2014-03-20
Madam Speaker Purick took the Chair at 10 am.
Madam SPEAKER: Honourable members, I draw your attention to Hon Dr Chris Burns in the Speaker’s Gallery. Welcome.
Members: Hear, hear!
Madam SPEAKER: Honourable members, I remind you that pursuant to section 30 of the Northern Territory (Self-Government) Act the Legislative Assembly may make standing rules and orders not inconsistent with the law of the Territory with respect to the order and conduct of its business and proceedings.
The standing orders are the formal rules governing the proceedings of the Assembly. They are the rules adopted by resolution of the Assembly, and while new and amended standing orders can be adopted, the rules we have should be observed until any such change occurs.
Standing Order 306 permits suspension of standing orders when the Assembly thinks it is necessary, and Standing Order 309 provides they remain in force until a resolution to change them.
While it is a matter for the Assembly as a whole, I am concerned that last evening during General Business a clear and deliberate breach of the standing orders occurred. While it is always understandable that members are in contest of ideas in this Chamber and seek to gain an advantage, the Assembly expects its members to comply with the rules and not to try to get away with breaking them.
There is no need to record a division for unanimous votes. What happened last night during General Business Notice No 1 on yesterday’s Notice Paper appears to have been a display of political tactics for the sole purpose of some members saying the government had to cross the floor. That is not what occurred.
The question was put to me on the voices. It was clear to the Chair from the voices that the ayes had it. However, pursuant to Standing Order 156, the member for Namatjira called for a division. That is her right, but she needed support. I asked for the required support from other members and the Opposition Leader indicated support, pursuant to the requirement of Standing Order 157. However, the Assembly then divided and no member recorded a no vote.
The members who called no and voted yes breached Standing Order 159, which states a member may not change their vote. This was an extraordinary move and one that will not be tolerated into the future. I will be seeking further advice with regard to the member’s action.
As you will recall, I sought clarification at the time and even put the question twice last evening. I expect all members to support the observance of the standing orders and to assist the Chair with the procedure and dignity of the Assembly being upheld.
Ms LAWRIE (Opposition Leader): Madam Speaker, I move that this House censure the Chief Minister for lying, failing to govern in the real interest of Territorians – urban, regional and remote, ignoring election commitments, and focusing instead on his own benefit.
There is no doubt people have never witnessed in the Territory parliament what we witnessed last night. The extent of turmoil and crisis the CLP has plunged itself into under the failed leadership of the member for Braitling, is chaotic, dysfunctional and getting in the way of good government of the Northern Territory.
Shane Stone said these things before the remarks the member for Greatorex made – the bullying and abusive language and behaviour towards the member for Namatjira – came into the public domain. This crisis has been looming for a long time.
It does not matter where you go in the Northern Territory, you hear complaints about the government’s mishandling of the economy, and the protracted, devastating disputes it is having with teachers across our education system because of the very real and drastic cuts it has taken to education, which ultimately affects the future of the Territory because it diminishes the education of our children. There are complaints that the non-government sector, which is there to provide care and support to Territorians, has had budgets slashed under the CLP. Not only have budgets been slashed, but they then received threats. ‘Zip your lips. Do not talk about what is occurring in the reduction of social services in the Northern Territory or you will have the rest of your budget taken from you.’
The fear, intimidation and bullying purveys the style of this government. Why? Because it is the way the Chief Minister likes to go about his business. Not only does he go about his business that way but, as a leader, he presides over members of his team to go about their business in that way.
I know their favourite sport is to attack me as Leader of the Opposition, to go after me because I am holding them to account; however, I hold you to account by reflecting on what Territorians are saying to us, and we make no apology for that.
We have done that consistently. Yes, we have plans and visions. We are proud Territorians on this side of the Chamber. For the Territory to truly become the place where you can yield the opportunities and benefits the Territory has, you must hold education dear and to your core. You must strengthen, not diminish, education. You must find new and innovative ways of delivering improved learning outcomes into our classrooms. You must provide our students across the Territory with choice, not only of subject matter, which we have seen affected by your cuts to education, but about where they go to school. That is a huge threat looming - very real right now - in our remote schools. You stated that policy before your Indigenous education review even got under way, which has – surprise, surprise! – recommended cutting secondary education from remote bush schools.
Shame on you, Chief Minister, and shame on your Education minister. Little wonder you have some real problems amongst your bush MLAs. Little wonder we see what is happening on the ground, member for Greatorex, despite you wanting to gloss over the loss of jobs through the repairs and maintenance contract.
Yes, we have a vision for a fairer and better society, one which does not include bullying across any workplace, anywhere or anytime.
The fairer and better society does not include taking an axe to critical services across the public sector or going into protracted disputes with people across frontline service delivery, such as firefighters and paramedics. These are all people who are saying to your government, ‘We cannot accept the way you are treating us. We cannot accept the fact you do not care, and the wages you are offering us are less than the cost of living.’ In real terms, under your government, families are going backwards and struggling to pay the bills of the household in the Northern Territory.
We have a vision for a fairer society, where government understands that whilst you have wages constraint – and we did that in government ourselves – you must understand where CPI and inflation are running so people have real wages rather than a reduction in wages. You will not do that. Instead we hear from your Minister for Public Employment an ideological attack on unions, ‘That is just unions, Labor and its leftie mates’. No, you are talking about people providing frontline services such as paramedics and firefighters.
We have a vision of a better healthcare system, where you are not sending the message to the remote healthcare system that they can have community clinics, and you will step away from government’s responsibility to provide a level and quality of care of health service, regardless of where people live in the Northern Territory. We do not share the Chief Minister’s view that you can exit from the real and core requirement to deliver quality healthcare in remote communities and they become community centres. With what resources and what funding?
That debate is mirrored in education where a review of the Education Act talks about school councils having the responsibility on one hand – for example, ‘We will give you a budget and you manage it somehow to get by’ – but on the other hand responsibility of the hiring and firing still rests with the principal, who is then hired and fired by the CEO of the department. What a farce! You are washing your hands of the responsibility of government to deliver services.
Our vision is of a fair government, delivering quality education and health services in the Territory, valuing and respecting the critical role of the public service in the Northern Territory to deliver services across a vast land mass with a small population. It is our vision and we pursued it in government. We created Territory 2030 which was a dynamic plan to provide for core policy initiatives across research and development – you do not hear the words ‘research and development’ ever coming from this government – education, law and order, health, the environment and housing.
Yes, we had plans and we still hold dear those plans of giving people a leg up, an opportunity to get into their own housing and get off the rental roundabout. We would bring back HOMESTART Extra which was scrapped. It was a fair scheme structured reasonably to provide low- and middle-income earners with a chance to stay in the Territory, get off the rental roundabout and own their home.
We would not evict public housing tenants and then sell that public housing stock. That is not our plan; that is your plan. Our plan is to be fair. Our plan is to reduce the Territory Housing public waiting list, not to increase the waiting list and sell off stock. We put in the plans and policies required in planning to set aside 15% of all Crown land release for social and affordable housing. We put in place an affordable housing rental company that could oversee stock we were funding through the budgets. I notice the CLP has continued with that Labor plan and vision to provide affordable rental housing stock.
We showed you can do it. We showed you can redevelop old rundown public housing areas such as Wirrina and create a new type of urban planning, delivering real outcomes for Territorians with a mix of public and private, leveraging private investment, delivering improved housing outcomes in an urban environment and improving that entire urban environment. We had plans to do the same at Kurringal. We had plans to roll that out across rundown public housing estates.
The CLP is copying some of those plans, rebranding, naming them as its own. But, on the other side of that ledger, what they are not doing – because through those redevelopments, you lose some housing stock – is creating new public housing stock in the new suburban divisions across Palmerston east. They are not giving Territorians on that waiting list a chance to get into housing.
A government that turns its back on homeless Territorians is a government devoid of compassion, and that is what they have done. They have shown no compassion in the approach they have taken to understanding the very real and present need of people to have shelter. I was listening with interest to people recently who were talking about what is occurring with homelessness, particularly of women and children fleeing domestic violence situations. There is a pressure point and people are being turned away. Shelters are full, and they have no other option but to turn people away.
I was proud to be part of a Labor government that worked to produce additional funding into short-term crisis accommodation. We worked with the non-government sector providing the short-term crisis accommodation. All of that has come to a screeching, grinding halt under the CLP. That has stopped for a non-government sector used to working constructively with a government to find answers to what is a horrible social problem that has a very real and present impact on women and children primarily, but also on families more broadly; men are on the list as well.
You show no compassion. I get to the fact that you show no compassion because your leader has no compassion. He shows arrogance, ‘It is my way or the highway. I do not have time to deal with the issue you have raised.’ He pretends the issue does not exist. He pretended the member for Greatorex did not use abusive language and bully his own colleague. Even when the member for Araluen, the Health minister, said, ‘I will not be part of a cover-up’, he continued the pretence, because if it does not suit his narrative or the Chief Minister’s script, it does not happen.
That is not leadership. Leadership is about accepting that with all the difficult issues and challenges that arise, you must take responsibility for dealing with them fairly and appropriately. That does not happen under this Chief Minister. It has not been fair, member for Greatorex, for you not to be disciplined. The actions you took are reprehensible. You should have been disciplined …
Mr Conlan: I cannot believe you can say that with a straight face.
Ms LAWRIE: Member for Greatorex, the parliament, including you, last night voted for you to be disciplined, and you have done nothing. Have you suggested to the Chief Minister what course of action you would take, what discipline might be appropriate, whether you will sign up to an anger management course – anything? Is there any consideration at all to the motion of the parliament last night? Nothing?
That was what we heard from the Chief Minister in Question Time today. We heard him dismissively saying, ‘He has apologised’. He apologised, we heard, some two to three days after this abhorrent incident after being forced to by the six female members of the government. That, Chief Minister, is not discipline. There is not a shade of discipline in that.
You failed to govern in the real interest of Territorians wherever they live. Territorians in the urban environment of the high-growth centres of Darwin and Palmerston have a very real, urgent need for the government to deliver on its commitment to lower the cost of living. Instead, after 18 months, you have doubled the cost of living. It has not just gone up marginally, you have doubled the cost of living, fuelled, of course, by those spikes in power, water and sewerage tariff increases.
Yet you pretend that is not happening. You do not acknowledge the 5% in January that has hit families again on their electricity tariff. You do not acknowledge the 4% coming their way in July as a result of CPI running at 4.4%. You do not acknowledge the 5% that will hit the families on their electricity tariff next January. That is another 9%, Chief Minister, locked in and signed off under your watch, that you think Territorians can absorb – that, somehow, while they are already struggling under the strain to pay their power bills, they can absorb it. Chief Minister, they cannot.
People are hitting the wall in their family household budgets scenarios – the meat is thin, they are struggling. There are too many stories of too many Territorians packing up and having to leave town because of the cost of living. For those in rentals, who have been locked out of the home ownership property market by your government’s decision to axe My New Home, which was a home finance scheme for the medium and above income earnings, HOMESTART Extra, the finance scheme for the low- and medium-income earners and, perhaps a cruel cut as well, axing the First Home Owners Concession Scheme. Those three actions have trapped people into a rental cycle that is growing at about 8%.
You will rail, as you always do, about what Labor did not do. However, what we did not do was say one thing and do the exact opposite. We did what we signed up to do. We said we would fast-track the release of land to help with the housing squeeze in the Territory, particularly the high growth area: the Top End. We created Palmerston east. We funded and resourced all the new infrastructure required to get Palmerston east to be realised as new suburbs: the land and housing that is turning off now.
We worked with Defence Housing to create Lyons, then roll across the road to Muirhead. We created a quota system within Muirhead to allow more Territorians, rather than Defence only, to buy into that environment. We agreed to an MOU with Defence to take 15% of the new Crown land release in Palmerston east. This is yielding the housing today.
We created Venture Housing, the affordable rental housing company which had 50 stock. That is often what you will laud – a scheme you pretend is yours. The Labor federal government created the NRAS scheme which is the 20% discount you are relying on for your 30% rental. These are Labor initiatives, but you will pretend and rail we did nothing. It is the big pretend and railing you hang your hat on as an excuse to do the things you want to because you have different priorities.
Your priorities are having fun. I remember being shocked when I saw the vision of you after being sworn in as Chief Minister when you came out on to the steps to do your first interview. The core thing you said the whole time was, ‘We are going to have fun’. Chief Minister, while you have been having fun, Territorians have been suffering.
Three of your own team threatened to break away, to shout out loud that Territorians in the bush are suffering too much and they require your election commitments to be delivered. It is not unreasonable for people to say, ‘We took you on your word at what you promised in the election, and now you must deliver’. People in town are saying that about the cost of living and the great big lie about their jobs being safe, then 600 public servants were sacked. No, do not count 600, only count about 240 because those 240 were permanent employees and the others were contractors. Do not count those contractors who lost their jobs because that does not matter to you, Chief Minister.
A picture is worth a thousand words. If you could take a snapshot of the Chamber right now, this picture speaks volumes …
Mr Chandler: Defending the line.
Ms LAWRIE: … about the lack of support for this Chief Minister. Member for Brennan, you are hanging in there because you believe in the job you have been given – to take an axe to education – and you will defend that, to your shame because it is wrong. You could not even remember the name of your own CLP candidate in Palmerston this morning. Unbelievable!
Chief Minister, in the regional towns people are also suffering and are crying out. In your own town of Alice Springs, comments were made by the Chamber of Commerce about the economy being in a dire situation and businesses closing. It became so bad the Chief Minister had to quickly throw a couple of capital projects at the town of Alice Springs. They were not planned for, not announced in the budget, but popped up within the last two months. You found the money for that, Chief Minister, because you could not face the very real prospect that companies like Sitzler, a formed and proud Territory company created in Alice Springs, were about to pack up and leave that town because the economy was so bad.
Those projects were not in the capital works program and they were not announced as initiatives in the budget. The new court house was not a budget initiative. But you found the money for that – millions of dollars. You found the money to take an $82 000 private jet back from Vietnam to get a photo shoot with Prime Minister, Tony Abbott.
The parade of our troops had been scheduled; we all knew it was happening. Why did you not want to attend the parade in the first place, which was something so important to our nation that the Prime Minister and the federal Leader of the Opposition attended? You were happy to sit in Vietnam until you heard there was a photo shoot opportunity. Quick, you better get that $82 000 private jet and get back to Darwin.
Chief Minister, people do not appreciate the waste. We have seen an incredible number of overseas jaunts by ministers. We have always been big supporters of our relationship with Asia. We were strengthening our relationships with China and Japan. We do not have an issue with ministers needing to travel. However, on one of the trips there were three of you together. I quipped that it was because every time the Chief Minister needed to leave town he had to take some numbers with him.
You cannot keep ignoring the suffering that occurs in the regional towns. Tennant Creek has had horrendous issues with alcohol-fuelled violence. You say we are devoid of policy, except the BDR. We will proudly talk about the BDR. The Health minister said Labor needs to stop talking about the BDR. We will keep talking about it because you have turned 2500 people who had a problem with alcohol back on to consuming vast amounts of it. You can see the difference in our regional towns such as Tennant Creek and Katherine.
I have friends who live in Katherine. Do you know what is going on in that regional town at the moment, Chief Minister? Have you bothered to find out that residents are saying they have to take some type of action to stop the rising, unacceptable level of crime and violence? People are saying it is getting harder to go to Woolies to shop. What is happening? The member for Katherine is a senior member of Cabinet.
I meet with the allied health sector; they are desperate to see the BDR come back. I heard the clinical nurses at the hospital saying, ‘We are swamped in the emergency department at Katherine Hospital; we cannot deal with it all.’ They are desperate for the BDR to come back.
Call it another name, but it is a supply tool that helped those regional towns. It helped in Darwin and Palmerston. We are bigger and it is a problem which is less in your face, but it is here and is real in the Top End towns.
Alcohol is not a core social value. We are better than that in the Northern Territory. We socialise with our friends, but alcohol does not and should not define us, and it should not be described by our Chief Minister as a core social value. A core social value is caring for others and making sure we have the programs and support to care for those who need support. You have taken an axe to that in the non-government sector.
The Health minister said yesterday, ‘No, we are not taking the sobering-up shelter off BRADAAG’. Funny, because that is what BRADAAG has been told. They have been fighting the decision for a while now. When the CEO challenged the Department of Health on it, they were told the decision went all the way to the top, to the Health minister. ‘Bad luck! We are taking the sobering-up shelter away from you.’ Really? That is not okay. Tennant Creek needs a sobering-up shelter.
You formed your alcohol policy on the $50m election commitment – not realised or even touched on yet – to build mandatory rehabilitation centres, but you have not built any, you have taken over everyone else’s infrastructure. Roseanne, in gaol in Western Australia, needs to be in secure care in Alice Springs. At least half of the Alice Springs secure care has been taken over by your alcohol management rehabilitation program. The other half, we hear, has only two clients in it because you have slashed the funding to that secure care program.
Everywhere we look you have failed to deliver your election commitments, but there are compounding problems and issues arising out of that to our society. When those compounding issues come down to hard-end suffering by people, even your own are starting to walk away from you.
You have only 11 numbers in this Chamber. Yes, your Speaker has the casting vote and she will cast for you. You have taken your party to a point of crisis where they have never been before. We hear in your CLP Central Council meetings it becomes a shout-fest towards you – significantly, at the last one because of the way you have failed the Territory’s fourth-largest regional town of Nhulunbuy.
Let us look at that failure, because I have touched on the big regional towns of Alice Springs, Tennant Creek and Katherine, but I have not touched on Nhulunbuy.
Nhulunbuy is losing over 1000 jobs. Families have no choice but to pack up and leave the town they call home. It is affecting generations of locals. People born and raised in Nhulunbuy have lost their jobs; they have to pack up and go under your watch, Chief Minister, by your hand, because you reneged on the gas to Gove deal the previous Chief Minister, Terry Mills, said was a done deal. He said he had signed with Rio Tinto to deliver gas to provide for the refinery to switch from heavy fuel to gas. On a public holiday, Darwin Show day, you reneged on that deal, and after that it was one big downhill slide to the loss of jobs with the refinery curtailment decision. Anyone who says in July, ‘I am reneging on that deal, Rio Tinto’, would surely then, at the very least, put in place a plan B: if Rio Tinto curtails the refinery and we lose 1000 jobs in a regional town, ripping the heart out of the job sector there, what would you do instead?
You would first have a socioeconomic impact analysis done, in your pocket, ready to go, to understand exactly what you need to do as a government to leverage proper funding from the Commonwealth government and, indeed, the company Rio Tinto, to say, ‘Here are the alternative industries’. We have seen this happen. BlueScope Steel in the steelworks in Newcastle did it; BHP could do it. The New South Wales government did it, but, Chief Minister, you did not do it. You walked around the Territory, pretending Rio Tinto would keep going with the refinery and that all was well. That was a catastrophic failure of you to do your job, and the people of the township are bearing the consequences of that today. They are suffering because of that today. Why? Because you have been focused on yourself and your benefit every step of the way with the nice jets, the junkets, being taken care of, putting the suit on, ‘I am the Chief Minister, it is all good, I am having fun’.
Chief Minister, while you are having fun, the rest of the Territory is not. Our economy is the fastest growing in the nation because Labor delivered the second-largest major project in the history of Australia: the Ichthys project. The oil and gas sector has been sent the most bizarre signals by you ever since then. The reneging on the gas deal stopped the doubling of the domestic gas policy. Announcing the fracking inquiry without so much as giving them a heads-up sent them into another tailspin. You are more intent on taking care of yourself than taking care of Territorians. It is little wonder three members of your own party are breaking away.
Mr GILES (Chief Minister): Madam Speaker, I am pretty sure I did not hear anything about a plan for the Territory’s future should Labor come into power – not one word. We heard carping, whining and whingeing.
Let me outline what the Northern Territory government is doing. Under the principles of economic development, the way we foresee driving economic reform into the future is around four key principles: economic, social, cultural and environmental. You must get those four pillars working properly to be able to drive economic reform for the Northern Territory. That is why we released our Framing the Future blueprint draft document last year. It went public; it has been out for consultation for some time now. We are just about to finalise it. We received a number of submissions and inquiries about Framing the Future and how we set forth the direction for the Northern Territory.
It will not be too much of a broad-ranging advertised document, but it is something that guides the principles of how the Northern Territory will govern into the future. That is the draft document; the final document will be released soon.
Underpinning the Framing the Future document and the strategic approach of how we operate will be our philosophical and directional approach to the development of northern Australia. The development of northern Australia has a key component, and that is the Northern Territory. Fundamentally, we have said we should be driving the northern Australia developmental approach. It should be driven through Darwin, the capital city of northern Australia, but it should encapsulate the whole of the Northern Territory.
When it was first announced by Prime Minister, Tony Abbott that he was supportive of that approach, he took the Coalition, in opposition, towards northern Australian development. Kevin Rudd, the then Prime Minister, quickly followed that approach. To be honest, that followed what we were always investing in from the Northern Territory government point of view. From where we stood it was the whole of the Territory, not just north of the Tropic of Capricorn. That is why I was very pleased a couple of weeks ago that the Prime Minister announced that Central Australia has been included.
