NT Minister announces regional partnership agreements
In the six months since the election of Clare Martin’s Labor Government in the Northern Territory, there has been a shift away from the previous government’s move to amalgamate Councils. Community Development Minister, John Ah Kit, the first Aboriginal Minister in NT, and second anywhere in Australia, recently outlined to Parliament why a new approach is needed. He said four years on for Local Government Reform and Development Agenda of the former Government, the Tiwi Islands Local Government is the only a single run on the board.
“Since I have come to this Ministry the Tiwi Islands Local Government has had to have financial controllers put in place amidst an atmosphere of widespread discontentment that the amalgamation was pushed through too quickly,” John Ah Kit said. “It is my intention that the Reform and Development Agenda be completely recast to look at regional governance issues relating to specific service delivery functions, rather than narrowly looking at the amalgamation of Community Government Councils.”
Minister Ah Kit told the Northern Territory Parliament that Aboriginal Territorians are facing a stark crisis and it is almost impossible to find a functional Aboriginal community anywhere in the Territory.
“This spiral of despair facing Aborigines has the potential to turn the Territory into a financial basket case,” he said. “The Local Government Reform and Development Agenda announced by the previous government in November 1998 was not just an exercise in saving money by reducing the number of Councils, it was an acknowledgment of failure.
“It has been said by many people over the years that the Community Government Council structures have allowed Aboriginal people on those communities the freedom to make decisions about a very broad range of services that are provided on their communities.”
He added it has also been said that these structures allowed the potential for great strides towards self determination, but asked where are the results?
“At any one point in time a significant number of Community Government Councils are in dire straits, and virtually every one of the other local governance structures in the Territory are heavily dependent on external support, by government agencies and their officers,” the Minister said. “None are self reliant, financially or structurally, and as government subsidies have shrunk or been frozen, their capacity for self determination has withered.
“Local Government in the Northern Territory – as the principal focus of service delivery or interface with other service deliverers in the Northern Territory – has failed abjectly in improving people’s lives. The lot of Aboriginal people is to sit at the bottom of the socio-economic heap – and on some health and employment measures, their situation is getting worse. “A fundamental reason for this failure is the complete lack of local economies providing the basis of productive activity and wage labour on Aboriginal communities – in both town and bush. The long term economic basis of Aboriginal communities cannot rely on welfare supporting whole populations. It is critical that regional strategies be developed to provide the basis for local and regional economic development.”
Among a number of new initiatives announced by the Minister is a program for community capacity building through developing regional agreements.
The NT Department of Community Development has allocated $600,000 for the next two years to assist representative organisations within regions to build the capacity to negotiate to achieve the best possible outcomes in regional partnership agreements. The new approach will involve both spheres of government and regional community representatives coming together to identify the issues that are important to them. Through negotiation, agreements will then be entered into covering levels of responsibilities, funding and resources.
The Government is keen to have things properly negotiated with shared accountability from regions to the Government and back again. It believes real employment outcomes within regions demand the coordination of programs and projects. Power, water, sewerage, housing, airstrips, barge landings and so forth need to be coordinated to deliver optimum services and economic spin offs to gain as much as possible from every dollar available.
