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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2011-09-14 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

APY LANDS

Mr MARSHALL (Norwood) (15:13): I rise to speak on the continuing crisis which is enveloping the APY lands, and the continual mismanagement by this government of all aspects of life on the lands. I begin my comments by acknowledging that there are no simple solutions to the issues which exist on the lands. Of course, there are many false experts: people who may have received a postcard from the APY lands and are all of a sudden experts on the lands.

There is also no shortage of government reports. In the last two weeks we have heard report after report—many of these are reports that the minister has never actually read, never actually seen—so many reports on what should happen, but unfortunately there has been very poor implementation of these plans. Most of the implementations failed for one simple reason, and that is the lack of consultation and the lack of engagement of the people who actually exist on the lands.

Take, for instance, the much-scrutinised food security plan which has captivated the imagination of the media, this parliament, and, I am sure, the minister's office, in recent weeks. This is a plan which has absolutely and unequivocally failed to engage with the key stakeholders involved in this process. There is no doubt that the key groups involved with service provision, in terms of nutrition and education on the lands, are the NPY Women's Council and Mai Wiru (which is a spin-off of Nganampa Health).

Both of these groups have been completely and utterly excluded from the minister's Executive Action Team. EAT—isn't it cute? Unfortunately it is completely and utterly ineffective. Not only were they excluded from the group, but when these groups—Mai Wiru and NPY Women's Council—asked to be invited along to present to that group, they were completely and utterly excluded. This is absolutely shameful and this points to the reason why her strategy has received such poor response on the APY lands.

I would just like to mention some of the things that have been raised in terms of the food security strategy on the lands, and I acknowledge that it is a complex area but there are some fundamentals that have completely evaded the minister. First of all, there is the issue of income management on the lands. There is no doubt that most of the people who are looking at this issue are looking at the minister and saying that there must be some type of income management on the lands.

A lot of people who maybe have not had a close look at the lands will come along and say, 'Well, this is because the Indigenous people on the lands can't manage their money.' The simple fact of the matter is that the Anangu on the APY lands are under an enormous amount of pressure from those people who are close to them which makes it very difficult for them to operate in a way that we might operate here in metropolitan Adelaide.

Humbugging is absolutely rife. I spoke to one person off the land very recently who said to me that it is not uncommon for money to be deposited into a bank account on a Friday night and be completely and utterly exhausted by Monday, and then that woman has to feed her family for the rest of the week.

This is the problem: Mai Wiru and the NPY Women's Council are 100 per cent behind the concept of voluntary income management on the lands. In fact it was the Mai Wiru organisation that had put to the minister the importance of immediately looking at the concept of a food card which quarantines income for the people on the lands each week and makes it excluded so that they spend it precisely on things that are important to them.

It is a practical response but, unfortunately, the minister has rejected it. The minister somehow thinks that we are all completely against her. She repeated in the house today time and time again, 'They've got it in for me.' What the minister—or, as we now have been alerted to, Sophia Loren, as she likes to call herself—

An honourable member interjecting:

Mr MARSHALL: She said it—look at the Hansard. What the minister does not understand is that this is not about the minister: it is about her performance. She should stop focusing the issues on herself. She should actually pay attention to her portfolio and, most importantly, she needs to consult with the people who are on the lands, the people who are at the coalface—Mai Wiru, NPY Women's Council—and get on with implementing something that is going to have success, not another government report, not another two years so that she is moved out of this portfolio completely. We need a response now. We need it before she moves on to the next portfolio on 20 October.

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