Under the banner of northern Australia you will soon see promotional material, advertisements and collective ideas about how that will be achieved. It will have different audiences. It will have an audience of the public service, Territorians, Queenslanders and Western Australians to come on board with the Territory. It will also have a national and international audience. That will be about selling the message of northern Australia, but from the point of view of the Northern Territory. From the Northern Territory’s point of view, it is about being who we can be, who we want to be in the future, and ensuring we set forth the direction to provide jobs for the future so the kids who are going to school today have jobs for tomorrow.
When I answered a question in Question Time today I talked about the need to build the pipeline between the Northern Territory and the national gas grid, which includes everywhere except Western Australia. The purpose of that is because that will be not only nation building, but job and economy building for the Northern Territory.
For those who like to research these matters, go to North Dakota or do some research and see how the realisation of shale gas has completely reinvigorated communities across North Dakota in the way they have seen economic growth. People who were down and out in an economic sense are now in the vast environment of jobs and economic growth. It has been completely transforming.
When we talk about the estimated opportunities of 240 trillion cubic feet of gas in the Northern Territory, we start thinking about how we realise that. The pipeline is part of realising that. We need to work out how we can get some of that gas into New South Wales or Victoria, whether some goes through Gladstone, what we can use for cheaper gas in the Northern Territory, what we need to use to swap gas, and the investment in building a pipeline.
This is a significant project for the Northern Territory’s future. Whether it comes off or not, we will wait to see. However, it has a significant amount of investment and commitment from the Northern Territory government, and we already have several companies interested in pursuing the construction of that pipeline. We are talking with the Australian government about that.
It is important to look at a number of key areas of the direction of government. I will touch on six key issues.
Crime is much reported in this Chamber and across the Northern Territory. We know property crime is at its lowest level in the Territory’s reporting history. Dating back to the late 1990s when statistics were first collected, property crime is at its lowest level. With the introduction of Alcohol Protection Orders as a suite of measures designed to target change in social and community circumstance around the consumption of alcohol, we are seeing positive signs already. We spoke about what is occurring with mandatory alcohol treatment. We have already seen in relation to the APOs which were first introduced mid- to late December, with early figures, year on year, February 2014 to February 2013, a drop of around 22% in assaults across the Northern Territory. We have seen the lowest levels of motor vehicle theft and crime in the Territory’s history.
You talked about the removal of the Banned Drinker Register. The only feigned promise Labor has is bringing the Banned Drinker Register back, which we do not support, because since we removed the Banned Drinker Register we have had a significant, positive change in the consumption of alcohol. For example, we have had a 4% drop in wholesale alcohol supply across the Territory. That is pure alcohol.
In Alice Springs, for example, where we know there have been significant challenges, there is a drop of 7%. Anyone who can tell me the Banned Drinker Register was working when we had a 7% alcohol supply drop after we removed it …
Mr Gunner: Alcohol-related assaults are up in Alice Springs.
Mr GILES: … is giving unwarranted criticism.
I note the interjection about the number of assaults going up. Member for Fannie Bay, the easy way to stop assaults from going up is to reduce the number of police on the beat. We have put an additional 20 police in Alice Springs and additional police across the Northern Territory. If we had not done that, there would be less policing and fewer people being picked up.
The other component is that the police who are picking people up are now prosecuting those who commit assaults, rather than leaving them sit in a gaol cell for 12 hours overnight and letting them out at 6 am or 7 am. They are being convicted of their crimes, and that is starting to send a strong message too.
Some of the changes we have made in relation to the Attorney-General’s portfolio on one punch homicide legislation and protecting the rights of the workers on the front line with mandatory minimum three-month sentences are causing positive changes. They are starting to have a positive reflection in the community.
If I move on to the economy under the guise of Framing the Future and the north Australia development policy agenda, a range of things is happening here. We agree the INPEX project is having a positive influence on the statistical numbers within our economy, but you also have to look at what we have been doing with building approvals and land release. I heard the comment about Kurringal flats from the Leader of the Opposition, saying it was their idea. If it was their idea why did they not do anything about it? Why did they not put out an expression of interest or talk to developers? Why did they not talk to tenants and neighbours? Why did they not put out a plan, a map, a glossy brochure, a letter or anything? They had 11 years to do something with Kurringal flats and did nothing. We have taken quick action and put out expressions of interest. We have a plan and are implementing the project now.
Look at some of the other projects under way and all the building approvals for units in the Top End right now. There are 26 applications at the moment. Sure, 13 were approved under Labor after many years, but in our 18 months of government an additional 13 have been approved to the point where there is $350m worth of construction on units occurring now and another $450m soon to commence.
The other day I was in Palmerston in the seat of Blain with Nathan Barrett, the Country Liberals candidate, looking at what we can do to speed up Zuccoli. We have made a $3.1m commitment for the dual lane section of Roystonea Avenue which will allow us to get Stages 3 and 4 of Zuccoli up and running early – 1300 new blocks of land with an additional 400 coming in Stage 5 of Zuccoli. We are releasing land like never before, not just in the seat of Blain or in Palmerston, but across the Northern Territory and all our urban areas. We want to start doing that in some of our remote locations as well.
I will not go through all the statistics and talk about the fastest growing economy in the nation, the highest rate of building approvals, the highest rate of land release, because people know these things are occurring. However, I will mention some of our structural changes such as our reforms to the Pastoral Act so it is not just pastoral activities that can occur on a pastoral lease. For 30 years, 30% of the property can have non-pastoral activities such as horticulture, which can start driving the development of this great unknown towards being the food bowl of northern Australia.
Today we heard the announcement that the Northern Territory is one of the most supportive and positive environments as a jurisdiction for mining and investment activity, and that will continue to grow.
The Leader of the Opposition spoke a little about education. We need to make sure our kids are at the right level to be able to undertake the jobs of tomorrow in the development of northern Australia, that we have engineers who can work in the gas industry and people to study at Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory to increase accreditation to a higher level and drive the leadership and growth of this nation. As we are seeing a contraction in New South Wales and Victoria across many industries, we have the opportunity now to ensure the Northern Territory is driving the economic direction and the future growth of Australia.
We have to ensure kids are properly educated. We know the NAPLAN results of the majority of students in the Northern Territory – their educational levels of attainment – are simply not at national standards. For many it is nowhere near national standards and we have to fix it. We have made some structural reforms. We have copped a lot of criticism about it, but this is where we say we have a plan and are able and willing to look into the eyes of those who criticise and make those changes so we have reform.
The Education Act is being reviewed. It is 30-plus years old and we are trying to revitalise it. We are looking at facilitating the potential around global school funding models so schools get their bucket of money and can be truly and fully independent and able to decide where the allocation of those resources goes. That is the opportunity for principals and school councils to do that.
We have undertaken a remote education review looking at some of the challenges in education. Why are the results so bad? What can we do to reform that? That review has been undertaken by Mr Bruce Wilson, an education expert, who has come back with some findings and told us where we need to make changes. Part of it looks at how you can get the best economies of scale in delivering education in the secondary education sector, and how many students are available and attending school, or enrolled. If you want a suite of subjects offered to students in remote areas, you have to ensure you have the students to turn up to those classes.
Anyone can understand that if you want to run a physics class, it is very hard to do for one student, the same as with a chemistry class or an Indonesian class. You have to get some opportunity of critical mass, not only for the economics of delivering education, but so students can learn from each other, both in and out of the classroom, whether it is tutorial services at night or networking with each other. We have to get a better model of education, which is why I believe Bruce Wilson has recommended in his review we move to a more regional-based secondary education model so the kids have economies of scale, can work and learn off one another, and we get better outcomes for the Territory.
When I talk about better outcomes for the Territory, it is not saying I want our kids at this level, it is making sure those kids get the opportunity in life to get the education. They then get the opportunity to get a real job. That is why the overarching theme of Framing the Future is facilitating, through the northern Australia development agenda, the creation of jobs for the future.
There is no doubt we have a chronic demand on health services in the Northern Territory. We made a commitment to increase elective surgery by 400 places each year. The Health minister has being doing a good job in overseeing the facilitation of driving down the pressures on the elective surgery wait list by having an additional 400 places. We have spoken about our mandatory alcohol treatment program relentlessly. I am a big supporter of it, as are we all on this side. I understand the philosophical dilemma of incarcerating people because they have a chronic alcohol issue, but we want those people to get off the grog and have an opportunity to make choices in their lives. I appreciate the concerns those on the left and many others have about the incarceration of people in mandatory alcohol treatment. However, we want to give those people an opportunity, and this is the area we are moving towards. That is why you are starting to see an opportunity for change in people’s lives.
Criticism comes from the opposition about bed block in Royal Darwin Hospital. Bed block is a result of a lack of capacity to be able to provide service to everybody at any point in time. It is a challenge we have to try to make change for. Having been in government for 18 months, with the whole issue of facing a $5.5bn Labor debt legacy – the enormous deficit we have – we cannot click our fingers and build a new hospital and provide hospital beds overnight. It is a challenge.
There has always been a plan to build a hospital at Palmerston. We promised it and committed to it in 2008. We were not elected into government in 2008. We did the same in 2012 and when we came in then we looked at what promises had been made before. The promise by the former Labor government was to build a hospital at Palmerston. All they had on the site after eleven-and-a-half years was a bit of cyclone mesh fencing and a sign saying, ‘Future site of Palmerston Hospital’. That does not deliver a bed to treat someone who is currently suffering due to bed block at Royal Darwin Hospital.
We needed to go back to the drawing board, identify if we would develop northern Australia, look at our population of around 239 000 in the Northern Territory, foresee what we think the population growth will be - ensuring we balance our lifestyle at the same time - and what our hospital demands will be. We need a brand new regional hospital for the growth of the greater Darwin area in the development of northern Australia. We have been working intensively with the Health minister in identifying what a hospital will look like and what the design requirements are to have a hospital to last the next 50 years.
This is where we are at the moment. Our scoping study has come back. I have been relentless in my conversations with colleagues, saying we must take the community with us. We will not design a hospital and build it without talking to anyone. We have to make sure we design it right, that the clinicians understand the model we have, and we take feedback from them if we have to redesign it. We need the health and hospital practitioners to tell us if we need to change the design parameters or make modifications.
We have found a site 15 times larger than the previous hospital site Labor had. They were going to build a Mickey Mouse little hospital with about 10 beds that would not have met the needs of a growing Northern Territory in a growing greater Darwin area. We are building a hospital for the next 50 years. I have said, and anticipate that, work will start this year. I am committed to making that happen. However, we are really committed to making sure we build the hospital of tomorrow to meet the Territory’s growing demands.
I will move on to the area of culture which fits under Framing the Future. To me it is about who we are as Territorians. It is about ensuring we do not lose who we are in our psyche as Territorians, as people who are proud to be different to the rest of Australia, who are proud to have a lifestyle that is different to the rest of Australia.
There are people in the Northern Territory who like to go fishing or shooting, or go for a Sunday drive and enjoy the open spaces. When we develop northern Australia, we must ensure we hold on to those passionate dynamics of what we all love and why we love the open spaces, the fresh air, and the warm weather if you are in the Top End, or the cold weather if you are at the bottom in the middle months of the year. That is the balance we always have to ask ourselves about. Do we impinge, with development, on our lifestyle? It is a question we ask ourselves every time a Cabinet paper comes through our government: how do we balance that? That will continue to be the way.
In regard to culture, we make significant investments in a range of areas, whether it is working in the fishing sector or ensuring we have arts and museums. We have just seen a change in the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and how that will be facilitated. We are looking at new museums and display products, and making sure we invest in Indigenous culture and have growth and renewal in that sector long into the future.
The last area I will touch on is remote areas and this assertion that there is little happening in the bush. There may be little promotional marketing activity in the bush, but the amount of work going on in the bush is profound and significant. The Minister for Housing was talking about the change in dynamics with the housing contracts. On the surface it can be said that people have lost their jobs through a change in contracts. Yes, there were 81 people working in the past, but much of that work was going through the shires at extremely high cost. There were delays in getting works done, and the amount of expenditure that could be made through the spread of work on the ground was very minimal.
The new contract model has enabled the government to seek to employ more people at the local level, with more supervisors, to be able to provide a better response time in getting repairs and maintenance work done at a lower cost. This means we can do more work in the bush, particularly on remote housing. I have gone up hill and down dale with these contracts to look at the reforms. While at the start I had a couple of questions, the reforms will be very good for the bush in getting the work done.
We went to the election talking about reforming the shires. As the former Local Government minister, when first elected some 18 months ago, I did a fair amount of work in establishing a shire working group, or a local government working group, looking at some of the issues and putting out a discussion paper. That was then handed over to the minister at the time, the member for Namatjira, to run some community feedback models and community consultations with the department.
The new minister for Local Government, minister Tollner, is now facilitating the roll-out of reforms in that area. While the regional council component has changed, the breakup of a shire council into a small regional council will be occurring in the member for Daly’s electorate in the area between Daly River and Port Keats/Wadeye. That is delivering on some of that reform.
It is not easy because it has changed. We must make sure we get the model right. However, there is no doubt the cost structure of shire councils is quite large through this centralised model. We must be able to facilitate reforms to bring that cost structure down in delivering increased services.
We have also been working very hard on bush road funding. There was a question raised about a previous announcement made on either 6 or 8 August 2012 by Warren Snowdon, the member for Lingiari, in the eyes of a Territory election campaign, about doing some road works for $106m. I also made an announcement two weeks ago of $106m for road works. I am not sure how on earth those two figures are exactly the same, as convenient as it seems.
As the previous Transport and Infrastructure minister, immediately after coming into government I was working to ensure how we could facilitate works on the Santa Teresa Road, the Sandover or Plenty Highway, the Tanami Highway, the Port Keats Road, the Roper Highway, the Carpentaria Highway, Central Arnhem Highway, the Top Road, and the road to Pickertaramoor on the Tiwi Islands.
We came up with a few different funding equations and models we put to the federal government. One of those surrounded the model we announced the other day, which was $106m, $16m of which comes from the Territory government, and $90m which comes from the federal government. The works included in that have changed a number of times over the last 18 months in trying to get that approved. We got no glory out of the previous federal Labor government. It refused to sign up and provide that funding.
I am very happy that Warren Truss, now the federal minister and Deputy Prime Minister, has agreed to that funding and the works will start rolling out in April this year. The first leg of the continuing work will start on the Port Keats Road. How that ended up being the same, I am not quite sure because it changed a number of times while I was the minister. Since I have been the Chief Minister, I have had my hands in, trying to ensure we get bang for the buck in that area.
There are other roads we have been seeking funding for which have not been approved. They include the work on the Plenty Highway, or the Outback Highway, as the general road between Perth and Cairns is sometimes known. There was an announcement by Warren Truss in the federal election campaign of $33m over three years to do joint road funding works on sections of that road between WA, NT and Queensland. We put in an early bid to try to get the majority of it. I am advised there was a deal done with the Queensland government a couple of weeks ago, that we were unaware of, to try to get a little extra of that money. We have since advised we will match every dollar the federal government is prepared to put in. We believe we will be getting a good announcement or outcome from that, which hopefully we can announce in the budget.
We want this budget to be about building the Territory – building roads, bridges, infrastructure, schools, releasing land and growing the Territory under the frame of northern Australia. We believe we have a good plan to move ahead.
While I am on the topic, I heard comments from Labor about our investment in the bush. There is no doubt there have been decades and decades of failure and lack of investment in the bush. The infrastructure simply is not there, whether it is mobile phone reception, bridges, roads, housing stock or kerb and guttering in communities. Whatever it may be, there are challenges.
I also include investment into power infrastructure. Most people are still running on diesel generators. Why have we not got greater networks of power out there? That is part of the reforms we would like to see. It is not easy to do. You cannot simply find $500m and network the majority of bush communities, but it is an area we are working towards which will provide downward pressure on pricing for electricity in remote areas. We are working towards being able to make it happen.
We need to start somewhere to reform years of neglect. Look what happened when I was the minister for the Department of Corporate and Information Services, or DCIS. It has a responsibility for telecommunications within that portfolio. All credit to DCIS, it has never had a broad role in mobile phones, NBN or any of that broader external telecommunications aspect outside the internal machinations of government. We went to the Telstra board, spoke to Mr Thodey and had the board up here. We said we would like a partnership as we want to invest in bush communities. We want more mobile phones and more data broadband so people can be connected a whole lot better.
Through that partnership arrangement we now have eight additional communities that have, or are getting, mobile phone or broadband technology. We are working on how we can extend that to Groote Eylandt and Minjilang as two other communities able to facilitate greater connectivity. You need that connectivity to achieve greater social and economic change, and create the opportunity of creating jobs for all Territorians.
These are parts of the infrastructure we are trying to do. You cannot simply roll out $450 000 for every community that does not have mobile phone connectivity. There are, I believe, 34 communities which are hardwired to hard-line telecommunication across the Territory. Those communities are easier to get mobile phones to, but for the ones that are not on that hardwire, that becomes a challenge. That is why we were not supportive of the NBN in the bush. I still believe the NBN model roll-out in the bush is deplorable and should not be accelerated. There needs to be better ways to do business. The NBN is failing under the Coalition government, but it was failing under Labor. There needs to be better ways to roll that out. We will continue to work to get better connectivity for people in the bush.
To get reforms in the bush we are working on a policy, which should not be too far away, about home ownership and asset sales to tenants in remote communities so they can own their own homes and have greater pride and investment opportunities in their home. We have been working on it for about 10 months now and it is not very far away. We believe we will come up with a model of home ownership in Aboriginal communities that will provide a long-lasting opportunity for people into the future. We can start realising some of that capital in foreign investment funds through the markets Westpac, NAB, ANZ and the Commonwealth Bank could access to get more foreign investment – as it would technically be called – money and loan products into Aboriginal communities in the bush. That will be a fantastic outcome.
One of the major things we have to do to drive change in remote areas is build economies. Most communities have a school, a health centre, local government and all the essential community infrastructure or service delivery models, but we have to build economies. We have to build them in Darwin, Katherine, Alice Springs and Tennant Creek, which has been neglected for many years, and in remote communities. That is a challenge.
That is why I am so excited about what we are doing on the Tiwi Islands with the new port that has been invested in through the private sector, with Mitsui and the woodchip, what we did with the Tiwi ferry, what the Minister for Health is trying to do at Wadeye and in the Daly region, and what we want to do at Ngukurr in opening up farming opportunities and road access. These are the changes we want in Alpara and Utopia in getting farming opportunities there. Creating jobs provides hope, inspiration and opportunity for those kids going to school today – or those kids who should be going to school – so there is a future for people.
In the Northern Territory our remote landscape is different from much of the remote landscape in other parts of the country. In other parts of the country there is social engineering where economists or Treasury officials believe the centralisation of populations around large urban centres is a cost-efficient model for delivering services. Many communities and populations move, but in the Northern Territory the cultural connection to land, law and culture is quite different, and people are not always prepared to move. We …
Mr STYLES: A point of order, Madam Speaker! I move that the Chief Minister be granted an extension of time, pursuant to Standing Order 77.
Motion agreed to.
Mr GILES: Madam Speaker, I was wrapping up. Many people in remote or regional areas of the Northern Territory have a significant cultural connection to land and place the priority of that connection above and beyond any other responsibility in their lives, whether it is having a job, access to healthcare, housing or whatever. As a government, we recognise that.
We have to facilitate the more effective localised roll-out of local government. To be able to facilitate greater investment in housing – and it will not all come from government – you must have private sector investment. That is why the home ownership model is such a good one. It is about making sure land is freed up to invest in without touching sacred sites or hurting traditional owners’ opportunities for their traditional lands.
That is the vision of this government which all fits within the Framing the Future document. Whether it is about economics or social, cultural or environmental priorities, it is about developing the Northern Territory and northern Australia. It is about saying to the rest of the country, ‘We are in charge. We have a plan. This is the direction we are heading. Jump on board and we will help solve Australia’s economic woes’, because we know the economic woes of this nation will continue to get worse.
Everything I have said is directly opposite to what Labor says in opposition. Apart from whingeing, whining, carping, fighting from the sidelines, and trying to talk about us rather than talk about the Territory, there are no plans for the future of the Northern Territory on the other side. There is not one policy in their show book, and that is a real concern.
I listened to the debate in this Chamber. In answering questions in Question Time, sometimes we have a bit of fun and sometimes we roll out policy and talk about our achievements. However, often it is hard to answer the questions because they are of such poor quality. I am not reflecting on individuals, but they are poor quality and the strategy of opposition is so poor it provides a poor reflection.
To have good government anywhere around the world you must have a robust opposition to hold you to account, to make you achieve higher levels and perform better. In this Chamber we see a very poor opposition. People talk about different opinions on this side of the Chamber. I welcome it; if people are having disputes, good on them. People are fighting for their electorates and for the Northern Territory. If we cannot get opposition from the other side of the Chamber, we will get it from our side, because the opposition and debate that comes from our side of the Chamber grows our policies and programs, and the direction we want for the Northern Territory, to ensure we have a better northern Australia for the future and we drive reform so we lead this nation.
We will not be supporting this censure motion. It is all about playing politics, once again. It is unfortunate, as I have reflected upon, that we have such a poor and weak opposition. It is not contributing to good debate in this Chamber or in the Northern Territory, and Territorians are being let down. As Chief Minister, I assure you we will continue to provide a good plan for the future, develop northern Australia, invest in economic, social, cultural and environmental aspects, and make sure there are jobs for tomorrow.
Madam Speaker, we have a plan and we will achieve our plan.
