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Friday August 10 2007,Media Release

HOWARD GOVERNMENT'S HASTE EXPOSED BY SENATE ENQUIRY

A rushed one day Senate committee hearing on proposed laws backing the Australian Government’s attack on Northern Territory Aborigines has further exposed them as a sham, the NSW Aboriginal Land Council Chairperson, Bev Manton, said today.

Ms Manton also urged the Senate to defer voting on the proposed laws until the resumption of Parliament on 10 September and said NSWALC’s 23,000 members strongly backed opposition to them by NT Aboriginal organisations and many community groups.

Following a brief address to the committee, Ms Manton said the proceedings not only exposed serious flaws with the proposed legislation but also revealed more than one third of the government’s $600 million funding package would be paid to public service departments.

“Senior government bureaucrats revealed that $226 million would go straight into public service coffers while not one cent of the package will go to children and women’s programmes or new housing,” she said.

“The inquiry was also told that $88 million of the funding will go to Centrelink to fund its quarantining of social security payments to all Aboriginal people in targeted communities, whether they are parents or not.

“Of course we already know that these proposed laws will trash the NT Land Rights Act and the Racial Discrimination Act as part of their punitive and discriminatory thrust.

“Now we learn from today’s hearing that senior government bureaucrats are also refusing to rule out the likelihood of NT Aboriginal people being denied ‘just terms’ compensation in cash for any land taken – in breach of the Australian Constitution.”

“We are absolutely appalled by these proposed laws, which are clearly focused on a punitive social welfare experiment and the theft of hard won land rights, and seem to have little or nothing to do with protecting children”.

Ms Manton told the committee that deferral of a Senate vote next week would enable Senators to consider the NT government’s response to the child sex abuse report on August 21 and enable a collaborative approach by both Governments in line with the Little Children report’s very first recommendation.

“A delayed vote will in no way affect the government’s current on the ground operations in the NT and it would also allow some badly needed consultations with the Aboriginal people who are being subjected to this unprecedented government attack,” she said.