was encouraged by the Australian Government because of the expected benefits to things like health (from bush foods), and harmony (from people drawing authority from their own land, and separation from disparate groups).
The policy guidelines at the time were very precise:
• Detailed consultation with groups intending to decentralise was a pre-requisite to support
• The groups needed to confirm an understanding that they would be leaving behind a range of services and facilities, most of which could not be replicated on a small homeland
• That basic facilities only would be provided at the decentralised location, which was generally accepted to mean access (road, airstrip or barge landing), water supply (in Central Australia comprising a bore, windmill and tank-stand), and basic shelters (certainly not conventional housing).
Avoidance of recurrent costs was the overriding objective.
The clarity of these arrangements quickly became blurred, lost in the mists of time, aided by the regular rearrangements of the Administrative Orders that can abolish departments and create new ones with a different mix of functions:
1. The Northern Territory was granted Self-Government on 1 July 1978, but the Australian Government retained responsibility for Homelands/Outstations, clearly out of a concern that a new, untried, Northern Territory Government might not give the same support to maintaining the momentum of this important new movement.
2. Responsibility for Essential Services (water, power, sewerage, roads, airstrips, and barge landings) for communities did, however, transfer to the Northern Territory Government, leading to endless disputes about the status of a settlement, e.g. at what point does a rapidly growing homeland become a community (at various times we have had ‘homelands’ of many hundreds of people, yet, when it suited, a group of 120 people incorporated as a Community Government Council). Arlparra today is a good example of such a transition from a resource centre to a town.
3. Housing was transferred to the new Aboriginal Development Commission in 1980, leading to three way arguments between the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, the Aboriginal Development Commission and the Northern Territory Government about what should be provided to where and when. The outcome was some conventional houses were built on homelands without power or water, and before the Department or the Northern Territory Government was satisfied that the decentralising groups fully understood that they would not be followed by government support with a full range of facilities (it amazes me even today that some people, mainly non-Aborigines, seem to think that the capacity of governments to replicate a full set of town facilities for every small pocket of population scattered far and wide through the bush, is limitless).
4. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) subsumed the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and the Aboriginal Development Commission in 1990
5. ATSIC commenced a review of this program in 1996 (but it stalled)
6. Responsibility was transferred to the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs in 2005 on the abolition of ATSIC
7. In 2006 the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs took responsibility. Neither of these agencies completed the review that was commenced by ATSIC in 1996
8. On 1 July 2008 the responsibility for municipal and essential services to Homelands/Outstations transferred to the Northern Territory Government.
With the fragmentation of responsibilities came a relaxation of the original policy guidelines. Conventional houses, power supplies and recurrent costs crept in, distorting the differences between homelands and the bigger communities.
Now
The irony of the current arrangements has not escaped me. If the Australian Government had transferred responsibility for municipal and essential services to the newly established Northern Territory Government in 1978, the annual cost of the program would have been factored into the baseline funding allocation to the new government and flowed, duly indexed, forever after. (As is the case for education, health services, policing, etc on homelands for which the Northern Territory Government was funded on Self Government and has been built into the funding arrangements ever since). Instead, on the thirty year anniversary, the funding package accompanying the transfer of responsibility in 2008 was for three years (now extended to 30 June 2012).
It was expected then that this money would roll into the pool of funds to support local government reform, which saw Shire Councils commence on 1 July 2008. After all, the rationale for local government reform was strongly about economies of scale, and many people had been worried for a long time about the duplication arising from the Australian Government’s retention of responsibility for Homelands/Outstations, which saw Community Government Councils and Outstation Resource Centres being cloned across the Territory towns within spitting distance of each other.
The Northern Territory decided to maintain existing arrangements pending a review. The review that ATSIC started in 1996, but the Australian Government never concluded. Arrangements were still frozen in a time warp.
Report 1 in this series (November 2009) mentioned this review, and the advice that it would be finalised in November 2009. My understanding was that the review would identify once and for all which homelands are occupied (and which abandoned), how many people live there, how far out they are, access difficulties, proportion of the year they are occupied, details of all facilities at each place, and so on.
Then you could make rational decisions about how to put available funding to best effect. Residents were to be given choice about service providers, funding allocations would be transparent. You could also make rational decisions about regional transport. Properly supported homelands can play a vital role in relieving pressure on Growth Towns. The draft Outstations/Homelands Policy led people to believe that the government would work with each and every outstation and homeland settlement to prepare a Statement of Expectation of Service Delivery; provide transparency and choice in relation to their modest recurrent funding and service delivery options; and provide assistance for residents to move towards self-sufficiency. It does not appear that this has occurred.