Mr VOWLES (Johnston): Madam Speaker, it gives me no pleasure to support this motion against the Chief Minister, but he leaves this side of the House no choice.
It is a little over 12 months since he took power, and it has been a year of missed opportunities, broken promises, financial pain, spiralling power costs, sacking the public sector and, now, the swearing scandal. This morning the member for Greatorex uttered verbal abuse towards me. He has form and he continues to do this …
Madam SPEAKER: Please pause, member for Johnston. This is a censure motion against the Chief Minister. If you believe there are issues in regard to the member for Greatorex, you can state them by way of a substantive motion. I ask that you refrain from making those comments and stick to the censure motion against the Chief Minister. If you wish to make a substantive motion at a later time, it is your choice.
Mr VOWLES: What a tawdry two weeks this has been. Chief Minister, Conlan-gate was your opportunity to make a new start, put a stamp on your leadership, support your values and regain the confidence of your backbench. I will recap my speech last night on the workplace bullying behaviour of the member for Greatorex.
On ABC on 11 March 2014, the member for Namatjira said:
The ABC presenter had asked her a direct question ...
Madam SPEAKER: Member for Johnston, I spoke earlier about the House of Representative Practice, which says you do not use quotes for other people and put words in mouths. I ask you to be careful of what you are saying. You may be quoting, but you are also using offensive language.
Mr VOWLES: Okay. Without hesitation, she answered firmly:
Ms Lawrie: It has been reported.
Mr VOWLES: That has been reported – disgraceful, abusive, disrespectful language. Again, I will quote from an interview on March 11 on ABC:
I ask this House and everybody, is that leadership? In other words, the Chief Minister did not bother with such minor matters as workplace vilification – bullying is verbal abuse – and wanted to sweep it under the carpet. He failed her and he failed in his leadership. At a time when leadership was called for, when any leader worth their position would have intervened and taken action, this Chief Minister failed. Not content with letting down his colleagues, his values and everyone who heard the comment, the Chief Minister decided it was best to cover it up. He had a chance to come clean, and when he did he said he was not:
That was on 8 March on ABC TV. Maybe he was mistaken. Maybe he had forgotten what the member for Namatjira said. He had another chance to set the record straight on Channel 9 the same day, and the Chief Minister said he was not aware of any offensive language that may or may not have been used.
I ask this House again, is that leadership? On Territory FM, the Chief Minister said:
Is that leadership, trying to sweep it under the carpet? The final insult in this whole Conlan-gate saga was on 10 March on Mix FM. The legendary Pete Davies asked:
The Chief Minister laughed. That is right, the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory showed leadership by laughing. He laughed at somebody being verbally abused. Verbal abuse is not a laughing matter.
To his credit, Pete Davies said to the Chief Minister, ‘Why not?’ The Chief Minister replied, ‘Why would I?’
It was the biggest political story in the Territory that day, and the Chief Minister showed his leadership by saying, ‘Why would I?’
Pete Davies tried to jog his memory by saying, ‘Well, I mean, he referred to one of his colleagues as a …’
It was a word that has previously been said in this Chamber in another debate. The Chief Minister said, ‘Well, Pete, I would actually challenge that. I do not believe that to be true’.
That is right, he showed leadership by saying, ‘I would actually challenge that. I do not believe that to be true’.
We cannot believe that. The cover-up lasted for a few days, and the Chief Minister showed his leadership of the Northern Territory by staying silent. It was only after the member for Namatjira told other listeners on ABC radio, after she was asked if she was offended:
Chief Minister, as I said earlier, Conlan-gate was your opportunity to make a new start, put a stamp on your leadership, support your values and regain the confidence of your backbench. We all know the member for Greatorex should have been sacked from the ministry. If you had taken this immediate and decisive action against the member for Greatorex when he swore in the most disgusting way at the member for Namatjira, people could finally say, ‘At last Adam Giles is showing some leadership’. They could say this leader has principles and standards. Despite the chaotic events of the past 12 months, they could say he may have made a litany of errors as Chief Minister, but now he is showing signs of leadership.
But he has failed. The Chief Minister supported last night’s motion to discipline the member for Greatorex. During debate, I made it clear you perpetrated a media cover-up of what happened from 8 to 10 March. You spoke in that debate. For some reason, the tacticians on that side of the House thought it was a great idea to hang you out to dry as the only speaker on that motion. But enough of the crazy tactics of your backroom boys, the fact is, you spoke. You might have even received that advice from the member for Port Darwin.
It was a debate. I had accused you of covering up, and you let it stay on the record unchallenged. That is right: unchallenged. In a debate, Chief Minister, where there is no rebuttal, the facts stand: you have covered it up. But, enough of Conlan-gate, it is merely the last chapter in the story of the government which may very well be the worst state or Territory government Australia has ever seen.
I want to go into more about the bullying. Reading some of the information in Preventing and Eliminating Workplace Bullying in the Northern Territory Public Sector Framework:
Let us go through what was said to the member for Namatjira. I am going off number one, ‘What is workplace bullying?’ I go to some of this:
I ask this this House, was the member for Namatjira intimidated? I say she was. I am sure everybody in this House would be intimidated by the words the member for Greatorex used towards her.
Considering we are hearing that the three bush members have been banned from Caucus meetings, I say that is isolating them from others. The members for Arnhem, Arafura and Namatjira cannot attend Caucus meetings ...
Mr Elferink: Well, they are Labor meetings for a start. They were in the parliamentary wing this morning as they are every day.
Mr VOWLES: Your parliamentary wing meeting. You play on words, mate. You have banned three of your own colleagues from meetings.
We are going to bullying behaviour, isolating …
Mr Elferink: It is untrue. Get your facts right.
Mr VOWLES: Listen! I know you are interjecting. I look forward to your response …
Mr Elferink: You are not telling the truth. You are required to tell the truth in this.
Mr VOWLES: Isolating a person … I will pick up on that. The member for Port Darwin has just said I am required to tell the truth. The member for Namatjira informed me of this. So, once again, we are telling the truth.
Let us go to the next ones: shouting, teasing, sarcasm. Seriously, we know the member for Greatorex and the Chief Minister – I suppose we could put in a few things about being bullied in this workplace as well.
Let us go to taking credit for someone’s work. The CLP, the government, should be accused of bullying us because they are taking credit for all the work we have done. We could probably take you on workplace bullying.
Then, we go down to racist and sexist. The member for Namatjira is a respected Indigenous woman. Racist! I will let other people talk about that. I would say the disgusting use of a female anatomy description by the member for Greatorex is sexist.
Let us go to the resolution process. Under ‘Key principles. Treat all matters seriously’, it says:
The one I really want to get to is ‘Non-victimisation of a person who reports’:
Debate suspended.
Continued from earlier this day.
Mr VOWLES (Johnston): Madam Speaker, I would like to clarify what I said in the House earlier today. I misunderstood what the member for Namatjira was telling me when she said she felt uncomfortable in CLP wing meetings, which is completely understandable. I misunderstood when I said she had been banned, which is not the case, and I apologise to the member for Namatjira for misquoting her. It was not my intention to misrepresent her and what she said, so I apologise for that.
Going back to the censure, I was talking about a resolution process and spoke about the non-victimisation of the person who reports. I repeat that it is important to ensure anyone who raises an issue of bullying is not victimised for coming forward.
The member for Namatjira was victimised for coming forward and, as I said last night, I applaud how brave she and the member for Araluen were for not being part of any cover-up, as the Chief Minister was.
We are here to discuss this censure and I have been focusing on the leadership of this Chief Minister. It is the day of closing the gap on Indigenous disadvantage. Most of us on this side of the House were at a breakfast this morning sponsored by the Menzies School of Health’s Rioli health fund. It was great to see the members for Araluen and Stuart there. We had the Leader of the Opposition, the members for Fannie Bay, Nhulunbuy, Casuarina, and me. It was great to be there and hear of the great work Menzies is doing. Guess who was not there? The Chief Minister of the Northern Territory was not at the closing the gap Menzies breakfast.
What is going on? Territorians are asking, ‘What is happening, where are you, what are you doing?’ You are so involved with your internal politics, trying to keep your own leadership, that you are not attending events. For me, and obviously, the members for Araluen and Stuart, it meant a lot to be there. It meant a lot for voters in the Northern Territory – people who attended and people in the industry – to see their politicians are supporting them when they can. The Chief Minister did not attend.
During the luncheon break, the Leader of the Opposition and I attended a closing the gap event held by Danila Dilba at the Jingili Water Gardens. There was no CLP, no Chief Minister and no leadership. All we heard was, ‘Sorry we cannot attend because sittings are on’. The Leader of the Opposition and I attended and got a great response. The Leader of the Opposition made a short speech, as did I, saying we will provide support in any way we can to close the gap in Indigenous disadvantage. We will support in any way we can in assisting Indigenous people’s lives. We have an Indigenous Chief Minister of the Northern Territory who cannot attend a closing the gap event. It is disgraceful and people are talking about it.
Not only that, Territorians are talking about power bills which have gone through the roof. People are leaving the Territory because they cannot afford to stay due to the cost of living, and those who stay cannot rely on the electricity supply. The worst blackout in our history, with a plethora of smaller blackouts either side of it, has happened on your watch, Chief Minister.
Then there are the broken promises to the bush. Little wonder your bush-based colleagues are in revolt. You promised so much, yet you delivered so little. You had to win the bush to win government, and you did it under false pretences.
There it is. The House must censure you on numerous counts. Territorians are hurting as their household bills skyrocket. The bush is being neglected, despite promises to the contrary. Finally, last night you voted in favour of doing something you, as leader, should have done without this House having to prompt you. In voting the way you did, you let the record stand that you misled Territorians in a clumsy cover-up on radio, on TV, and in the press. You basically voted to question your own honesty. If you do not trust yourself why would Territorians? You show no leadership to your colleagues. We know it, your colleagues know it, and Territorians know it. You have failed as a Chief Minister and as a leader. You need to go.
Mr ELFERINK (Attorney-General and Justice): Madam Speaker, I defend the integrity of our Chief Minister and our government. Why would I not? Since coming to government, I have striven, as has the government, with one clear thought in mind.
I invite all members to visit my office. I have had a number of members from the opposition and the Independent member in my office from time to time since coming to power. Those who have paid more attention would have discovered there is a single line plastered on every door in my office. You cannot walk through a door in my office without running into a sign. The sign is the last line of the prayer we say in this parliament every day. It is my mission statement and my vision statement. It simply says, ‘For the true welfare of the people of the Northern Territory’.
When I was, many years ago – it seems such a long time ago now – a flat foot in Central Australia and a police officer in the Top End of Australia, I saw things around me which needed to be attended to. Whilst at the time it was a political longshot to stand for the then seat of Macdonnell, against the political monolith that was Neil Bell, I thought, ‘Why not?’ If there is something I believe in, it is that we should stand up and pursue those things. I admire all members of this House, as I admire nearly all political candidates who put themselves on the line to stand for election. The vast majority of political candidates do not achieve office.
For those of us fortunate enough to be given office, we are given a rare and precious opportunity. When I was the member for Macdonnell I learnt many things. I had the seat of Macdonnell for eight years and it was a remarkable opportunity to do something and learn about people from different backgrounds.
In my electorate of Macdonnell, at the time, I could count seven independent languages and cultural systems. It was impressive and it left a lasting and indelible mark upon me for the following reasons. If you go into the bush, into these remote Aboriginal communities, you see a microcosm of what the rest of the community is, but in a much starker relief. For argument’s sake, if you travel to Hermannsburg you will meet some of the most pious human beings you will find anywhere on the face of the planet. They are good church-going folk. They do not drink or smoke. They are people of deep faith, if not a simple view of the world. In every sense of the word, they are good people. I learnt a lot from that because as a police officer you can develop, over time, a jaded view of the world. To find there were many good people in remote communities was almost a surprise to me, despite the fact I had served in some of these places. Of course, the pious and the good are not the types of people you come into contact with as a police officer. Unfortunately, you only come into contact with others.
The others, sadly, were overrepresented. I always felt the urge to see if we could do something better. In saying that, doing something better did not necessarily mean we should intervene in their lives in a fashion where we take their lives over. One of the things I have always believed, and even more deeply believe to this day, is that if you try to take over a person’s life – which is what things like the intervention, welfare and charity attempt to do – it has the effect of removing responsibility.
While responsibility is something uncomfortable, it is an important skill to learn. The more you discover about responsibility, and the more you try to apply responsibility to others as well as yourself, the more you start to understand how important it is. A person who says, ‘I am responsible’, is a person who, essentially, does not need any law to govern them because they will govern themselves automatically. Fortunately, the vast majority of people in our society and in our community will do so.
For the rest, we need a response. That response needs to be firm and to remind people of responsibility. Unfortunately, what I hear from the other side is not a world view I can subscribe to. They argue government should be compassionate. I understand that is their motivation; that is a word used several times by the Leader of the Opposition. Unfortunately, the way it is used by members opposite is an attempt to try to interfere with a person’s life and absolve that person of responsibility.
I cannot subscribe to their world view because, in a practical sense, when you have moved to make, adopt or be compassionate in the way described by members opposite, it is something that is immediate. It is something that has charitable intent, but does not better the person who is the subject of your charitable action; it simply provides for them. As the Chief Minister has said in this House, we need to create an environment where we do not necessarily provide for people, but we find mechanisms by which people learn to provide for themselves in better ways of thinking, behaving and acting.
The members opposite would argue that a compassionate society is one that says we can spend and borrow as much money as we like in the pursuit of the compassionate. That is exactly what they did prior to losing government. That is easy. Today we could say we will be very compassionate and start borrowing lots of money. However, we have seen the results of that sort of compassion in countries such as Greece and Italy. Compassion one day must be paid for the next and, unfortunately, in those communities, money that was spent for compassionate reasons – for arguments sake, keeping retirement rates low and those sorts of things – has to be paid for by someone. That someone is my seven- and eight-year-old daughters. I do not want to burden my girls with the costs of paying today’s compassion on the credit card bill into the future.
The policies of compassion, as outlined by members opposite, are policies which are there to satisfy the immediate. But that is not the legacy that I and members on this side of the House desire to leave behind. The legacy I want to leave behind is a legacy where people stand up and say, ‘I am accountable for who I am. I am accountable to my community, to my family and, ultimately, to myself.’ In doing so, what we then do is look at policies which focus on accountability.
Compassionate policies lead to the concept of things like the BDR, that we, as a society, are collectively responsible for the actions of a few. We have seen arguments about the BDR once again being thwarted by the reality of the statistics that were discussed on ABC last night.
What we do as a government is say we will hold those people who misbehave or engage in conduct which is bad for the rest of us directly responsible for themselves. For that reason, we have mandatory alcohol rehabilitation, not sweeping alcohol reform for the whole community. We say to a person who lies in a park so drunk three times in two months that they have to be apprehended and taken into custody that they have a problem they need to address. As a consequence of that, we have mandatory alcohol rehabilitation targeted at those individuals who are the problem. That is the difference between us and them.
We have Alcohol Protection Orders. We have gone down the path of demanding Alcohol Protection Orders because the person who commits the offence that attracts the order is the person who is answerable to their community, their family and themselves.
I do not know of any person in this parliament who has been subject to an Alcohol Protection Order. I suspect nobody in this parliament has been subject to an Alcohol Protection Order because we do not need them. If we were to commit offences where we had to have one thrust upon us, then we would deserve it. We, as a group of people, do not need them. But, the alternative government of the Northern Territory would inflict one rule for all.
The problem with the one rule-for-all attitude is you are often trying to fit square pegs in round holes. This is the reason the intervention failed. It failed because Canberra tried to say, ‘We know what is good for you in Yuendumu, Hermannsburg, Milingimbi or wherever else’. The moment you try to create policy in that fashion, you run into the problems you always will run into. Local solutions need to be driven by local community members. This is the what this government is pursuing and will continue to pursue.
We are not soft on the community with regard to crime – quite the opposite. We are harder than the former government ever wanted to be. It is for this reason we introduced mandatory sentencing for assaults that occasion bodily harm. It is for this reason we introduced things like APOs and mandatory alcohol rehabilitation. It is for this reason we introduced a number of legislative instruments that will see people go to gaol for longer. It is for this reason we have introduced instruments into this place which will enable us to keep serious sexual offenders in custody beyond the expiration of their sentence because of the likelihood they will offend. It is making those people accountable through those processes. For those people who do offend and find themselves within the system, then the system must be engineered in such a fashion that a person is encouraged – nay, almost pressed – into a response where they will ultimately become more responsible for themselves.
This is the reason we have the Sentenced to a Job program. This is the reason we are going to, increasingly over time, make the prisons a place of rehabilitation through labour, self-worth and self-understanding, rather than a concrete box to do some time. If we are going to correct, then we need to do that which is necessary to correct.
Madam Speaker, if any member wants to see my philosophy on rehabilitation, it is stuck to my office wall, right next to the posters of ‘For the true welfare of the people of the Northern Territory’. Also on my office wall is an artwork by a rape victim. It is not a particularly brilliant piece, but it is poignant because of its darkness. Underneath I have written as a reminder to my staff that this person was a victim of rape. Those of us who work in the Attorney-General’s department look at the artwork, remember what it looks like, take it on board and remember these are the people we are working for and trying to protect. That is what impels me and my colleagues, because we are driven to succeed for the people of the Northern Territory.
Consequently, when the Chief Minister says he has a plan for the people of the Northern Territory, it is because we have a plan which is coherent and makes sense. The Pillars of Justice plan which is being rolled out extensively across government agencies marries up all of these philosophical constructs so there is a philosophy operating which is consistent from the point of arrest to the end of parole and beyond. The police understand their role, the courts know their role and the corrections system knows its role. We can then overlay that with a juvenile justice policy which matches that philosophy, a domestic violence policy – which will very shortly be announced – which will overlay the same philosophy, and we will construct a civil system around it to support it which will reflect that philosophy. It is a consistent, logical, methodical approach that we have taken into this House.
However, it takes time to build and construct these things. It takes time and effort to build something that is of value and worth to the people of the Northern Territory.
I am personally driven by this. I do not want to give the sense that I am boasting, but last night when I completed my last file and looked at the clock, it was 11.05 pm. This morning I started work at 6 am. I relish the opportunity given to me to work on behalf of the people of the Northern Territory and their welfare. I will consistently put my nose to the grindstone as long as the people of the Northern Territory continue to ask me to serve their interests. I am passionate about what we do.
The members opposite would drag this government down and cast it to the four winds if they could. I ask them what they would offer in return. Twice in two weeks the member for Johnston has had to apologise to people for misrepresenting them. He had to apologise to Ms Carney in the newspaper and issue a media release. Twice he had to apologise and he is clumsy in the way he approaches his job.
This is what the Leader of the Opposition would offer in place of me or any other minister in this House? This is who the Leader of the Opposition would offer up? I ask honourable members: really? Is this the alternative government? Is this the alternative minister we would happily see? I suggest to honourable members that is probably not a wise choice.
There are other members on the other side who consistently misrepresent the truth in this House. We have heard it again and again. They continue to misrepresent the truth in this House because they have nothing to offer other than deceit. They have nothing to offer the Territory …
Ms LAWRIE: A point of order, Madam Speaker! Offensive.
Madam SPEAKER: Member for Port Darwin, you should withdraw that. It is a reflection on all the members of the opposition.
Mr ELFERINK: Yes, Madam Speaker, I agree. I withdraw and I will press on. Clearly, there is a sensitivity about these issues on the other side.
I will continue to focus, as I know all members on this side of the House will, on that one fundamental and guiding principle. I urge all members in this House to turn their minds to that one fundamental and guiding principle the next time they hear it. We should take a moment to reflect that we do not work here because of what goes on in this House, on the fourth floor, or on the fifth floor. I urge all members to occasionally walk to their balconies and look out at the real reason we are here. What they will see is the Northern Territory and the people who live here.
Madam Speaker, I ask all members to listen to the prayer again on Tuesday when we say it, and remind themselves when they hear the line that this is who we work for. We work for the true welfare of the people of the Northern Territory.
The Assembly divided:
Motion negatived.
Bill presented and read a first time.
Mr TOLLNER (Treasurer): Madam Speaker, I move that the bill be now read a second time.
This bill is being introduced to align the Northern Territory’s Motor Accident Compensation Scheme with the National Injury Insurance Scheme minimum benchmarks for motor vehicle accidents.
In August 2011, as part of the National Disability Strategy, the Productivity Commission released a report into disability care and support in Australia which found the sector was underfunded, unfair, fragmented, and a lottery based on the type of disability and in which jurisdiction the patient lived.
To address this issue, the Commonwealth established two schemes: the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the National Injury Insurance Scheme.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme will provide individualised care and support for eligible people with a significant and enduring disability, while the National Injury Insurance Scheme will provide lifetime care and support for people who are catastrophically injured in accidents.
The National Injury Insurance Scheme is to be phased in over several years and has been established to provide nationally consistent, no-fault, lifetime care and support for catastrophic injuries caused by four types of accidents: motor vehicle accidents, workplace accidents, medical accidents, and general accidents.
The first stage of the National Injury Insurance Scheme centres on standardisation of statutory attendant care provided under state and territory mandatory motor accident compensation schemes. The Territory is required to implement the first stage of the National Injury Insurance Scheme by fulfilling nationally consistent minimum benchmarks for motor vehicle accidents. This involves providing no-fault, lifetime care and support for people who are catastrophically injured in motor vehicle accidents from 1 July 2014.
