Remote indigenous battlers doing it tougher under recent government policies

At the same time as people have been hit with enforced unemployment, they have had their main means of proactively remedying the situation removed. Direct involvement by the citizenry in the administration of their own affairs has been diminished dramatically because they no longer have their own local council board and many local assets have been stripped by the new shires. In one community I visited, I asked at the shire office if there was any accommodation available. I was told to ring a town four hundred kilometres away as it now handles bookings.

Admittedly, the shires are a clear step towards accountability - which is commendable - but this has come at the cost of participatory democracy and learning through responsibility. And what if anyone wants to complain? In 2008, the NT Ombudsman’s office was closed where I live in Alice Springs.

Complete inactivity or unpaid work on the dole are now the two choices for many of the Territory’s remote workers. Senator Mark Arbib, the Federal Minister for Indigenous Employment, recently indicated that people are expected to “move from Yirrkala to Melbourne” for work. But bigger centres in the Northern Territory are in fact where they will end up, and. I am not aware of any job creation programs or housing developments catering to more than current levels of growth in Katherine, Tennant Creek or Alice Springs. The new economic migrants from the bush and their descendants will end up in the same town camps that sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s when thousands of workers and their families were laid off from the cattle stations. At that time, government failed to plan for the effect of equal wages and technological development in the pastoral industry. Unlike then, the population upheaval in coming years will be entirely government created.

Reactive, populist, short-sighted policy shifts are the Northern Territory’s business-as-usual. It’s social-engineering with L-plates - our perpetual groundhog day. These issues will affect the quality of life of all Territorians. The small-minded, harping critique offered by the Country Liberal Party in opposition does nothing at all to resolve the problems. Only by divorcing the governance of remote Australia from the partisan three year (re)electoral cycle can we create the conditions in which positive, sustainable economic and social development policies can be collectively re-formulated and delivered in the Northern Territory.