When A Working Future, Territory Growth Towns suite of policies was launched, local media referred to the package as the ‘Outstations policy’, and still does so. Finalisation of the review will hopefully assist everyone in getting the context right. Growth Towns are those locations with significant public facilities providing goods and services to a much larger population scattered throughout a constellation of homelands/outstations that can access the bigger towns by improved transport for most of the year.
For many years the prospect of any significant new public investment in privately owned outstations and homelands has been waning. It is clear now that any such prospect is gone. When the Working Future policy was announced, this was fairly clearly stated. It was not popular, but it was straight.
Some terrible policy dilemmas face governments and Indigenous peoples.
Are homelands really a viable option?
This question has effectively been dodged for thirty years, probably because of all the ethical and moral issues it throws up. Like:
• Should government actually support the removal of kids from school when we know how essential education is, or the movement of adults away from the only prospects of a job?
• Can Indigenous people really expect the Australian taxpayer to support them for life?
• How many people have moved from welfare dependency to independence as a consequence of moving to a homeland?
• Are homelands self-sustainable without external support?
• Should governments continue to fund fixed improvements like housing on privately owned Aboriginal land? It doesn’t build things on a cattle station for example.
• If not, is it really the intention of governments to pressure newly formed young families to move from homelands to Growth Towns with the lure of new housing?
• The failure to do the intensive work with outstations on self-sufficiency may not be the fault of the public servants alone. As mentioned, almost two years into Working Future we have not seen the Homelands/Outstations Policy finalised by the Northern Territory Government. Further, self-sufficiency and economic development will almost certainly require long-term, tradeable land tenure for residents and this appears beyond the policy mindsets of the Land Councils
• There are dramatic financial crises looming too. CDEP is scheduled to wind- up early in 2012 and the $20 million in Commonwealth funding for municipal services to homelands/outstations will cease in June 2012. It is likely that a number of Resource Centres will struggle to survive.
• The consequences could well be that people will vote with their feet, and the movement of people to Growth Towns, and the main towns on the bitumen, will accelerate, placing all of them under enormous pressure. If that happens, the social consequences will likely be tragic. Glimpses of such a future have been evident in all towns over the recent severe climatic period.
• The consequences will be tragic for the migratory Aboriginal people, AND the permanent residences of the towns.
The vexed question of housing
ATSIC made it clear back in 1996 that pending the outcomes of the review it mounted, there would be no funding for new homelands, and no new housing on existing homelands. This rule was maintained through to the present time. It is probably this rule more than anything else that has fuelled the contention that the aim of governments is to move everybody into Growth Towns.
This rule has been reinforced by other government decisions to not provide any further public housing unless the government can control the asset through having title to the land on which the house sits. This has been achieved in the main by housing precinct leases in the Growth Towns. I am unaware of any effort being devoted to leasing housing precincts on homelands/outstations, and can foresee an even greater reluctance on the part of such residents and Land Councils to lease their land to the government. So we have this set of policy teasers:
• Nowhere else in Australia can a citizen reasonably expect the government to build a house for them on privately owned land
• Yet in the past the government has done just that on homelands (indeed all Aboriginal Land) right throughout the Northern Territory
• Without new housing on homelands (whether public or private) people may move to Growth Towns where the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP) is building new houses (just as people are moving into Alice Springs because of delays in rolling out the SIHIP program in Growth Towns in the Centre).
• Are governments planning to divest the investment in housing in homelands, and leave whatever repairs and maintenance requirements that arise in harsh climates to the meagre resources of the residents without a clear transition and capacity building process?
• Publicly funded community housing cooperatives were vogue once, and might be a compromise solution for homelands. The logic behind the program, that it would relieve demand on public housing, would remain the same. Some more vexed questions: But if homelands survive, how can we ensure children are educated? (Noting that it would be impossible to provide schools at every outstation).
• One regularly hears stories about the stripping of abandoned outstation assets. Are the assets on abandoned outstations recoverable? If so, by whom? Have they been secured?
• The same questions arise when considering the future of Resource Centres
• How will the mutual obligation tests for residents in receipt of welfare benefits be structured as these measures inevitably tighten in the future?
To repeat – the unintended outcome of this mix is to accelerate the urban drift. Take Central Australia for example. No new housing on outstations. No new housing (SIHIP) yet in Growth Towns in the Centre. But close to $100 million of housing and infrastructure improvements has been provided in Alice Springs town camps, as well as a Visitors Centre, and Transitory Housing.
Recommendations
The Northern Territory Government concludes, and publishes the outcomes of its review into homelands/outstations
The Northern Territory and Australian Governments provide certainty about onwards funding arrangements for the thousands of residents out there
That a very clear policy about new housing, repairs and maintenance of existing housing, private housing support, and potential for home ownership be announced. For example, if there is to be no more public expenditure, and no move to lease that stock, is the government washing its hands of any further responsibility for housing on homelands?
Examine the feasibility of extending the community housing cooperative grant scheme to homelands.