Currently, the Northern Territory’s Motor Accident (Compensation) Act establishes a no-fault compensation scheme. This means if a person is injured or dies as a result of a motor vehicle accident, there is no requirement to prove the fault of somebody else in order to receive compensation, allowing for equitable care and support for all Territorians.
The scheme is underwritten by the Northern Territory government and funded by contributions from motorists when registering a motor vehicle or trailer. The Territory Insurance Office (TIO) administers the scheme on behalf of the government. The act prescribes compensation benefits for medical and rehabilitation costs, loss of earning capacity, attendant care, and compensation for the dependants of a person killed in a motor vehicle accident.
Attendant care benefits are personal and household support services required by people who are seriously and permanently injured. While the scheme does not limit medical or hospital benefits, attendant care benefits provided for home-based care and support are currently capped at 32 hours per week and paid at a rate less than what can currently be purchased in the market.
The National Injury Insurance Scheme establishes minimum requirements in relation to eligibility, scope, exclusions, level and range of long-term attendant care benefits for people who are catastrophically injured through motor vehicle accidents. For the Territory to comply with these minimum benchmarks, amendments to the current benefits provided under the MAC scheme are required.
In relation to attendant care, a key change under the National Injury Insurance Scheme will be that long-term attendant care benefits for future accidents involving motor vehicles will be uncapped and assessed against what is regarded as necessary and reasonable for individual claimants. Robust assessment tools supported by evidence-based clinical and practice guidelines will be used to ensure the boundaries of what is necessary and reasonable remain well-defined and clear.
Rates will be set with reference to the market and specified in a fee schedule to be gazetted. This represents a substantial improvement in compensation benefits for the catastrophically injured, as benefits will no longer be capped, but will be aligned with each individual’s needs for care. Other changes to the act relate to eligibility requirements for receiving benefits under the scheme.
In relation to unregistered vehicles, currently, the MAC scheme entitles drivers and owners of unregistered vehicles, on both public and private property, who are catastrophically injured in a motor vehicle accident to medical and attendant care benefits, but benefits for economic compensation of loss of earning capacity and permanent impairment benefits are excluded when the accident occurs on public property.
Under the amendments to the legislation, owners and drivers of unregistered motor vehicles involved in a motor vehicle accident would be excluded from all benefits for accident occurring on either public or private property. A three-month grace period will continue to apply for unregistered vehicles, and this will assist in the fact that the Territory no longer uses registration stickers on vehicles.
In these cases, people who are catastrophically injured in an unregistered vehicle would be eligible for National Disability Insurance Scheme assistance. Benefits provided under the National Disability Insurance Scheme include medical benefits such as clinical health services, medical and social rehabilitation, therapies and care, and home and vehicle modifications. Drivers of unregistered vehicles who can establish they did not know the vehicle was unregistered will be eligible for benefits under the scheme.
Importantly, passengers and pedestrians involved in accidents with unregistered vehicles would continue to be covered under the Motor Accident Compensation Scheme.
As a consequence of the National Injury Insurance Scheme minimum benchmarks, the owner or driver of an unregistered vehicle which is involved in a motor vehicle accident with a registered vehicle would receive attendant care benefits under the scheme.
The amendment removes the inconsistency that currently exists, providing the benefits and exclusions for accidents that occur on public land should apply equally to accidents that occur on private land. Where vehicles are being driven on private property for work-related purposes, then other forms of insurance are available such as workers’ compensation and personal insurance. A safety net remains through the National Disability Insurance Scheme, as well as the public health system.
The exclusion of unregistered motor vehicles is based on the rationale that owners of unregistered vehicles have not contributed to the scheme. Unregistered vehicles often represent a higher risk and cost because they can be poorly maintained, and unregisterable vehicles such as motocross bikes, quad bikes, and dune buggies may be involved in higher risk activities. Covering these costs creates a cross-subsidy which results in a cost impost to premium-paying Territory motorists.
Exclusion of unregistered vehicles from the scheme will encourage people to contribute to the MAC fund and also encourage the registration of vehicles for road safety reasons, as unregistered vehicles often do not meet the roadworthy standards and undermine the identification of vehicle owners as a means of managing driver behaviour.
Additional measures will be put in place to promote greater vehicle registration in remote areas, including increased compliance activity and driver awareness campaigns. TIO currently partners with the Department of Transport to run DriveSafe NT, a remote Indigenous licensing and registration campaign which aims to capture remote Indigenous Territorians who find it difficult to obtain a licence and to register their vehicles.
In relation to conditionally registered vehicles such as Segways and all-terrain vehicles that collect litter on the side of the road, they will be included in the scheme so long as the vehicle is being used for the purpose for which it is conditionally registered when the accident takes place. This recognises that a MAC contribution is paid as a requirement of conditional registration, and owners, drivers, and injured third parties should benefit from their inclusion.
In relation to racing, competitions, demonstrations and trials, the MAC Scheme is significantly exposed to racing events on both private and public land. Even though the current legislation excludes injured parties from economic benefit such as a loss of earning capacity and permanent impairment, the medical and attendant care component of the Motor Accident Compensation Scheme benefits can impose a significant cost burden on the Motor Accident Compensation Scheme. Also, covering races and motor sports events is out of step with provisions in other no-fault motor accident schemes.
Through amendments to the Motor Accidents (Compensation) Act no benefits will be payable for a person’s injury or death as a result of a motor vehicle accident if the motor vehicle involved in the accident was taking part in a motor sport event such as a race, competition, demonstration, trial, or high-speed vehicle test. This is regardless of whether the vehicle was registered or not. Spectators at these events will be eligible for benefits if they suffer an injury during the event.
The proposed exclusion is consistent with the National Injury Insurance Scheme minimum benchmarks, and represents a public policy consideration regarding the equity of providing benefits for individuals engaging in risky activities and where a contribution has not been made to the scheme, particularly where there are other forms of compensation available. This exclusion places the onus on an event organiser to take out appropriate insurance to cover participants and officials in a manner similar to that required for the Confederation of Australian Motor Sports membership.
Territory residents involved in accidents in unrestricted speed limit zones will still continue to be covered under the Motor Accident Compensation Scheme so long as the vehicle is registered and the driver is complying with the road rules.
In relation to seatbelts and helmets, at the moment a 25% reduction from all benefits applies with the exception of medical and rehabilitation expenses if the driver in a motor vehicle accident is not wearing appropriate safety equipment, such as a seatbelt or helmet, at the time of the accident. We are now going to change this so the reduction does not apply to benefits for appliances and special facilities, attendant care, emergency travel and funeral costs.
The proposed amendments restore a greater number of health-related benefits to align with the National Injury Insurance Scheme minimum benchmarks where reductions for contributory negligence are not applied. A 25% reduction remains in place for benefits of loss of earning capacity, permanent impairment and lump sum death and dependency.
There are other minor amendments. A series of relatively minor amendments to the MAC Scheme have also been included in the amending bill. This includes increasing the pension entitlement age in line with the Commonwealth government’s incremental increase for the purposes of calculation of loss of earning capacity benefits. There is also a change in the working hour week from 48 hours to 38 hours for the calculation of loss of earning capacity consistent with national legislation, and a provision that excludes acts of terrorism involving a motor vehicle from MAC benefits, which is consistent with the National Injury Insurance Scheme scope of cover.
A provision has also been included which enables the Territory Insurance Office to reject a claim if the driver involved in the accident does not report it to police as is required under the Traffic Regulations. This is aimed at trying to reduce the number of fraudulent claims received by the scheme.
In relation to the financial impact, TIO commissioned PricewaterhouseCoopers to examine the impact of the proposed changes on the scheme’s outstanding claims liability and break-even premium. The report was based on claims history held by TIO. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates the financial impact of the proposed reforms to be approximately $49.4m as a one-off impact at the time of implementation, to improve the attendant care benefits for existing claimants, and an annual impact going forward of $40 per vehicle.
TIO also estimates there will be additional implementation costs, as they will be required to take a greater role in assessing eligibility for benefits and in approving service providers, particularly in remote areas of the Territory.
Due to automatic indexation of MAC premiums and prudent management by TIO in recent years, the scheme has accumulated significant capital reserves. Given the financial position of the scheme, the adoption of the National Injury Insurance Scheme minimum benchmarks can be funded initially from existing premium indexation arrangements and capital reserves. On this basis, MAC premiums will increase from 1 July 2014 in line with indexation, as is normal.
The amendments to the Motor Accidents (Compensation) Act will provide for increased benefits for those catastrophically injured in a motor accident from 1 July 2014, and is consistent with the Territory’s commitment to the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the National Injury Insurance Scheme.
Madam Speaker, I commend the bill to honourable members and table a copy of the explanatory statement.
Debate adjourned.
Continued from 19 February 2014.
Ms MANISON (Wanguri): Madam Speaker, I support the Health Practitioner Regulation (National Uniform Legislation) Amendment Bill before the Assembly today, but I also highlight the need for continuing work by the minister and this government to fully support private midwifery practice and home birthing options for mothers and families in the Northern Territory.
The bill has been introduced by government so it can create the ability for private midwifery practice as part of the health sector in the Territory. At present there are no privately practising midwives; however, they are in place in other jurisdictions.
Looking back, it was in 2002 when privately practising midwives across Australia lost their ability to access professional indemnity insurance due to the withdrawal of these insurance services. Following on from this, the Territory government invested in supporting a home birth service so women could access publicly-funded home birth care and continue to have choice of care pathways for their pregnancy. Midwives were able to work within the public health and private hospital system as they had access to legal support from their employer. However, a privately practising, self-employed midwife looking to assist with home births could not access indemnity insurance and did not have the support of an employer in the event of any legal action.
To enable privately practising midwives to operate in the Territory health system, this bill will seek to amend the Health Practitioner Regulation (National Uniform Legislation) Act by inserting section 4A, thereby enabling national legislation which aims to allow privately practising midwives to practise without professional indemnity insurance that covers the intrapartum or birthing period.
The amendment seeks to explicitly outline that privately practising midwives in the NT will be covered by the exemption provided for in section 284 of the national law. That national exemption is in place until June 2015. However, there is no clear answer yet on what will happen after that date. I urge the government to start working with its state and federal counterparts to seek a resolution on this matter in the near future. Attracting privately practising midwives to the Territory will be all the harder, given there is no answer yet to what arrangements will be in place next year. All jurisdictions will be facing this same issue.
Seeking an earlier resolution will help give everyone certainty going forward and will help in the case of establishing privately practising midwives here. This legislation goes some way in ensuring the government has a genuine desire to integrate privately practising midwives into the Territory health sector.
The amendments being debated today have followed on from significant pressure on the government from home birth advocates regarding changes to the current government-funded home birthing services, particularly for access to home birth service and one-on-one continual midwifery-led care they seek.
The opposition believes it is important that women have choice when it comes to their options of care when they are pregnant, continuing through to their birth and postnatal care. We believe women should have access to strong antenatal, intrapartum and postnatal care, and have appropriate choice on how they decide to go through birth.
We appreciate that everyone wants to have the strongest and safest care and to ensure the health of the mother and baby is top priority so there are minimal complications and issues occurring through the pregnancy and birthing process. We appreciate this legislation will go some way to increasing access to care options and maintaining high standards around birthing practices in the Territory.
We will support the bill before the House on the basis it will create more choice for Territory families on birthing options and give midwives more pathways for their careers. However, we have concerns about whether this legislation, in some ways, is just a mechanism for government to continue appeasing home birthing advocates while reducing publicly-funded services and midwifery resources for people seeking to birth at home and at the RDH birthing centre facilities. This could be seen as a mechanism to assist government in reducing investment and access for women wishing to seek one-on-one midwifery-led care for their pregnancy.
We have some concerns regarding the process that has been followed in preparing the bill, and the level of consultation with the community and health sector. When I approached some key stakeholder groups with interests in the outcome of this bill, it was clear that government had not been engaging with them about the detail of the bill before the Assembly. They have subsequently been offered briefings and some were only briefed yesterday. Clearly, if you want to get it right, it is important you engage with those groups up front and have those discussions in order to get the best legislation in place.
With anything new, it will take time to get a new arrangement up and running, and for people to arrange the setup on how they will operate, where they will work from, and get appropriate registration and insurance.
I understand the Department of Health is looking at putting in a framework on how privately practising midwives can operate in the Territory. There is a real desire from home birthing advocates in the community to see this framework completed as soon as possible. Understandably, everybody appreciates it is very important to get it right. Everybody wants to ensure the very best practices are in place. Clearly, consultation will be a very important part of that. I am sure the appropriate medical and home birthing advocates would like to be part of that process to get the best resolution for all.
It will be good to hear from the minister about how the framework will be put together and who will be consulted in the process – the time line given, June 2015, is not too far away – to ensure we give privately practising midwives the best opportunity to operate in the Territory and create the right environment for people to come into the Territory or decide they want to go down this career pathway.
In my consultations, several questions were raised about privately practising midwives accessing indemnity insurance and how it works for the intrapartum stage, which is the birth. In the minister’s second reading speech, she stated:
There are also other relevant mechanisms to place a grievance or complaint, so it is known and can be investigated through the Health and Community Services Complaints Commissioner of the NT, the professional board, the regulating authority, which is the NMBA, the patient advocate and the Department of Health.
However, there is no real clear direction in this legislation on the following: where does a mother go if she has complaints or grievances about the birth; when utilising a privately practising midwife, if something does go wrong, how are issues arising from that resolved? Clearly, given that most of the privately practising midwifes will be self-employed and given no insurance cover during that birthing period, they are left significantly exposed. This may also make it harder to attract privately practising midwives to the Territory.
If a privately practising midwife becomes the subject of legal action, will they have access to any government support to a system through that process? We know there would be a range of support for the community home birth service funded by government. However, privately practising midwives appear to be left out on their own.
The minister’s office has advised us there will be professional support relationships built between the Department of Health and the privately practising midwives to ensure they are following best practise and everybody gets to see the best possible outcome. However, there appears to be no real direction on what support there is in whether there are any legal issues that result during that birthing period.
The minister, in her second reading speech, referred to the issue that will also require ongoing attention from the government, that is, the national legislation reflected in the Northern Territory’s Health Practitioner Regulation (National Uniform Legislation) Act provided for an exemption for privately practising self-employed midwives holding professional indemnity insurance for the period ending by the national agreement in June 2015. That professional indemnity insurance exemption period, for both public and private midwives, is under review. What happens after June 2015 is yet to be agreed at a national level through the Australian Health Ministers’ Advisory Council.
Amendments contained in the bill make it possible for privately practising midwives to practise in the NT in line with both the Northern Territory and national law, but what happens after June 2015? I have been advised that the main options at present include:
1. that the national exemption is further extended
2. that insurance companies determine conditions upon which they will offer professional indemnity insurance to privately practising midwives for the intrapartum phase of midwifery care in a home birth situation, and the exemption is no longer necessary
3. the current exemption is withdrawn and, in the absence of professional indemnity insurance provisions, privately practising midwives providing home birthing service will no longer be eligible for national registration with the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia.
That is what I mean about the necessity of the minister continuing work in this area, because clearly she has a very high level of commitment to delivering privately practising midwives to operate in the Territory to facilitate more choice. Clearly at the national, state and Territory levels there is much work to do. Given we are sitting in March 2014 and it expires in June 2015, time is running short.
We all agree that with any new system and services it is important to have checks and balances in place to ensure we have quality practises. When it comes to pregnancy and the delivery of new babies, we all want to know the systems are working well and issues are dealt with effectively.
The bill today imposes requirements on privately practising midwives to report back to the Chief Health Officer so the government is able to effectively monitor home birthing cases. All privately practising midwives will be required to provide reports under section 4A(4) in clause 3 of the bill:
It was also stipulated within the amendment bill that the privately practising midwives will be required to inform the Chief Health Officer of their practising in the Northern Territory before 31 May each year after they register. It would be good to hear from the minister about what type of reporting on the progress of the implementation of the new privately practising midwives will be available to keep track of how it is all progressing.
There were some concerns relating to the collection of perinatal data. It would be good if the minister could outline, with regard to the reporting practises of the new privately practising midwives, what data will be collected and how this data will be used and reported on so we can get that clear today and see exactly how that will all work.
Another issue that has been raised is how privately practising midwives will work with public hospitals and staff within them. The feedback I have received loud and clear is that it is crucial that privately practising midwives have strong working relationships with the hospitals and appropriate staff within them to deal with any issues that may arise during the pregnancy or the birth and, if a mother determines she would like or needs to transfer to a hospital from home, there are mechanisms in place to ensure seamless transitions to hospital services.
Community home birth advocates have recommended to the government that it develops guidelines to admitting the practice rights to public health facilities as part of the privately practising midwives framework. Their recommendations include that mechanisms for visiting access by eligible midwives to public hospitals are essential, all Australian states and territories commit to facilitating women’s access to hospital care by eligible midwives under the National Maternity Services Plan section 1.2.2 which requires a generic process for eligible midwives and medical practitioners to secure clinical privileges, admitting and practice rights to public health facilities is implemented and monitored, and there is an ability to consult and learn, utilising the lessons learned by public hospitals from Toowoomba, Gold Coast, Bundaberg and Ipswich, all of which have cooperative arrangements with eligible midwives.
It will be good to hear from the minister regarding this matter and what work will be done to ensure privately practising midwives have strong working relationships with the hospitals to ensure the best level of care for mothers and babies. It is important that Territory women have choice when it comes to their pregnancy and birthing options.
Last year there was strong community pressure on the government about reduced access to home births and one-on-one midwifery care for women who had previously had a caesarean. This brought the home birthing debate back into the public domain and onto the steps of Parliament House.
Many home birth advocates and mums have challenged the blanket approach by government to dealing with women who have previously had a C-section, rather than individually assessing that woman and her pregnancy. For many of these women it is not just about having a home birth, it is about getting access to one-on-one care from midwives through the home birth service, and they were devastated to lose this option. Their choice had been reduced and a pathway of support they wanted to receive through their pregnancy had been taken away.
The home birth advocates believe a Lancet article published in September 2013 and the Cochrane review of home birth outcomes support that stated midwifery-led care models lead to cost savings for government as well as quality care for mother and child. A key finding from the Lancet article stated they found that using an individual caseload midwife led to significant reduction in rates of non-emergency caesarean section births. Women under the care of a named midwife were also more likely to experience spontaneous labour, required lower doses of painkilling drugs and suffered less blood loss after birth. They stayed in hospital for less time than women given standard care, and they were more likely to breastfeed their babies. In addition, employing a caseload midwife led to a cost saving of $566 per woman giving birth.
With this bill before the House and the changes which have been introduced to access the home birth service and the home birthing centre, there are concerns the government is moving away from fully supporting access to publicly-funded home birth services. There are real concerns that the reintroduction of privately practising midwives could lead to a further reduction of access to publicly-funded home birth services and one-on-one midwifery care for Territory women.
I call on the minister today, as part of this debate, to outline the plans for the future of the home birth service and access for all women wanting to seek one-on-one midwifery care. Will there be cuts or changes to publicly-funded places within the home birth service and midwives and the birthing centre? There is an opportunity today for the government to put on the record if it is planning any further changes.
Clearly, for privately practising midwives to be an attractive option for some families, price will be a consideration. Just like the choice families weigh up of whether they go to the public or private system, weighing up whether they can afford the services of a privately practising midwife will be another issue for many families.
Some midwives will be eligible to provide Medicare rebates for their services which will make accessing them more attractive to families. It would be good if the minister could outline how the government will support privately practicing midwives eligible for these rebates in the NT and help make new home birth arrangements accessing privately practising midwives more affordable.
The Australian Medical Association has raised some concerns regarding the establishment of privately practising midwives being reintroduced into the Territory. They are concerned about midwives practising outside the current systems in place and health issues which may arise when home births go wrong. They also have concerns regarding the fact that during the birthing period there will be no access to insurance.
This raises the critical point of strong working relations with the Top End and Central Australian health services in the Department of Health. For a woman and the baby to get the best possible care it is essential those relationships are seamless and, if it comes to the case where they need to go into the care of hospital staff and services, there are practices and a framework in place to ensure they are able to be accessed at the earliest possible opportunity.
There are still some questions around whether privately practising midwives will be able to start operating in the time we have left before June 2015. It is positive the government has shown their intent and desire to have privately practising midwives, but I hope this is not at the cost of publically-funded access to home births, the birthing centre, and access to continued one-on-one midwifery care.
There are also questions about privately practising midwives’ inability to get insurance support in their practice in the intrapartum period of pregnancy. There are questions we need answered today about how privately practising midwives will build strong relationships with the hospitals to ensure women and babies get access to the best possible care when they require their services and staff.
On a personal note, I wanted to get the ear of you and some Health department staff in the House today. As somebody who has had to recently explore the wonderful world of birthing options and pathways available in the Northern Territory, there is not a huge amount of information on the Department of Health website. It is pretty limited. The most I could find was a couple of pages. It would be great if you could get your communications staff to work with the Health Department to look at it. I might have missed it online, but it was something I could not find a huge amount of information on. Some more would be wonderful.
