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MP damns welfare controls

By Joel Gibson Indigenous Affairs Reporter

30 October 2007 - LABOR's vice-president, Linda Burney, has condemned the Federal Government's policy of welfare quarantining and declared she does not trust John Howard to deliver his promised referendum to acknowledge indigenous people in the constitution.

Her attack puts Ms Burney - the state's first indigenous minister - at odds with the Labor leader, Kevin Rudd, who has offered broad bipartisan support to the Government.

Ms Burney said yesterday that she could not remain "silent and bipartisan" at such a difficult time for indigenous people.

"While I welcome Mr Howard's call, I also remind him - we in the reconciliation movement have long memories," she said.

Ms Burney denounced the Government's spending $88 million to quarantine the welfare payments of 20,000 indigenous people in the Northern Territory. During a University of Technology, Sydney reconciliation event she said the policy was excessive and targeted war veterans and good families as well as dysfunctional ones.

She told the story of Geoff Shaw, an Alice Springs man who has served in Borneo and Vietnam and is having half of his war veteran's pension quarantined because he is an Aboriginal man living in the Northern Territory.

"I have no problem with mutual responsibility, but this seems to be a blanket application, and you don't need to do anything wrong to be affected by it," Ms Burney said.

Her comments were out of step with the stated position of Labor's indigenous affairs spokeswoman, Jenny Macklin, who has said that while Labor would make some changes to the intervention, it would not scrap the Federal Government's welfare-quarantining system.

She said at least $13 million of Commonwealth funding promised for indigenous housing in NSW in the coming year has been withdrawn, even though there are more Aboriginal people in this state than anywhere else.

"The question needs to be asked, how the Northern Territory intervention is being paid for and what that means for other states and territories."

A spokeswoman for the NSW Minister for Housing, Matt Brown, said that although NSW had one-third of Australia's Aboriginal population, about $13 million of Commonwealth funding it received annually to help house these people had been scrapped as part of a redirection of funding to remote and very remote areas. The new system will not be finalised until after the federal election.

"This is despite the fact that 95 per cent of the Aboriginal population in NSW live in urban and regional towns. Nationally, only 9 per cent of Aboriginal people live in remote areas."

Ms Burney, asked if she expected a slap on the wrist for her comments, said she did not.

"The last time I checked, freedom of speech was still part of Australian democracy."

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

Further information: election 2007 issues page - includes news index and external links

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