I acknowledge and say thank you to the Department of Health staff who have worked on this bill, and staff in the minister’s office - Alex and Anthony - who have been very helpful and always help in getting a brief in a timely fashion. I appreciate it. I thank the ANMF and the AMA for their feedback when I asked them their thoughts on the bill. Mostly, I thank and pay tribute to the home birth advocates in the Territory, to the Child Birth Education Association of Australia, the Darwin Homebirth Group, particularly Hilary, Lisa and Alison who have given me an education. It has been your work and advocacy which has helped get us here today. It is wonderful to see people standing up in the community for what they feel is right and give people more options as they go down this special journey of pregnancy and giving birth. You have done a wonderful job which has been outstanding. We are in this place today because of the work you have done. Well done and thank you.
The opposition will support the bill today, but we see there are some obstacles still in the way to getting privately practising midwives operating in the Territory. We believe access to choice during pregnancy and birth is important and must always be done with the health and wellbeing of all involved held in the highest regard.
We will be monitoring the government’s investment in home birth care, one-on-one midwifery care and access to the birthing centre, to ensure Territory women continue to get access to these important services. We welcome seeing privately practising midwives practicing again in the Northern Territory.
Mr WOOD (Nelson): Mr Deputy Speaker, I too support this bill. When I first came to parliament, one of the first issues raised, when I was quite green, was midwives. There was quite aggressive debate on the matter. It was, at that time, a learning curve for me, especially when I had just arrived in parliament and someone started talking about midwifery. There are people in our community – and some of those people are here today – who have long wanted more choice for mothers on where they can have their babies, and home birthing is one of those choices.
I thank the department for the briefing I had the other day, and I thank the member for Wanguri, who has raised many other issues.
The core of what has been put forward today is to allow an exemption from the Health Practitioner Regulation (National Uniform Legislation) Act so midwives can practice without contravening section 129(1) of the national law, which states all health practitioners must have professional indemnity insurance. The amendment will give privately practising midwives in the Northern Territory coverage from section 284 of the national law.
There are other requirements, which the shadow minister spoke about and are in the explanatory notes. The clause provides a risk management strategy by requiring the midwife to give notice to the Chief Health Officer of their intention to practise private midwifery in the NT. This will enable the CHO to keep records of privately practising midwives and to monitor outcomes.
There is another clause which requires midwives to provide written data on cases and outcomes to the CHO. This will be in line with the requirements for perinatal data recoding – I do not know whether that is meant to be recording – under the Public and Environmental Health Act.
As we know, the exemption applies to the intrapartum or birth stage, so mothers are covered for the prenatal and antenatal parts of the birth. The issue has been around indemnity in relation to intrapartum. I raised this issue in the briefing, because I understand there are many safeguards. We are dealing with professional people in the hospital who are well-trained. There are some limitations on either the distance from the hospital or the travel time from the hospital this can apply. It is not for everybody. You have to be, I think, within a certain distance of the hospital. There are some limitations, and on top of that you are dealing with professional people.
What concerns me is what if something goes wrong? You do not want anything to go wrong. It seems the legislation says if the person having the child signs a form – I will read from the second reading:
I raised this at the briefing. I know it sounds like it comes out of left field, but I will put the case of the Howard Springs Reserve where for many years people were able to swim. The Health Department then checked the water and said it was too dangerous and people could not swim there anymore. There were two legal cases where the department – it would have been the Department of Parks and Wildlife – had to check whether by putting up a sign, Parks would be indemnified from any problem that might occur if someone swam in that water. My recollection is that both legal opinions said the department would not be exempted from any actions that could result from someone being permanently sick, or even dying from entering that water.
My concern is the government is saying, ‘We will indemnify you by passing this legislation’. The mother will sign a consent form which is a bit like saying, ‘I understand there is a sign up there that says you do this at your own risk’. However, what happens if something goes wrong? Of course I hope nothing goes wrong. However, we are passing legislation which allows an exemption from insurance at one stage – a very important stage, the point of intrapartum.
I am interested to have it on record from the government whether, by making this law, if something goes wrong they are exempt by ensuring the mother gives informed consent? Does that remove any liability from the government if something goes wrong? In general, I am happy that people can have their children at home. I realise there are some risks, and it is not for everybody. However, there are some people who would prefer, where possible, to have their children born at home. That is my concern, minister, and I am interested to see whether government has any responsibility. Is their responsibility removed if something goes wrong, simply by a woman giving informed consent?
I thank the shadow minister for her excellent response to the bill. It raised a few issues which have been discussed before. The issue about caesarean birth is a topic there has been much discussion about. People on both sides of the argument have very firm ideas. Also, there was the issues of the relationship between the hospital and the mothers who are having their children at home.
The other issue was about the website and looking for information. Some departments have good websites and others have difficult websites. I have not checked this matter on the Health Department’s website. Some sites are not easy to gain information from. I do not know whether it is the way they are designed. It could be me, of course. I am not the greatest person when trying to get information from a web page.
Mr Deputy Speaker, I support the bill subject to getting some clarification on the issue of the government’s role or where the government’s responsibility lies if something goes wrong, simply because we are passing an exemption from the bill. We are giving mothers the right to do this, so I am interested in the response to that.
Mr ELFERINK (Attorney-General and Justice): Mr Deputy Speaker, I also speak in support of this bill. In supporting the bill, I sound out some cautions. I will bring, if you like, a legal perspective to this legislative instrument before the House. I pick up, in particular, on the questions raised by the member for Nelson in this area, and the shadow minister.
The structures of this bill are quite clear in their intent, but it would be remiss of me, as the Attorney-General of the Northern Territory, to not point out quite clearly the implications that associate themselves with this instrument for people who are seeking to take advantage of the permission it enables.
The bill before us does a simple thing: it enables private practitioners or midwives to operate away from clinics and other environments. This, of course, is something the AMA, and obstetricians in particular, have signalled some cautions around. It is my understanding and belief that a woman who is pregnant is not sick. The heart of many of the arguments in support of legislation like this is that births will occur regularly without any form of complication whatsoever.
With the birth of my two children, we had clinicians involved in both cases and those births were in the hospital. One could have been forgiven for thinking afterwards what we were spending all the money on because Mother Nature took its course, and, whilst it was uncomfortable for my wife, nevertheless, it went as it was supposed to.
I am mindful that one of the great truisms of the later part of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st century is that we have become used to medical interventions. We often question why we need those medical interventions. This can be revealed in a number of debates we have in the modern world.
In the immunisation debate we now see in the west, we often hear parents say they will not expose their children to immunisation processes because it represents a risk to the child. Yes, there is an element of risk, but one only has to remember what polio and smallpox was like and, in more recent times in Darwin alone – in the last few weeks – the revisiting of diseases like measles …
Oh no. Is she all right? The poor mite’s taken a tumble. Is she okay?
I am somewhat thrown. For the Hansard record, one of the kids in the public gallery has just gone A over T down the staircase. It looks like she is being well looked after, but we can hear her through the soundproof glass. On the subject of risk, perhaps we have to look at those steps.
We have to look at medical interventions as a greater risk than the thing that can potentially go wrong, and we can often forget the risk it represents. If you look at something like immunisation, we now have smallpox existing, as far as I am aware, in a petri dish in a refrigerator in a lab somewhere in the world. There is a debate as to whether or not we should extinguish that species from the face of the earth. Somebody hit that thing with a can of Baygon please and let us be done with it. I invite any member to Google – for those of you who have your computers open –images of what smallpox looks like. Take the Wikipedia entry to remind you of the reason we have immunisations.
I speak of these things because obstetricians like to be close to medical attention on those occasions where something can go wrong. That is the argument from the medical profession. I believe a large slice of the bills I paid when my two children came into the world were paid onwards by the obstetrician to insurance companies.
Obstetricians are, like any other practitioner, potentially subject to malpractice suits. When those malpractice suits come through the door they are big figure payouts, because often when something goes wrong in the intrapartum stage of a birth, the effects can be permanent and the payout can be literally for a lifetime. This is considered a risk, so much so I am led to understand the insurance companies will not make the product available at all to a privately practising midwife. If this is the case, you understand the risk must be substantial, particularly considering the amount of money which has to be paid out.
If an insurance company gets to the point where they are not prepared to insure for something, they must determine there is too must risk to carry. If there is ever an organisation which can conduct an effective assessment on risk, it is an insurance company. They are only slightly down on risk assessment from casinos and their capacity to determine what is worth covering and not worth covering.
They are more than happy to provide insurances for antenatal care. They are more than happy to provide insurances for the postpartum environment for privately practising midwives. I imagine the risk factors represented in both those forms of indemnities are not substantial and the payouts - or the risk carried in what is potentially paid out - is not necessarily so large. The fact insurance companies say, ‘No, we are not prepared to cover this sort of practise away from the clinics’ speaks volumes to me as a legislator.
However, this bill clearly says we will allow it to occur, but only in certain circumstances. There will be high levels of reporting required and high levels of oversight by the Chief Health Officer – the CHO is the expression - and that oversight means this legislative instrument is trying to mitigate risk. However, we on this side of the House are Liberals, and by definition we believe in choice and in people being responsible for those choices.
I rose to my feet because I want to make it abundantly clear – these are the questions raised by the shadow minister and the member for Nelson – this is us saying to those midwives, do this and you take the risk, because we, as a government, will not indemnify you against your decision. If you want to do it, by all means do it, but follow these rules, not least of which is a full and open declaration to the mother-to-be that you are not carrying indemnity insurance. Should something go wrong, you will still be liable to the full extent of the common law in relation to your tortuous liability – standard of care, duty of care and proximity being the tests, particularly the first two. However, if the midwife acts in a professional fashion and satisfies the requirements of the standard and duty of care as required by tortuous law, the responsibility and expense of caring for that child will fall upon the parents.
There will still be a claim against the state because there will be requirements for medical and health interventions. We are not such a callous society that we would not provide medical assistance for a child who has suffered as a result of being too far away from medical intervention during the birthing process. But having said that, this legislation is making clear to the community at large that the risk is substantially theirs. Obstetricians, the Australian Medical Association and many other organisations will tell them not to do it and stay close to medical facilities in case something goes wrong. If they want to do this, go and do it, but the risk is theirs to take.
I suggest if it came to a place where a person had a child not close enough to medical care and something went wrong, they could still sue the practitioner. If the practitioner was found wanting in the standard of duty of care, I suspect the practitioner would very quickly find they would not have the resources available to provide support out of their own pocket for the child indefinitely. The response of a tortuous action, I suspect, would lead, in one case going wrong alone, to bankruptcy for the practitioner. That does not help the child, and it is this debate which has raged and brought us to the House today.
As I said, we should expect to live in a society where people can make their choices, but the implication of this legislation could not be clearer. It is that while we allow people to make their choices, they also carry the risk of those choices if they do not take all steps available to them to avoid possible outcomes. It throws the responsibility on the practitioners to make sure they provide a standard and duty of care which is acceptable within the terms of their profession. We expect parents to contemplate these decisions very carefully indeed and, should it go wrong, essentially, what this bill says is they are largely on their own.
Having made those observations, I have sounded the caution I wanted to sound in this House today to any Territorian contemplating taking advantage of this legislation. I wish any Territorian who does take advantage of this legislation the very best, and I wish them a wonderful and beautiful experience. If it does go wrong – and the insurance companies will tell us, by their response, that the risk is unacceptable for them – then the responsibility will ultimately lie upon the shoulders of the person who has made that choice.
Mrs LAMBLEY (Health): Mr Deputy Speaker, I thank all members who have contributed to this debate on the Health Practitioner Regulation (National Uniform Legislation) Amendment Bill 2014.
Yesterday the Department of Health held a stakeholder briefing on the legislation with representatives from the Australian College of Midwives, Darwin Homebirth Service, the Child Birth Education Association and the Darwin Homebirth Group. I understand it went well. I acknowledge the contribution those groups made to bringing about this amendment to the legislation, which will allow privately practising midwives to again function in the Northern Territory. They have been the true advocates, as the member for Wanguri said and, without their enthusiasm and pressure on us as a government, this would not have come about. I acknowledge their hard work and dedication to something they truly believe in.
Adequate consultations were undertaken for what is essentially a very small piece of legislation. It is just two pages. It brings us into line with all other jurisdictions in Australia when it comes to giving privately practising midwives an exemption to practice within the Northern Territory. It is fairly straightforward legislation, but it has significant implications. I do not make any apology to the allegation that our consultation was not sufficient; I believe it was. It is, as I said, fairly simple in nature. What happens in the implementation of the legislation, the guidelines, the regulations if required, is perhaps where we could have some more direct consultation with the various interest groups. In the first place, it is fairly straightforward and brings us into line with the rest of Australia.
It has taken a long time to get to this place in history. Privately practising midwives have not been able to practice in the Northern Territory for many years. It surprised me there was this lack of choice in the Northern Territory for a long time.
To take a political position, it surprises me that Labor left this gaping hole in services and choices for women having babies in the Northern Territory. However, we have moved on, listened to people and tried to plug this hole. It is not ideal. We will be revisiting this space in just over a year when the national legislation, effectively, expires.
In response to some of the questions the member for Wanguri raised about what will happen at that point, it is not clear. I have attended several Standing Council on Health meetings, which are the meetings in which the Health ministers gather to discuss these type of national policies, and it is not clear. In fact, at the last meeting it was deferred. There are many differences in opinion on how we should move forward. One view – and the member for Wanguri raised this – was an option around this issue of giving admitting rights to privately practising midwives. That is something I would be very open to. However, the whole solution beyond June 2015 is very unclear. Across the jurisdictions of Australia there is much division and difference in opinions as to how we will proceed.
I will keep the various groups updated as to how that proceeds. I am due to attend a Standing Council on Health ministers meeting in April. I have no doubt this will be on the agenda because it is something we all have to put our minds to. It is a situation that is not ideal on many levels.
First I will address some of the issues the member for Wanguri raised. This amendment to the legislation was a reaction to an issue that came about at the end of last year whereby we, as a government, were advised that, after caesareans, vaginal births taking place in a home birth setting were not safe. We were advised very strongly by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists that having high-risk births – for example, vaginal births after caesareans in a home birth setting – was too high risk to approve or to allow within a public health setting. We had to stop that, and I make no apologies for following the advice of those clinical experts.
It was met with great resistance by various interest groups across the Northern Territory who felt that was very unfair. I spoke to several women late last year on the lawns of Parliament House who said they had gone on to have very successful vaginal births in a home birth setting, or otherwise, after a caesarean, and they felt very disenfranchised by this decision we felt compelled to make. In talking to the stakeholder group of some women on that evening outside Parliament House, it was drawn to my attention that another option to give people choice in this space was to allow privately practising midwives to operate again in the Northern Territory.
That was something we thought we could do fairly quickly. It was my commitment at the time that we would try to expedite this and get it up and running. It has eventuated like that. The reaction to us not allowing VBAC in a home birth within the public health system was around October/November last year. Here we are in March debating this amendment to the legislation to allow privately practising midwives back in the Northern Territory. We have met our commitment. The Department of Health has worked very expeditiously to have this legislation enacted. We all feel committed to ensuring women have this choice which was not allowed to them for quite some time.
We appeased the home birth advocates but, on reflection, it makes perfect sense. When we did the research into what was happening across other jurisdictions, it made even more sense. Why this gaping gap in choice in the Northern Territory existed for so long was quite puzzling.
We are committed to best practice and choice; there is no doubt about it. Most contemporary thinkers in this space – and I regard myself as one, it was not such a long time ago I had children – think it is extremely important that we provide best practice, best quality services in the Northern Territory, and choice in all areas of birthing: antenatal, intrapartum and postnatal care.
However, it raises big issues, and the members for Wanguri and Nelson highlighted some of those. The issue of complaints or grievances around the services provided by privately practising midwives is something I have not put my mind to. These people will be self-employed, will have their own ABN, will be registered as a private business and, I imagine, would have a mechanism in place whereby consumers of their service can make complaints or grievances.
It means, without the indemnity insurance for that intrapartum period, these privately practising midwives will be exposed to legal action. It is a reality the Attorney-General put very succinctly and clearly. That is the reality of this model. It is not ideal and has all sorts of implications for people who are choosing to access these private services.
The Department of Health will be working very closely with these privately practising midwives. The obligations the privately practising midwives will have to report regularly to the Chief Health Officer are self-explanatory. They will be required to adhere to the various guidelines – the Australian College of Midwives, National Midwifery Guidelines for Consultation and Referral – and will be monitored to ensure their practice is consistent with all guidelines and professional regulations in place.
They will have to be registered. They will have to adhere to the Code of Professional Conduct and all other requirements that are expected of any midwife, regardless of whether they are practising in a public or private setting.
It is very difficult to preempt what will happen in the case highlighted very clearly by the member for Nelson when something goes wrong. I can only look at what has happened in other jurisdictions. There have been some very sad cases. I do not feel it is the time and place for me to go through those cases. However, things do go wrong in health and medicine all the time, despite the regulations, monitoring, reporting, best practice guidelines and the best of intentions. Health is like that. All we can do is ensure the risk is minimised.
Things will go wrong and, technically, the government will have no liability during that intrapartum period. All we can do, as a government, is require that these privately practising midwives practice according to all the standards and requirements.
We are fully committed to continuing home births within our public health system, there is no doubt about that. The home birthing service has been a success. It was initiated by the former Labor government and is very successful in Darwin and Alice Springs, and we will continue to provide it.
There is an integrated maternity services policy which was approved by the former Labor government. We agree with the policy, as it is about improving pathways for women. Part of that is ensuring there is a greater and more efficient use of the birthing centre in Darwin. There are some concerns about accessing the birthing service, and some people feel it may not be used as effectively or efficiently as it could be. We will continue to provide the one-on-one birthing model. Having the option of privately practising midwives means it is a one-on-one birthing model of care. If you can afford to pay for the service it is what you get. By allowing this legislation to go through it is saying we recognise the need for the option of a one-on-one model of care on a private basis.
I thank the Department of Health for its great work in this area. As I said, it has jumped on it very quickly. It was able to get the legislation written in a very short period of time. These things can often take many months. For us to have this before parliament within a six-month period is extraordinary, and I acknowledge the hard work undertaken by the department.
I look forward to working with the department, the sector and the community to further explore reforms in this important area of government policy, including looking at admitting rights for privately practising midwives.
Let us get this system in place first. We will get it operating and see how it evolves over time. In time, we can tweak this to make it better and continue to listen to the very strong advocates, the passionate people who have a very strong vested interest in this subject.
Motion agreed to; bill read a second time.
Mrs LAMBLEY (Health)(by leave): Mr Deputy Speaker, I move that the bill be now read a third time.
Motion agreed to; bill read a third time.
Continued from 27 November 2013.
Ms FYLES (Nightcliff): Mr Deputy Speaker, much has happened since this statement was last before the House in November. We have seen the government force teachers to a ballot on enterprise agreements. They overwhelmingly rejected the government’s offers; 81% voted no. It was a strong message from our teachers to the government about the importance of education.
The CLP did not listen to Territorians who, last year, said to the government, ‘It is time to stop the cuts’. Hopefully, they will soon listen. This matter is too important not to. The Minister for Education continues to claim his cuts do not matter. They do matter; they are hurting our schools every day. I again call on the CLP government to stop the cuts right now.
We went to the election in 2012 with a clear message from the CLP government that jobs were safe. It said one thing before the election and the exact opposite afterwards. We all remember the commitment by the CLP that frontline workers’ jobs would be safe, but they have gone about sacking hundreds of public servants on contracts. They are still jobs which have gone.
Before the election, CLP members and staffers stood outside public sector offices with the notorious CLP placards claiming, ‘Your jobs are safe’.
I repeat some of the job security promises they have broken, ‘The Country Liberals plan to strengthen the NT public service. Your job is safe. We will immediately provide secure employment for our teachers. We will immediately support and strengthen the NT public service. If your base salary is $110 000 or less, your job is safe. If you are on the front line, your job is safe.’
The minister constantly talks about our NAPLAN results, and I challenge the minister to go to any Territory school and tell the students, face-to-face, that they are ‘the bottom of the pile’. It is offensive and misleading. The government is wrong to say that education in the Territory is going backwards. The NT has had the largest gains in Australia between 2008 and 2010, made by Indigenous students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in reading, spelling, grammar and punctuation for a start. These results are a great tribute to the hard work of public servants in schools across the Territory: teachers, families and the students.
These improvements are being put at risk by the actions of the CLP government. Minister, is this how you improve outcomes? Do you improve educational outcomes by denigrating public education and students? Do you improve educational outcomes by slashing jobs?
It is not just the Labor opposition which has made the point that the NAPLAN results of Indigenous Territorians are improving at the greatest rate in the nation. I quote the former Education minister, minister Lambley, who said:
at or above the national minimum standard:
That was from minister Lambley’s media release in September 2012. We are seeing gains and improvements, and we need to keep up that hard work.
We are all appalled at the proposed real cuts to education. Last year, we saw the Open Education Centre move from its home of 25 years. The minister said:
That was earlier this year. I ask the government to consult on its plans and I ask the minister’s to give us a timetable of dates in his wrap speech. Has the design work started? When will construction commence? When will the construction be completed? What consultations are taking place? In the meantime, what was the cost of the temporary move of the Northern Territory Open Education Centre from its location on Chrisp Street to Nightcliff Middle School? What was the rush? What was the cost of moving the music school from its location so the Open Education Centre could move in? What was the cost of rebuilding all the music studios at Sanderson Middle School? Do you still commit to the centre opening at the start of the 2016 school year? I hope these questions can be answered.
In relation to Nhulunbuy and education in that region, the Commissioner for Public Employment committed to no changes to the employment of school staff in Nhulunbuy until the end of semester one, except for Years 11 and 12 when there will be no change until the end of 2014. Why is there no change for every school level and every year? In contrast, the Nhulunbuy Christian College guaranteed staff a full year for this year, 2014. I urge the Northern Territory government to do the same.
On 3 December in Question Time, the member for Nhulunbuy asked the Chief Minister about this matter, and he admitted the school population of the town is expected to drop from 947 to 275. There is no certainty for students and their education beyond June, and I call on you, minister, to provide it. You could give certainty today. You could guarantee every teacher in Nhulunbuy now will still be teaching at the end of the year. Families want that, as it would make a big impact on their decisions. If they know they could get certainty for their children’s schooling for the year, they will make an effort to stay in that town for the year. People need that certainty.
I visited Nhulunbuy recently. It is a beautiful spot, but people are upset, they are feeling the pain. The students at that school now have a wall of pictures of students who have left. Each week, new faces go up. You, by guaranteeing teachers will stay until the end of the year, will help families make that decision to stay in that town, and at least help make that journey of change a little smoother.
The past few months have been characterised by the failure of the Chief Minister and the government to stand up for Territorians and the people of the East Arnhem region. The minister can give some clarity around, at least, their education future. It feels like the minister and the Chief Minister just do not care.
There are not many Education ministers in Australia or overseas who celebrate cutting budgets and staff, and saying no to additional funding from the federal government. In the NT we have an Education minister who has used a variety of excuses over the past year to justify cutting education funding and individual attention from our classrooms.
In parliament, the minister admitted the CLP cuts were about budget rather than education. He said:
It is your job, minister, to fight in Cabinet for our teachers.
He is also on the record saying:
At the Estimates Committee, the minister said about teachers in middle and senior years:
Late last year we saw you jump up and down and say:
I again call on you, minister, to release the school-by-school breakdown of teachers, not the 14 000-odd pages you released under FOI. People deserve to know what is going on within our schools. I call on you to release the full staffing figures for all Territory schools.
At the end of last year, we saw absolute chaos. Some teachers were verbally told, ‘By the way, come back next year, we need you’, and other teachers did not know what was happening. Schools had been telling us for months they did not have their allocations. As I understand, some schools received their allocations in the last week of term, while others went back to school this year with their allocations still all over the place. The government cut teacher numbers and support staff, and you need to explain the impacts on each school by releasing the staffing figures.
At the start of this year, in fact, we saw Madam Speaker, the CLP member for Goyder, relay her concerns of teachers and families in her electorate and how they were facing uncertainty. They were not sure what was happening with the start of the school year so close. That level of concern was widespread across the Territory.
The government has not been transparent, open and accountable with these changes. It changed the teacher to student ratio which meant we had fewer teachers in our classes, larger class sizes and less subject choice. They have not been open and accountable about it.
Schools are suffering under the burden of the budget strain. Many already, early on in the school year, could not afford emergency relief teachers. Many were concerned about how they would pay their utility bills. Teachers and parents are concerned and frustrated at the government’s refusal to stop and listen. More recently, we heard there are more budget cuts in education for Territory schools to come. Minister, we cannot cut. There is no more room, no more fat there. You need to stop.
I do not know what will happen. This is from people within schools – parents, teachers – who do not know what they can do. We have lost teachers; we have larger classes and less individual attention. We have seen support programs go. We have seen the GEMS program go. If we see …
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Member for Nightcliff, your time has expired.
Ms FYLES: Okay, thank you. I will continue my comments in adjournment.
Mr WOOD (Nelson): Mr Deputy Speaker, education has been a hot potato in the Northern Territory since the CLP gained government. It has caused some major issues in the schools in my electorate. The member for Goyder has had concerns as well about some of the cuts to Taminmin College and the effect that has had. We both are concerned about not only the cuts to some of the teaching positions, but to the ancillary positions that are so important to making a school run smoothly.
I do not want to talk about that today. The issue I would like to raise is in relation to the government’s education reforms which the minister released on 26 February 2014 in the hope everybody would have an answer for him by 16 April 2014. I raised the issue in Question Time yesterday about the government doing a lot better in bringing people along. They have said. ‘Here is the document we will send out. It is called Reform of the Education Act (NT) Discussion Paper. It will have some Discussion Starters and a second section called Reform of the Education Act (NT) Discussion Paper for Consultation.’ I do not know why there are two separate documents. Why not have one document and part of that document would have the starter next to the section in the document dealing with consultation? It seems to be an overlap.
Minister, the department says in its information about the discussion paper:
That is fine but, having been to a couple of school council AGMs and having been on school councils for many years – I cannot always get to them because I have so many schools in my area – changes to the Education Act would require a little assistance.
I understand you have a starter pack to encourage people to try to work their way through it, but although you are saying there will be another paper later which will be like a draft of the act, before you get to that stage you need to offer the services of the department to visit school councils and talk them through this. At the beginning of the consultation discussion paper the Table of Contents has:
1. Objects and Guiding Principles
2. Local School Autonomy
3. Parent, Community and Education Partnerships
4. Safe Schools
6. Government School Operations
7. Non-government Schools
8. Accountability
9. Streamlining.
In that document there is a huge number of issues and many are important. If you look at local school autonomy, basically, this paper is saying school councils should have more power. I have mentioned before that when one of our school councils used some of its power the principal got a rap over the knuckles from the department saying, ‘Pull your school council into line’. This paper is saying something different.
There is also discussion about the independent public school idea which has been put forward. At the AGM I attended recently, one of the parents made the point that she thought in Victoria, where there are these schools, it had not made a lot of difference. I do not know. Minister, you say in the beginning of this document:
You have to remember parents on school councils are interested in the running of their school while, at the same time, raising children. They do not have a lot of time to read these documents and understand them. If you are a departmental person, sometimes it is not so bad. If you have been on school councils for umpteen years, you might have a fair idea. I am sure there are new people who would have little understanding of some of these important issues.
You talk about autonomy; that is a big issue. One of the concerns raised is a principal is not there just to look after the school, but is also a part of the teaching and learning of the school. If you are to give the school global funding, as you mentioned yesterday, there are concerns that we will not need a principal with educational background in charge; instead we will need a finance officer or a business manager to run the school. You are putting much of the responsibility back on the school principal.
There is a bigger question. If you give all this power to school councils and you make schools autonomous and independent public schools, why not scrap the department? Give each school the curriculum. You can put it on the web page and say, ‘There you are, if you need a hand we have a 1800 phone number. But you are on your own.’ It would save a lot of money, because you are saying ‘It is all yours’. The question then would be, what is the role of the Department of Education now? Is it just to fill a spot in Mitchell Street? There is danger that you are moving away from your responsibility, which is the overall proper running of education in the Northern Territory. There is concern that giving too much autonomy could turn schools into businesses and not educational facilities.
I might be wrong, but why is the department not going out and talking to schools, or at least offering? They may not be able to get to every school. In the rural area they may have a meeting at a school and interested people can come, and a few other schools. This is a big, important change, minister. You said the Education Act had not been changed for 35 years. It sounds like we need to at least look at it. This does not mean it is bad. Just because something is old, does not mean it is bad ...
Mr Chandler: Exactly.
Mr WOOD: Thank you, minister, I appreciate that we are in the same boat.
We need to look at it, but we do not need to throw everything out. People have been looking at this and saying one of the problems is that many things in the Education Act are in here. They should be identified, otherwise this looks fantastic. Look at all of these things we have to discuss. There needs to be something which says these things already exist in the Education Act. These are the new things you are asking people to comment on.
We have Safe Schools, a very interesting section, which talks about the expulsion of kids who are noisy or disruptive. I understand that can be a major problem in some schools, but it needs to be balanced with what we are doing to make sure kids are not like that. What are we doing to make sure we have facilities to help those kids? You cannot throw them on to the street. I know we have the Malak centre and the Edmund Rice or St Joseph’s facility in Alice Springs for kids who have dropped out of the system; however, we need to make sure if you are talking about kicking kids out of school, we also have processes which look after those kids in some way. Are we putting emphasis on making sure we do not get to that stage through early intervention?
There is also Enrolment, Attendance and Youth Participation. We know that is a hot topic in the Northern Territory. The Commonwealth has introduced a team of truancy officers to try to increase the number of kids at school. It is something we are all interested in. I do not think I have ever seen a school which has put in reports that it has 100% attendance. There is somewhere between 85 and 95%, and it goes up and down a fair bit. Discussion may discover how we can improve on that. I do not know how our enrolments, especially in urban schools, compare with urban schools down south. These are issues we need to discuss thoroughly before we have any major changes.
There is a section called Government School Operations which has a lot of subheadings that talk about the curriculum, children with special learning needs, international education and home education – I have a group that meets regularly in my community room that deals with home education – fees and voluntary contributions, additional services to government schools, accessing distance education by choice, charging regimes, student records and data, religious education, power for the closure of a school, advisory councils, etcetera. Some of those issues are important.
Regarding fees and contributions, public education is meant to be free, but we charge. Most people are happy to have those relatively moderate charges applied. Not everyone pays them, but it has been a standard thing to pick up some of the things that schools cannot afford.
A person at an AGM said some of the independent public schools now charge quite a bit, and you start to get competition between schools. Some of these schools do charge fees, and one school starts to look better than another, possibly because they come from a higher socioeconomic area where parents do not mind paying a few more dollars. I do not know whether that causes a problem with one school losing students and another gaining them. Again, these are issues that have been raised and on which the department needs to hear what people have to say. If there are answers for them, fair enough.
Non-government schools – my children went to St Mary’s – also have issues. They are an important part of the Northern Territory education system. About a quarter of schools in the Northern Territory are non-government schools, and they play an important part in the education of our children.
I am not saying there are not a lot of good things in this document, but you should have highlighted what already exists in our schools. We would expect to have some of these things currently. We do need some objects and guiding principles, that is for sure. That is something many parents would like to speak about and give their opinions and feedback on.
I do not think the feedback, just by putting this out to groups and hoping they will write back, is adequate. If the government is sincere in its desire to improve education programs in the Northern Territory and the way we access and deliver education, it needs to be proactive in talking to people.
You said we are looking at 12 to 18 months before anything will happen. What is the hurry? Surely, it would be better not to put 16 April on it? You have to remember many of these school councils only met for the first time last month, or probably even this month. They will have their first formal meetings either late this month or next month. Then someone hands them a document, which is pretty heavy going for the average person, to comment on.
Minister, the department could do it better. One of the faults of the government is its lack of communication at ground level with the people who have to deal with these matters every day. I do not think you are bringing people along. You can issue a media release, do an interview on the TV and the radio, bring out a nice document – it is nice and neat and tidy, there is no doubt about it – but you have not sold it. The way to sell this is to take it to the people and give them the opportunity to understand. It may take several workshops, because some of the issues will take up more than an hour at a local school just to talk about the objects.
If you want to have some basic foundations to education, you have to have some objectives and guiding principles. Whilst you have those down here, there may be other guiding principles people think should be there, or ones they think should be deleted. Not only can the department listen to what people say, it can also give a guiding hand and say, ‘The reasons we put these here were such and such’. It does not need to be a workshop that says, ‘This is what the government thinks and too bad if you have a different point of view’. It needs to explain what is in this and then listen to what people have to say, and take your time, because there are a many schools with many parents, teachers, students and principals.
Education is one of the pillars - should I use a CLP word there, the pillars? I must admit I keep thinking of Asterix when I think of pillars. He used to pick them up and throw them in the Roman Empire. One of the pillars is education, so I hope we spend the time and do not hurry it. The minister said there is 12 to 18 months. Let people have a chance to understand it, and the feedback you will get will be informed feedback where people will have a chance to give you something that will be beneficial to your concept of improving the Education Act and improving education in the Northern Territory.
If you bring the people along, you have a better chance of succeeding. If you leave it out there for people to, hopefully, read a piece of paper, then either you will get very few answers or you will get the criticism and many answers you did not really want because you already have a predetermined agenda. You can always say you consulted, and the consultation will be this book. The government needs to do better than that. Take your time, involve the people, talk to the people, listen to the people, then come back with a document that will gain more support than if you just hope people will be consulted by having this document.
Mr STYLES (Young Territorians): Mr Deputy Speaker, it is a pleasure to support my colleague, the Minister for Education, in his statement titled Challenging Convention – Shaping the Future of Education in the Northern Territory. That is exactly what this government is doing in so many different areas: taking the Territory to a better place than it was when we found it.
We were all taught when we were younger that when you get hold of something, always leave it in better condition than you found it. Sadly, that was not the case when we inherited government from the Labor Party, but we have plans. Country Liberals are the only people in this House with plans at the moment. We do not hear anything about policy from the other side.
I will talk about some positive things shaping the future of education in the Northern Territory. I refer firstly to the ABC 7.30 Report and the story of a lady by the name of Amanda Ripley who wrote a book called The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way. She is a journalist and writer who spent a lot of time talking about how the world can increase its education systems. She went all over the world, looked at all types of systems – a range of things. I quote from part of the transcript of that interview where Leigh Sales, the interviewer, put the question to Amanda Ripley:
I will quote the answer because I will go on to speak about what is happening in the Territory. Amanda Ripley answered that question:
In this debate, and debates late last year, the member for Port Darwin was talking about how we need to increase the professional development of our teachers, and I agree with him. We have some wonderful people in the system and they need to be given every opportunity to increase their knowledge base and work with our universities to increase their capacity, to give that information so vitally needed by young people if we are to have economic development and an increase in our position in the world in relation to education.
In that interview she talked about South Korea. One can look on the Internet to find an article called the Saturday Essay by Amanda Ripley. It is about a South Korean named Kim Ki-hoon who earns about $4m a year in South Korea. I am quoting from this article by Amanda Ripley which says:
I do not want to bore people with the three or four pages of the transcript, but it makes the point that this guy has some techniques in the way he teaches people. He also sells his stuff for $4/hour through people watching on the Internet. He sells a lot of it, because he is one of the best teachers in South Korea. That makes the point of investing in our teachers.
Talking of education direction, one of the points I saw in the minister’s statement was about developing a centre of school leadership to provide improved professional development for our teachers. It is a great idea and has been around for a while, and we should look at doing whatever we can to help that ...
Mr Gunner: You cut funding to it by $1m.
Mr STYLES: Sorry, I cannot hear those interjections, so I will ignore them.
Mr Gunner: You do not want to hear that one.
Ms Walker: You do not have a comeback, that is the problem.
Mr STYLES: I will pick up the interjection. I am happy to answer it. What was it?
Mr Gunner: You cut funding to the Centre of School Leadership in the last budget paper by $1m.
Mr STYLES: I do not have any figures on it. All I know is we are looking at how we can develop. We are developing the centre, and I am sure you will see, when the budget comes out, that things will be appropriately funded. If I have anything to do with it, I will be convincing my colleagues it is a good idea. It is about professional development and raising the standard.
There are many good teachers and we should give them every opportunity to become better teachers. The better the teachers, the better the students. I do not know how many times it has been said in my lifetime, and in this House, when we were at school, if you had a good teacher, liked a teacher, got along with them, and they did a good job, exams were easy. If you know your material, you walk out of exams saying, ‘That was really easy, what a great test’. But it is only when you have good teachers you like and you like the environment that you can do those things.
On this side, in shaping the future of education in the Territory we are also refocusing on key aspects of reading, writing and mathematics to develop competencies in these areas.
In my former life as a school-based police officer, I watched that scheme deteriorate under the previous government. When we visited schools we empowered young people, including kids who felt bullied and not capable of handling certain situations. I spent a lot of time in classrooms empowering young people so they could walk into a classroom, hold their head up and know there was someone on their side. Sadly, that scheme was wound right back under the previous government. In 2001 I was shown a letter signed by the then minister for Education and minister for Police, Mr Syd Stirling, instructing the police to wind back the school-based policing program. Fortunately, at that time, the community pushed back and it did not happen. However, slowly it was wound back to the point that we now have Youth Engagement Officers. I am talking to people about trying to re-engage a range of issues the school-based police officers used to be engaged in within schools.
As we all know, it is important that kids feel safe at school. In the schools where you do not have much access to school-based policing, I am sure there are many kids who do not attend simply because they do not want to be bullied, are a bit scared or there appears to be no one on their side who will look after them. It is good if we look at all those things.
Going back to the reading, writing and arithmetic – the three Rs as they are commonly known in the community – they are very important. Sadly, I have seen many kids who reach high school and can hardly write their own name, let alone put a sentence together. It is a bit sad. It is about social promotion and a range of things, but the saddest thing about social promotion is when these kids get to a stage where they know they do not have the same capability as - not the capacity, we are not talking about capacity, we are talking about capability. These young people who are normal human beings have the capacity to do it, but they do not have the capability, because either they did not go to school, felt they could not be at school, or no one got them up in the mornings. There is a range of issues. It is important we focus on those three Rs and many life skills kids need to learn at school and as young adults going through middle school, high school and university – where not all of them end up. It is about looking at curriculums and refocusing.
In this statement and in the discussion since, there has been talk about the establishment of a behaviour management task force to drive policy change so we can tackle behaviour issues which have a negative impact on education outcomes. It is sad that these young people who do not get to school suddenly get to a point where they all think it is too hard to pick up back from day one. It is important we do that.
There are many things that have occurred to encourage kids to go back to school, such as the Clontarf program and other programs in schools where we get young people engaged in sport. I recall the minister for Sport announcing further grants to parents – the $75 Back to School voucher, another $75 to help kids get into sport and maintain their membership and issues like that.
I also note in the statement the minister talked about developing relationships with international education and having a training hub here so we can build prosperous relationships with our international neighbours. It is all in tune with developing northern Australia.
We all know the Prime Minister wants to spend some money here, and we are doing our very best to get some of that in the northern development area. Education is a great export we have in the capacity of our universities and colleges to train people from overseas.
It is also about developing strong educational links with Asia and teaching Asian languages in our schools. I did not have the opportunity to study a foreign language when I was at school; they just did not have it in my primary school. By the time I got to high school, French was it. It did not look as though I would go to France, so I did not participate in that. I took other subjects. Since then, I have learnt the niceties and pleasantries in a number of different languages. I have learnt some Indonesian, so at least I can survive going through Indonesia.
It is something we need to do in our schools. Given the 2.5 billion people within six hours flying to our north, it is essential, in relation to our economic development and developing the north, that we ensure our young people have access to these languages and can choose to do one, two or three. Most kids in Europe can speak four or five languages fluently, and read and write them.
Due to our isolation, we have not previously had the opportunity to learn many languages or to use them. If you live in Europe, you can bet your bottom dollar there will be people walking down your street every day from at least 12 or 15 different countries. Here, that is not the case.
I was in Singapore recently, where I had dinner meetings with some people. Of the senior Singaporean people around the table – there were about five of them – three of them were educated in Australia. I was talking to a member of parliament, the former Transport minister of 12 years in Singapore, who spent eight years studying in Australia. He also had a very good time here because of the hospitality offered by Australians. Many people from Southeast Asia come to Australia because of the hospitality we offer them.
I took a tour of Singapore last year to look at economic development opportunities and how we could transfer that knowledge back to northern Australia and industrial parks here to create more jobs, because that is what it is about. The two people running that economic development tour were educated in Australia and spent considerable years here studying at colleges and universities, and gaining masters degrees and other qualifications. That was great to see. It is good to see we have so many international students coming to Darwin. We would like to grow that.
It is good to see the minister supporting the development of these educational opportunities for people from overseas. I recall, as a child in my own home, my mother hosted students from Southeast Asia to live with us while they studied. It was a fantastic learning opportunity for a small child, to gain access to people from other countries and other cultures, to learn that it is what is on the inside of these people, not what is on the outside. I found them to be wonderful people. I thought they were really terrific, they put up with me as a child. Like most people, when we are children, we are not perfect. But they developed a relationship with me and to this very day I continue those relationships at festive times. Whenever I get overseas I drop into various places, and we get together and have dinner with those people – terrific people who have also been very successful.
When I look at the advantages of those things and where my life went with the acceptance of other cultures and other people who look different, it was a massive learning curve where you learn that these are good people who love their children, their country and their culture. That is a terrific way to find yourself being accepted in any circle. When you are genuine, people from all races will pick up that you are genuine. That is what I found as I was growing up. Those people accepted me when I visited them with my parents. When I was a teenager they still accepted me. It is one of those intrinsic things you have that you do not realise until you move through life a bit.
In my role as the Minister for Multicultural Affairs, I can work across so many cultures, and I love what I do. People tell me that it shows. I said, ‘It is really easy. It is a great job because if you love what you do it is not work.’
I encourage the minister to pursue developing those strong education links with Asia, and the teaching of Asian languages in schools.
When I look at other highlights of the statement on shaping the future of education in the Northern Territory, I see we are developing the teacher performance and development framework to monitor the ability of teachers and provide professional development as needed. That all comes with the school leadership that is developing school leaders. It also comes with the professional development of our teaching staff who are at the coalface. It is a great thing to have, along with many other initiatives that have gone into this report.
The expanded School of the Air teaching model to 10 outstation schools is another great initiative. Obviously technology plays a big part in this. It is great to see the NT Open Education College is also moving along with the expansion of the School of the Air. However, I have heard some criticisms from the other side about shifting the Northern Territory Open Education College. There will be a state-of-the-art building built at Darwin High School. I find that exciting because that will open up to so many young people the ability to get online, save this material and be able to go back over lessons.
However, more importantly, one of the reasons I was really impressed with this is the principle of what will happen. There are kids who have a wide variety of interests in relation to their educational subjects. Those young people would like to have the ability to choose various subjects. Of course, if you have teachers in the NT Open Education College who are in one place and only have a certain expertise, you say to these young people, ‘Sorry, you cannot have this subject because we do not have anyone at the NT Open Education College to teach that’. Whereas if you locate this at Darwin High School and have three kids who want to do some particular chemistry – biological chemistry or chemical engineering – and we do not have a teacher at the NT Open Education College, you get teachers from the general school population who have an interest in that or an ability to teach it. Then you pull them in for a lesson. Those teachers are also in classrooms each day interacting with kids, developing their own knowledge base and keeping up to scratch with what they are teaching young people.
I see that as a fantastic opportunity for people to increase their professional development. If we have subjects we are not quite sure of, there are teachers who can apply for extra professional development. If we have extra professional development, kids at the Open Education College could also access School of the Air. With the technology we have today we can do that. I find that exciting.
Regarding some of the things I have heard from the other side in this debate, I will quote some of the facts and figures my colleague, the Minister for Education, stated:
The graphs I have used in this House before showed we had 173 students over the same period of time.
There was an increase of 790 staff and 173 students over the same period of time, with an increased budget of 46%. Sadly, we did not see the results in outcomes. We are debating NAPLAN results and doing a range of things like that and, basically, the other side said everything was great. I find that interesting because when you have kids struggling and our NAPLAN results are not good, a situation – I am on four school councils with ladies I know very well who are grandmothers, but not older grandmothers, they are okay …
Mr CHANDLER: A point of order, Madam Speaker! In accordance with Standing Order 77, I ask for an extension of time for the member for Sanderson.
Motion agreed to.
Mr STYLES: I have been on school councils since the mid-1980s when my children went to school. It was around 1985 or 1986 when I joined my first school council at Nakara Primary School, and I stayed on school councils. I became a school-based police officer which meant I had a unique position on school councils. I have been on school councils ever since, so for close on 29 years I have been a continuous member of school councils. You hear many things and get to understand much of the debate and discussion that goes on. I was around when devolution was taking place.
I was also at Nightcliff High School in the late 1980s and early 1990s when they had one of the first Aboriginal units in that school run by a lovely lady by the name of Marg Parks. She was a great teacher and would take these kids who had come in from way out bush in remote areas and did a fabulous job working with them
I also met many urban Aboriginal people. A delegation of those urban mothers, who I knew 25 years ago-plus at Nightcliff High School, came to see me late last year. They complained about what is happeing in the education system. It was probably a couple of years ago now, but they visited me again at the end of last year. They were saying, ‘I am a grandmother, I can read and write and do all of that. My kids are not too bad, but my grandkids at school are really suffering.’
I am looking at the time frame when we were spending all this money, using time and resources to get extra people into the system, yet going backwards. I heard the member for Nightcliff in her closing remarks say she has people coming into her office saying all sorts of things. I find it very interesting because they are not coming into my office. A delegation of teachers I have known for many years has come in to have some words about how they would like to see things go. I have not had any parents come into my office yet. I have been to school council meetings, and I encourage people at them to lay it on the table for me and give it to me straight. There are no frills, nothing. If you have an issue, tell me. If you need to beat me up, beat me up – verbally, that is. Have a go, let loose.
Some have small concerns about various aspects but, generally, what we do in education has not had a huge response from the school councils I am on. I heard the member for Nightcliff say her school councils are up in arms. It would be interesting to do a survey of school councils and see how many of them are severely up in arms, as espoused by the member for Nightcliff.
We need to change what we are doing. There is a famous quote by Einstein, I think, about doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result. The minister quoted in his statement Justine Ferrari’s article in the Weekend Australian recently where she talked about the $40bn a year we spend on students which has doubled in real terms since 1995, yet student results in international and national literacy and numeracy tests have flatlined or fallen. We have a major problem where we are slipping in the educational ranks worldwide because of a system which does not seem to be working.
As Amanda Ripley reported about Finland, the system there, from the 1960s, which is considered the most successful in the world, is followed very closely by South Korea, and we are way behind. The US is way behind Finland. What have they done? We should perhaps look at that system, which is what we did. All the OECD countries are moving to the model we have been espousing since the Minister for Education first announced these changes in this Chamber. It is important for us to look at what is best practice around the world. People tell us best practice is this, so we should consider it.
The other thing which comes to mind is that in every report are the two words ‘early intervention’. This is where we are going. We are looking at early intervention, putting the money into preschool and the early years of schooling, reducing class sizes and giving teachers professional development so they can ensure these kids get the best possible start. That is where you need to put the effort in – at the beginning.
My mother always said, ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’ As a school-based police officer in my former life, I saw the results of people who missed out and fell through the cracks, or went through the early years of school and did not quite pick it up. We propose we do that and look at what we do in relation to early intervention in children’s lives, especially in their educational life.
Geoff Masters, who heads up the Australian Council for Educational Research, said Australia had to focus resources on initiatives that have been proven to work. The Finnish model has been proven to work. That is not exactly where we are heading. The Minister for Education would enlighten me, if I had the time to sit down with him for several hours, and tell me exactly where we are going. When I read his statement, I looked at things Geoff Masters said. For instance, there are quotes from Geoff Masters, including:
You would hear the former Treasurer, when she was in government, saying they had spent so much money and much more money than we did when we were in government. That was the only answer: ‘We spent lots and lots of money’. I do not want to drag my graph out again, but we all know how much trouble we are in financially after she said, ‘We spent more money’ on issues and problems. It is not about spending more money, it is about how the money is spent and value for money.
It would appear the previous government struggled to get value for money. It spent a lot, got a lot of people in, but we did not see any corresponding increases in what was happening. In fact, we saw results going backwards.
Geoff Masters went on to say we cannot keep spending the way we have been, doing the same things over and over, and expect things to change.
I listened to the contributions by those opposite, and they just want to keep things going exactly the way they are. The member for Nightcliff said, ‘This is terrible, you cannot change this. We must keep doing it.’ But it is not achieving anything. I think it was Einstein who said if you keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result, that is insanity. I am not suggesting that anyone on the other side is insane, but it is a quote that is put out there …
Mr Chandler: You have said that about three times now.
Mr STYLES: Sorry, I just want to make sure they get the message.
On this side, the Country Liberals have plans. We looked at world’s best practice and that plan fits in with the overall plans. On this side of the House there is an integrated planning approach. When we are planning this, we work out how each of us can contribute to each other’s portfolios in the most positive way possible, so the whole plan to develop the Territory economically, to have strong culture, have the environment looked after – those pillars we have – are all integrated and form part of the overall and overarching plan to ensure the Northern Territory is a great place to live and bring your kids up, to educate your kids, for them to get a job and to work and play. We hope those people will not only live and work here, but stay here, raise their families and continue to live here. The Country Liberals are the ones with that plan.
Ms WALKER (Nhulunbuy): Madam Speaker, I contribute to the minister’s statement on education delivered on 27 November. Since then, things have become progressively worse in public education in the Northern Territory. I am very worried about the future of education in the Territory under the CLP government, and I am not the only one.
I am an ex-school teacher, married to a teacher, and I am also a consumer of public education services, with two teenage boys at Nhulunbuy High School. On that front alone, schools in the electorate and township of Nhulunbuy have had a double whammy, not only with cuts to education from this very mean-spirited government, but also with the announcement of the curtailment of Rio Tinto’s operations on 29 November, two days after this statement was issued. The incredible uncertainly for schools – as the member for Nightcliff, our shadow, talked about in her contribution on the floor this afternoon – has rocked our community. The government was very slow off the mark to redress the situation of senior schooling when the announcement was made on 29 November, without providing any certainty beyond the end of semester one.
It was a foolish stance they took when they, obviously, bowed to pressure and committed to guaranteeing education for senior students in Years 11 and 12 at Nhulunbuy High School until the remainder of 2014. As the member for Nightcliff said, why not guarantee all school levels until the end of 2014, given that Rio Tinto has provided a good deal to its workforce to be able to stay on in their accommodation? I believe in the vicinity of about 150 families are taking up that option because they want to allow their children to finish the school year.
At least the Minister for Public Employment announced yesterday he has pushed out the guarantee for public service jobs from 31 March – less than a fortnight away – to the end of June. That is a bonus because it was insane in our schools. Whilst teachers have been really anxious about how best to cater for their students, understandably they have also been really concerned about their jobs. We have this bizarre scenario where permanent teachers were guaranteed until the end of June, yet all other public servants were only guaranteed their positions until 31 March. Obviously, we have many public servants in our schools, hard-working staff who are there to support teaching staff. There was a complete misalignment of that. Some hope public servants now have until 30 June. However, it is no different for permanent teachers who are still only guaranteed until the end of semester one.
I respond to some of the remarks the member for Sanderson made about an interjection from the member for Fannie Bay about cuts. He said he did not know about those cuts. We know for a fact the Centre for School Leadership funding cuts in the 2013-14 financial year were $250 000, and in the next financial year $0.5m was cut from the Centre for School Leadership. For this government to say our schools are well resourced is staggering. We know for a fact that cuts to resources, spending, teacher positions and teacher support positions are, without a doubt, going on across schools in the Northern Territory. It is shameful.
On a brighter note, I was delighted to learn the Education minister arrived in Nhulunbuy last Friday for a visit. I have been asking him for some time, and his predecessors. He is the third Education minister in the Territory in the past 18 months. But, he did it. He got to Nhulunbuy and visited schools. He met with some teachers and, I believe, some school council people. I believe at the meeting – it must have been at the primary school – he even sang the praises of the local member – me – and noted how I had advocated strongly for the community. I would be delighted if you could pass that message on to your colleagues, particularly the gentleman who sits in that seat in front of you, Mr Education minister, because I have, indeed, advocated very strongly for my community in my electorate in what is an incredibly difficult time.
Obviously our local media was interested in your visit. I am sorry it is only a small copy; I was hoping to have something a bit bigger. But there you go, you got a page in our local paper, or about three-quarters of a page, with a couple of nice photos and a little write-up about your visit. Well done, minister, for handing over a $50 donation to Maddi McSherry in her cause to raise money for the Shave for a Cure. I have known Maddi McSherry for many years. I have a son the same age ...
Mr Chandler: She had beautiful long hair.
Ms WALKER: Yes, all that long hair is gone, I believe. Good on you, minister, for visiting.
I want to quote from the local newspaper because the headline of the article says, ‘Teacher Conditions Best in Country: Chandler’. The minister is quoted in our local paper as saying:
There was a rebuttal to that and I quote from our paper:
I have no reason to disbelieve the quote from that teacher, who I know, and other teachers there and around the Territory who have been very vocal about what they have to deal with in their schools where there are cuts. Where you have cuts you have increased demands upon teachers and you also have reduced outcomes for kids. Kids cannot learn, believe me. I know the CLP has a flat-earth view of the world, but you cannot have improved outcomes for students when you reduce resources and have larger classes. Believe me, I know, I am an ex-teacher. Every teacher would disagree with you, minister, and the view the CLP holds on that subject.
As we know, teachers have been very proactive and very vocal in objecting to the cuts that have been foisted upon them. We are in the midst of an EBA for teachers and they have been strident. Let us be very clear, it is not about pay or the quantum for teachers. They are protesting the cuts to resources and the conditions, and the fact those conditions, whilst becoming unworkable for them, are disastrous for kids in our schools.
Again, from our local paper, was coverage of the strike in Nhulunbuy on Friday 7 March. Let us remember that the teachers were planning a two-hour stop work on Tuesday 4 March, earlier that week. Thanks to the minister responsible for public education – we know the CLP hates unions – who took teachers to task and said, ‘If you are going out for two hours we might dock you one day’s pay’, teachers – and I do not blame them one bit – said, ‘Okay, dock us a day’s pay and we will be taking Friday 7 March. We will surrender our pay for that day to protest to the government about our working conditions and the impact this has on kids.’ It is not about their pay, as we know.
To add insult to injury, the Minister for Public Employment accused teachers of wanting to take a long weekend. I want to put on display a photograph I took when I attended the rally in Nhulunbuy. Ruth Micka is an incredibly dedicated teacher who works in homelands, and she was carrying a placard which said, ‘Not camping, not fishing, striking for our students.’ Minister, I cannot begin to tell you how angry people at that rally were at the insinuation they picked Friday so they could take a long weekend.
When they left the rally in Nhulunbuy, these teachers, all of them, were going home to work, not going back to their schools, but home to do preparation work because they are inundated with a workload which is not sustainable. Teachers are stressed but are determined to see this campaign out, and I wish them every success in it. It is worth fighting for; it is not about them, it is about their students.
Interestingly, I met a group of teachers from Gapuwiyak who had driven to Nhulunbuy to attend the rally that was held in Nhulunbuy town square. I will talk about my subsequent visit to Gapuwiyak last week, one week after that teachers strike.
I want to touch on the draft report of the Indigenous education review. I believe the consultation in Nhulunbuy was held on Friday 21 February; I know it was a Friday immediately at the end of one of the sitting weeks. I understand that around 80 people attended the consultation session with the consultant, Bruce Wilson, which was held at Yirrkala School. That is quite a turnout. It does not surprise me because there are two aspects of the draft Indigenous education review and two recommendations in particular that people at Yirrkala – not just Yirrkala – are really concerned about. One of them is the recommendation about boarding facilities for students in secondary education in their senior years, and a suggestion they will be losing secondary education in some remote schools and students will have to come into larger centres. We do not know where these boarding facilities are. The other was the recommendation about teaching in English. You can imagine, in the bilingual heartland at Yirrkala, how upset some people were about that. That was the feedback I got from that consultation meeting at Yirrkala.
I attended the session that was scheduled at 5 pm at Nhulunbuy Town Hall. It was not an ideal time for a consultation session, and perhaps that was reflected in the numbers. I believe about 15 people attended that session, mainly teachers. There was a school council representative there, and I was there. We certainly appreciated the overview that Bruce Wilson provided and the frank discussion we had. Not surprisingly, the issue of boarding facilities arose again during that consultation session.
The question was put to Bruce Wilson that earlier in the week the Chief Minister had released a statement about Nhulunbuy and had suggested there were a few things the Northern Territory government was looking at in trying to find some new economic activity with the downturn of Rio. Among the list of those possible economic drivers, what those potential new industries or services might be, was a series of boarding facilities, not just one.
The question was put to Mr Wilson at that consultation session, ‘Given you have been talking to us today about boarding facilities and the fact it would be a carefully managed process, these boarding facilities would be on a trial basis, they would be identified and would progress in a highly consultative fashion, is your recommendation about these boarding facilities in any way linked to the Chief Minister’s statement in this same week about boarding facilities in Nhulunbuy?’ The reply was, ‘No, definitely not, there is absolutely no connection’. That in itself was interesting, but the reason people take umbrage at the suggestion of secondary boarding facilities and the removal of secondary education, particularly senior years, from some of the remote communities, is it completely removes choice. We know that in more than two decades of CLP government there was no secondary education in the bush; no students graduated from Year 12, and that was an incredible deficiency for more than two decades.
If delivering secondary education in the bush is challenging, it is because the former Labor government had so much ground to try to cover when we came to government in 2001, and we had a commitment to establish secondary education in the bush. There have been and will continue to be families in the bush – I am talking about Indigenous families – in homelands and remote communities who choose to send their children to boarding schools. I know of a number of families who choose to send their kids to boarding schools, and it is important they have that choice. What they also have, by way of choice, is the option to remain on their communities, for many of them anyway, to allow their children to have access to senior secondary education.
What I am alarmed about is, again, the sort of policy on the run, ad hoc decisions the CLP government is making. With the announcement this week of Rio Tinto’s $50m, for which the Chief Minister can accept no credit whatsoever, Rio Tinto has made its decision and has put a dollar value on what it will be contributing. The Chief Minister announced that the CLP government’s contribution, in terms of new money, will be $2m – which is paltry – then in his media release he had a bit of a wish list. He said he has written to Prime Minister Abbott, saying, ‘We need you to do this, this, this and this’. It is a bit of shopping list, and there is no harm in prodding the federal government because it has been absolutely useless. It has done nothing other than send Senator Scullion and Minister Billson out for a meeting, just less than two weeks ago, which has delivered nothing. However, from this media release, we understand the Chief Minister has written to the Prime Minister and asked him to provide $40m to establish a secondary boarding facility.
I am not sure where he is talking about and, most importantly, I am not sure who he has consulted. Where does this proposal to get hold of $40m and whack up a secondary boarding facility somewhere around Nhulunbuy fit with an Indigenous education review where submissions only closed last Wednesday, with a number of those submissions strongly objecting to the proposal?
The other big question people in my electorate have is: whatever happened to the commitment for a secondary boarding facility at Garthalala? Whatever happened to the commitment of the CLP government, when in opposition, that had committed to homelands, and had said it supported people’s right to live on their homelands, to receive education and services …
Mr McCARTHY: A point of order, Madam Speaker! Pursuant to Standing Order 77, I move the member be granted an extension of time.
Motion agreed to.
Ms WALKER: There has been no formal announcement from the new federal government that they are axing the secondary boarding facility planned for Garthalala, and when a Chief Minister writes to the Prime Minister, the $40m he is requesting is simply a transfer from a facility that was to be built at Garthalala, but now will be built somewhere else.
Consultation has been missing from this whole process. The Chief Minister is simply looking for quick fixes, in complete contrast to the words of Bruce Wilson during the consultation in Nhulunbuy during the evening I was there. He talked about the need to develop strategy around public education in the Northern Territory and to plan over a period of time that transcends and goes beyond political cycles. I could not agree with him more, and yet by the same token, we have the Chief Minister announcing we will build a boarding facility.
The Chief Minister will have a fight on his hands with Yirrkala people, homelands people and people in the remote areas of northeast Arnhem Land who will be outraged that the secondary boarding facility will be nowhere near Nhulunbuy. That will really get people up in arms. It is staggering we can have, on the one hand, a consultation process through an Indigenous education review and, on the other hand, a Chief Minister making policy on the run and writing to the federal government to say, ‘Thanks very much, we need $40m, Mr Abbott, for a boarding facility’.
I will talk briefly about truancy officers. We are seeing some success, insofar as kids are getting into school. Are they getting an education? There is a difference there. They might be getting into school but are they getting an education?
It is expedient for the federal government. It is looking for some quick wins to be able to say, ‘Yes, look, we have increased attendance rates. Isn’t that fantastic?’ Senator Scullion said, ‘There are no excuses for students not getting to school’. I wonder how sustainable this will be. I am not the only one; there are many people who think this is not sustainable.
We have kids who do not attend school for all sorts of reasons, and very complex reasons, as I am sure the minister who has responsibility for child protection knows. It is not just parents at home being lazy and not sending their kids to school; there are some complexities in people’s lives, particularly among our Indigenous families, as to why their kids are not getting to school. While Senator Scullion may be saying there are no excuses for not getting kids to school, it is like saying there are no excuses for living in overcrowded housing, or no excuses that food security is an issue in so many people’s lives.
With all of the social dysfunction that goes on in these kids’ lives, the quick fix the senator and the federal government are looking for – we are seeing success at the moment, but it is not sustainable. It is not sustainable for teachers in our schools in the Territory who are trying to deal with large volumes of kids who are now being hauled into school. They talk about the investment in early childhood. Yirrkala School, which has had poor attendance, now has children going to school. In the early childhood area, we have one teacher who is trying to run a composite class with three levels. She has Preschool, Transition and Year 1 children all lobbed into the one class.
In the same week the teachers strike was on, there was an article in the paper. The theme of my column a couple of pages over was about the need to adequately resource our schools, and I invited the Education minister to walk a mile in the shoes of one of our teachers from Yirrkala or one of our homeland schools, and understand the challenges they are facing with this huge range of abilities within one classroom. It is not only a range of abilities, but kids with all sorts of complexities in their young lives that is making learning for them difficult, and teaching just about impossible for their teachers.
I mentioned, having met with some Gapuwiyak teachers. I drove to Gapuwiyak last Thursday and stayed the night. I try, when I go to these remote communities, to stay the night there and spend some quality time with people. Teachers were telling me about the challenges they face in the school at Gapuwiyak where they have had quite good attendance for some time, and about the impact on their school with the loss of four positions. They just cannot deliver the programs they want to and, therefore, cannot deliver the outcomes they want to provide for students.
In 2008 that school had eight Year 12 graduates, which is an outstanding result. The minister and the Education department may not think so, but it is. These are families who want their kids to remain on country and remain close by. I know that is quite a different view of the world; the Noel Pearsons of the world from the Cape York Institute have a different view that children need to get out of their communities. We do not have a one-size-fits-all approach to education. It is important to recognise what goes on in the different regions of the Northern Territory and what families are seeking for their kids.
It goes back to this business of consultation about a boarding facility. I am here to advocate for the people of Gapuwiyak, which is not in my electorate; it sits in the member for Arnhem’s electorate but is only two hours away from me. Families there want to see senior secondary education maintained in their school and are horrified at the prospect their children may be sent to a boarding facility around Nhulunbuy. I deliver that message most emphatically to the Minister for Education.
Minister, I appreciate you have a challenging job. I said to the Minister for Parks and Wildlife recently that being around the Cabinet table and standing up for the area of responsibility you are delivering is a fairly competitive process. You appear to be the one minister who has rolled over to find budget savings. It is appalling that Education, which is so important in building the Territory and the capacity of young people in communities around the Northern Territory, is severely impacted by the cuts being inflicted.
We should not be spending less money on education, we should be spending more. I implore you, minister – I am sure your budget Cabinet has probably just about wound up, but we need to see more money in education, more resources, not for the heck of spending, but to deliver the very best outcomes for students around the Northern Territory.
Mr CHANDLER (Education): Madam Speaker, I thank everyone who has contributed to the debate tonight and earlier when the statement was first brought to the House.
A lot of rhetoric has been thrown around again, but there was some interesting information and I pay credit where it is due. I found the member for Nhulunbuy’s approach very constructive. There were some things I did not know about and I have taken some notes and will follow them up. There will always be a difference in opinion on both sides of the House when it comes to how we educate children in the Northern Territory. We heard it clearly from the member for Nhulunbuy who said we must throw more money at it. The member for Sanderson raised the point that in the last five years of the Labor government, there were 790 extra positions in Education, an increase of 46% of the budget and $210m. At the same time we had 790 new employees in the Department of Education, our student enrolments grew by only 173. That is the proof that money is not the answer when it comes to improving educational results. The financial investment increased, but NAPLAN results went backwards.
I will give you a couple of examples: Year 3 numeracy went from 77% at or above the national minimum standard to 70%. Year 5 reading went from 62.5% at or above the national minimum standard to 61%. Even after $210m worth of additional funding, after employing 790 new staff in Education, our education results were going backwards. You do not have to be Einstein to realise that throwing more money, particularly untargeted money, into education was not the answer.
I know the budget has been bandied around as a reason for making savings in different areas. I put to you that even if this government was cashed up, even if the previous government left the Country Liberals government with money in the bank and no debt, I would still have responsibility over a department with perhaps the second biggest budget in the Northern Territory. I would be looking at the budget and how it is spent very closely, because it is public money and must be spent wisely.
Education is important, but so is spending public money wisely. Right across the Northern Territory there is a lack of evidence that money has been spent to benefit children in the classrooms, which is where we must focus. Every decision we make in education must focus on how it will improve results in the classroom. Over the last few years, I have seen, probably over the last decade, where money could have been spent better. I have seen some amazing gymnasiums. There might be some people who say it is great to have sporting equipment in these schools, but I have seen some gymnasiums so well-equipped they would not look out of place at any major club on the North Shore of Sydney. The sad thing is that in some of these schools, these gymnasiums are locked up, so all of this money is being expended on gymnasium equipment which is locked up for most people.
A 46% increase in education investment and falling results is a sad indictment of the previous government, because it lost focus. It continued to add what we call ‘bolt-ons’, one after the other. It was a scattergun approach to education, trying to find the silver bullet. It was well intentioned. It does not matter what side of politics you come from, you want the best outcomes for education. You try to achieve good outcomes, but Labor had five years where it put on 790 more staff when student numbers went up by about 173.
That does not make sense, particularly when you see the results went backwards. I still get frustrated with the rhetoric coming from the other side. Yes, there are 35 fewer teachers in the system today than this time last year, but if you look at five years ago, when there were 790 employees less than we have today, how bad was the system then? It was under the Labor government. We have taken away 35 teachers, but five years ago, there were 790 fewer positions in education. Yes, 35 teachers have the potential to make a difference, but five years ago, the department was 790 shy of where it is today. There was a massive increase in resources into education, particularly over the last five to seven years.
Much of what has come through in the debates has been rhetoric. I put it to the opposition that they have run, in conjunction with the unions, a very successful campaign in destroying the image of education in the Northern Territory. Parents came to speak to me over the Christmas period, and have come to me again since schools have gone back. The sky did not fall in; schools are open, teachers are in front of classrooms and the start of the year was very similar to every other year in the last 10 or 12 years. There was about a 1.4% rate right across the Territory where we were in the recruiting phase. That is quite a normal thing when you have a beast the size of Education, when you have parents up to the last week and even up to the day school starts, coming in to enrol their children.
In an organisation the size of the Department of Education you will always have tweaks and balances made right up to the last day, and even into the first few weeks of school. Sometimes families are moving into the area, and some families have left and not notified schools. There are always adjustments. The same thing happens every year, but you would expect from the rhetoric the other side was throwing out constantly late last year, and again earlier this year, that the sky had fallen in. You would think we had destroyed Education, we were closing schools, there would not be teachers in classrooms, we would have 35 or 40 children in each of the classrooms, and that is just not true. What it did do was send a really bad image to the general public about what I would still say is a pretty damn good education system. Are there areas we need to improve? Damn right we need to improve, absolutely right we need to improve, but it is not being destroyed, as you would think from the rhetoric on the other side.
There were about 35 media releases from about April last year. Every one of them has mistruths in it, and I have them all here. I could go through them one by one, but I do not want to take up all the time tonight just pinpointing where the information in those media releases is incorrect. What is more disappointing is that sometimes when information had been corrected by the department, the member for Nightcliff, in particular, would go on with the same rhetoric.
Were there schools that had some issues because of the size of education and issues at the school level? Absolutely, and that happens every year, but a responsive department gets on and works with principals and the school council and, wherever possible, tries to resolve those issues. That is the beauty of the formula we have today in staffing schools, and that is where we will see attendance go up, where we will see enrolments improve and see an increase in resources. Conversely, in schools where we see attendance rates dropping, we must, at some stage, take the appropriate level of resources from those schools and put them into schools where we see growth.
As I said, I have copies of 35 media releases here, most of them from the member for Nightcliff, some from the Leader of the Opposition and some from the member for Fannie Bay, Michael Gunner. Most of those from the member for Fannie Bay are not too bad; they are a lot better than what has come from the member for Nightcliff and the Leader of the Opposition. Perhaps that is why some of his colleagues favour him as the new leader, because at least he does not try to spin the wheel as much as some of the rhetoric that goes on in here. They tell untruths, time and time again. Why? Because they have heard something or someone has told them something, and they have not bothered to check it before going to print or fronting the media.
One embarrassment for the member for Nightcliff must have been when she stood outside the Malak Re-engagement Centre last year, and pulled out the media – I think it was a Friday, around 4.30 pm – to sprout that we were closing the Malak Re-engagement Centre, all because I had visited it. In fact, what I saw there impressed me. What I wanted to see was more students engaging. I wanted to see that invested resources were being better used. I have given the department CEO, Ken Davies, an instruction that we must find ways to better use that facility and better engage with students, so we have 30 or 40 children going there every day, instead of six or eight children. It is a wonderful resource, but to stand out the front with union mates and say we were about to close the Malak Re-engagement Centre must have been a huge embarrassment because, again, she got it wrong. This has happened time and time again. As I said, there are 35 media releases here, all with mistakes. In fact, the first one even has the wrong date.
I will go back to the member for Nightcliff’s statement that she made, or her reply to this statement. On page one, she says:
You can cherry pick the figures all you like to make a story, just as I can. I could cherry pick some of the figures from our NAPLAN results and show you there are excellent areas within our education system. As I said, the system is not broken. We have some fantastic teachers in the Northern Territory in some of the most challenging conditions in this country, and some of the results are fantastic. But we still have a sea of red compared to the rest of the nation. That is something we should stand proudly together on to work at ways to improve it.
Further down she said, a throwaway line, that it does not make sense to slash and burn. I hardly think 35 teachers is a slash and burn program.
Again, you have catastrophised education to the point where there was, I believe – and there is evidence there was – a small movement of people from the public to the private system over the Christmas period, on the back of the scare campaign run by the opposition and the unions. I had parent after parent coming to me afterwards to tell me they were bringing their children back into the public system or were disappointed because they figured the schools were closing down, we would not have classes open and we would have teachers in front of 40 kids. That did not eventuate, and they had fallen hook, line and sinker for the rhetoric the unions and the Labor opposition would have you believe last year. It did not happen. No schools have closed, teachers are teaching and we have wonderful kids in our classrooms.
Does that mean we can take our eye off the ball? No, we have to find ways to improve education. That is why we are looking at middle years, it is why we are reviewing Education and it is why we are investing in new schools. It was fantastic being in Palmerston this morning with the candidate for Blain, Nathan Barrett. The reality is that $1.3m to duplicate the Rosebery preschool is evidence we are investing in new infrastructure. In Palmerston east, Zuccoli will continue to grow, and it will demand a new primary school in the very near future.
We know we have special needs requirements, both in Palmerston and the greater Darwin area, closer to Darwin with the new Henbury School. These are all things that are proposed forward works for education over the next five to 10 years. One of the things I did on coming into government and being made the Minister for Education was to commission a review into what infrastructure we would need for the next decade. John Glasby has done a fantastic job in identifying where the growth will be across the Northern Territory. There are a number of hot spots in the city centre. We can see the unit growths, and the demand will be on government to provide additional educational facilities in the city.
The rural area will continue to grow. I know the members for Goyder and Nelson and those other rural folk may not like that, but eventually the rural area will grow in certain areas, with people living outside what you might call the district centres. There are still more and more people moving to the rural area, which will demand infrastructure. Look at Taminmin College today. It is a very big school, and there will come a time soon where we will have to look at whether it is a new middle school that is needed there or a new high school and primary school.
The new preschool at Durack, the new childcare centres that are being constructed and the ones we are taking over from Palmerston council all point to the fact that we are a government that is listening to the community and putting in infrastructure where it is required. The beauty of the system and the way we resource schools today is that if a school grows, so will its resources. That might sound like common sense, but you must have a better understanding of attendance and enrolments, and better ways to track students. These are all things we are working on at the moment.
To summarise some of things we have done in government:
we have developed the Centre for School Leadership which provides improved professional development for our teachers
we refocused on the key aspects of reading, writing and mathematics to develop contemporaries to these essential areas
we have established the behaviour management task force to drive policy change so we can tackle behavioural issues that have a negative impact on education outcomes
we have established a task force to develop an international education and training hub so we can build a prosperous relationship with our international neighbours and develop northern Australia
we have doubled the Back to School payment from $75 to $150 to help parents with the cost of going back to school
we have made NTCET results publicly available on the Education department’s website, something Labor wanted to hide
we developed strong education links with Asia and teaching Asian languages in schools
we have agreements in place with schools in Vietnam, Japan and Timor-Leste about principal, teacher and student exchanges, and there will be more on that later this year.
Mr ELFERINK: A point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker! Pursuant to Standing Order 77, I move the minister be granted an extension of time.
Motion agreed to.
Mr CHANDLER: I thank the member for Port Darwin, who is exceptionally interested in education. I put to you he was deeply disappointed when he no longer had the Education portfolio. He got a kick out of it. To continue:
we have provided further grants to childcare and early learning centres worth $150 000 annually
we are building five child and family care centres, four of which are co-located with local primary schools to promote the importance of education from an early age
we have developed a teacher performance and development framework to monitor the ability of teachers and provide professional development as needed
we have provided further incentives to retain remote teachers through training and HECS offsets
we have continued our commitment to independent Indigenous schools through financial assistance to Kormilda College for its expansion
we are partnering with Transport to deliver safer roads
we are delivering professional learning to school staff
we have undertaken the most comprehensive review of Indigenous education in 15 years to fix the mess left by Labor, of which they are proud
we have developed a greater Darwin school infrastructure plan, which I have spoken about, from John Glasby, so we can prioritise our investment to deliver exactly what the community needs
we are building a $50m state-of-the-art NTOEC at Darwin High School to service the entire Northern Territory and beyond, which really excites me
we have refocused school staffing on the early years with an additional 63 teachers in Transition to Year 2 this school year; and
we are also reviewing the Education Act, which is 35 years old and not suitable to support a modern education system.
The member for Nelson raised the issue of feedback and providing ample time for feedback into the Education Act. I somewhat agree with the member for Nelson on this, except in my experience, when you provide a finite amount of time there will inevitably be extensions made because people will contact you in the last few days. If you do not put a tight date in, these things can tend to blow out six months, 12 months, 18 months and you are still waiting for a decision. If, however, people put information in late, of course it will be accepted. I want as many people as possible to provide information back into this system, because the more information we have, the better it is. My experience is even when you give an extension, people are still rushing for the last few days. If you look at the dates on most things that turn up in submissions, they are usually dated the day submissions close, sometimes the day after and sometimes the day before. Usually people leave it until the last moment to put their heads together, but I welcome that feedback.
This piece of work is so important. It is probably the most important legislation I will have the privilege to deal with in this House. It is something I want to get right. The opportunities it could create for so many young students for the next 30 to 35 years are too much to get wrong, so we must listen to as many people as possible and ensure we get this right. It needs to be contemporary and have the robustness to take us through the next decade and beyond.
I will sum up, this is a government that is really focused on improving education. However, we will not fall for the trap of just being measured on the amount of money spent on education. It must be targeted spending. As I said before, I have visited schools. I was at a school the other week and was concerned there was a number of treadmills just behind desks and not in an exercise area. It could have been over years, but they had spent money on treadmills for staff. Do not get me wrong, being physically fit is extremely important. However, I still did not understand. This equipment would be expensive, and there was not one treadmill in this section of the school, there were three. It made me think of the resources our schools get. It was no different to a couple of weeks ago when I was travelling to Kintore, Docker River, Mutitjulu, Finke and the great school at Yulara. I went into one of the storerooms and saw the resources the schools have available. They are second to none. One teacher who was originally from the Territory, had gone to Queensland and come back said, ‘It is second to none. The resources our schools have compared to some of the schools in Queensland would blow you away.’
When I was speaking to those teachers I raised the Education Act with every one of them, and the importance of, at their levels, providing feedback into the system. We have well-resourced schools across the Territory. You can argue all you like that a few dollars taken out of Education here and there – the opposition will say we are selling out education and destroying education.
However, I can tell you of a culture that existed under the Labor Party where there just did not seem to be any care about how public money was spent. You can find evidence wherever you go of the expenditure on waste, and it is not money wasted that might be seen as just thrown away, but it was how it was spent. We really must think every time we are about to spend money, particularly on education: how will it benefit the child in the classroom? How will the outcome for that child be improved through spending that money? As I said, I have seen evidence over the last five or 10 years where I would argue that some of the money that has gone into Education has not benefited students and improved outcomes. There are always ways you can make savings.
There are many recipes to make a chocolate cake. We just do not subscribe to the recipe the Labor Party has used for the last decade or more in the Northern Territory. There will be changes, and some of the changes will be quite challenging. We will have to meet those challenges, the rhetoric thrown up by the Labor Party and, from time to time, by the unions. However, I have the courage to stand up and do it because I care about education.
I care about the future of our students and I will not give up on this fight to improve educational outcomes, whether you are a student in the northern suburbs, in Docker River, Mutitjulu, Kalkarindji, or any other place across the Northern Territory. They deserve a government that will stand up for them to improve their results and provide them an opportunity for the future, which means jobs and, perhaps, seeing the wider world. That opportunity can only come through a decent education, and that is something this government is working really hard to do. Yes, it will be a different approach to that of the former government, but I have put up the statistics before: 790 employees, $210m extra in the budget and our outcomes were not improving. That is not good enough, and this government will not rest until we see results improve for our students across the Northern Territory.
Motion agreed to; statement noted.
TABLED PAPERS
Travel Reports from the Members for Arnhem and Casuarina
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I table seven travel reports, six from the member for Arnhem and one from the member for Casuarina, under clause 4.1 of the determination.
Mr ELFERINK (Leader of Government Business): Mr Deputy Speaker, I move that the Assembly do now adjourn.
Ms PURICK (Goyder): Mr Deputy Speaker, I will speak briefly on the Friends of the Taminmin Library Inc, which is based at Taminmin College. I recently attended its AGM, on a Saturday, and members elected their new committee and office bearers for 2014. Congratulations to the following committee people, some of whom have been on the committee for some time in the past, and some are new people.
The chairman is Sandra Parker, the vice chairman is Jon Ottway, the secretary is Angela Wallace, the treasurer is Shelley Grobler, and the public officer is Sandra Parker. The committee members are: Anna Durbridge; Lyn Gerdes; Pat Jones; Robin Hempel and Pauline Fitzmaurice. There are many more people associated with the Friends of Taminmin Library. I am a member, and I also note the member for Nelson is a member of this group. It is a very active group. Some people may be of the view these days that libraries are not so much what they used to be, but the library at Taminmin is definitely not in that category. It is the hub of the rural community, many activities are held there and many people go to that library for a variety of reasons, not the least to borrow books, read books and engage with other people with a similar hobby.
It also provides library services for Taminmin College. At the AGM, apart from the usual business of the AGM, the library manager, Iris Beale, provided some information and a bit of a snap shot and summary of what has been going on in the library over the last year. It was very interesting to see some of the statistics she provided. I tried to do a bit of research on how Taminmin Library compared with other libraries in the Top End, such as the City of Darwin library, Nightcliff, Casuarina and Karama libraries, and I also tried to get some information from Palmerston library. They are clearly servicing a far greater population than we have in the rural area. From the comparison I have done, I believe Taminmin Library is probably punching a bit above its weight and has not done a very bad job at all, given it is a small rural library, tucked away inside a large local secondary school, or composite school, as I think it is now called.
Over the past year the library had approximately 4800 patrons, 1400 from Taminmin College and 3400 from the community. It answered about 7540 inquiries and trained 96 people on computers. I know many of the people they help with computers are seniors or people who have retired. They are the type of people who have grown up without much computer knowledge, but they realise it is the way of our future, particularly with Facebook when they are conversing with their grandchildren. I have helped a few people come to grips with modern technology.
About 118 000 people visited the library, which included college students, the public and teachers. The ratio of college to public visits is about 2 to 1. Over the year, they issued 38 000 loans and their weekly programs included children’s programs, seniors programs and tax help special events. They held 247 separate events, which had about 7000 people attending, and that is extraordinary. They put 100 new items into the Litchfield local history collection. People would perhaps not be aware of that, but they have a really good history collection at that library of everything to do with the greater rural area of Darwin, whether it be people, events, what has happened, what has not happened, how the area has grown, the good, the bad, the ugly and everything in between. That includes newpapers, local newspapers, maps, posters, photographs, as well as, of course, books.
Over the year they added 1571 new items to the collection, which includes approximately 400 e-books. It does not include library books bought by the college, nor does it include books gifted to the library through a variety of people and ways. Interestingly, the library manager, Iris Beale, said there is more and more demand for e-books. It will become a balancing act of how much money you expend on purchasing e-books versus how much money you spend on purchasing normal books we are used to, which are the paper and hardbacks.
Some of the innovative ventures the library does – and they are very enjoyable – include the Library Expo, which was held on the Humpty Doo Village Green in the Dry Season school holidays. They are going to repeat this again this year. They did it at that time last year because the school grounds and access to the library was all a bit mucked up because of construction works, but it turned out to be a really good idea out in the open, and many community groups also participated.
The Funky Chicken production, a dramatised book about a cheeky chicken that ended up in Humpty Doo, was also held at the library and 300 local children participated. The production was a huge hit. If you can imagine 300 little children in that library, it was definitely a sight to be seen.
The library gets involved – and the Friends of Taminmin Library also take part – in a function called Darwin to the Doo, which is where you see a lot of vintage and veteran cars leave the historical air hangar in Parap to travel to the library where they go on show. There is music, a band, food, refreshments, lots of other cars, tractors and even the few ubiquitous ‘beaut utes’. It is a good day. It is held sometime in July.
They get involved in the Biggest Morning Tea for cancer fundraising, and in the National Simultaneous Storytime, which I have been to, and I know the member for Nelson has been to a few times. That is also a fun event. The flagship is the Seniors Poetry Lunch and seniors poetry day, which is held in August. Then sometime after that they launch the poetry anthology for the year, which is usually attended by anything between 30 and 80 people. Refreshments are provided and it is a really good day where people read either the poems they have written or poems they have chosen out of a book. There have been other activities. There have been people who have sang, and we have even had junior poets for that day. I think that has been going on for 10 years now. There are some people who have been there from the very beginning. Congratulations to Sandra Parker, who was one of the driving forces of the Seniors Poetry Lunch and day.
I put on the record the good and fine work the Friends of Taminmin Library do, and I know they will continue to do it because they are passionate about libraries, reading books, the written word and all that is associated with it. They will have many more enjoyable functions in the future, and I encourage anyone who is going for a drive down the track to call in to Taminmin Library and say hello to them all in there.
Mr STYLES (Sanderson): Mr Deputy Speaker, I have some great news about a great event I recently attended, the Music NT program launch for the 2014 program. The Northern Territory government is committed to developing a confident culture across the Territory by encouraging young people to get more involved with music. It is one of the numerous plans the Country Liberals have to make the Territory a better place to live, work and create music in.
Music NT has been the peak body for contemporary music since 1996 and has helped numerous local performers go from the local scene to national recognition. Gurrumul Yunupingu and Sietta are two success stories of Music NT. It does great work with local artists, and is an outstanding supporter not only of local music, but Aboriginal music as well.
The program for 2014, which I had the pleasure of launching, is an ambitious one. It will reach every corner of the Northern Territory and will focus on providing services that will benefit the whole of the Territory’s music scene. The regional areas music program has previously been very successful in taking support beyond Darwin and reaching out to all parts of the Territory.
Some of these programs include NT Song of the Year, whose winners have subsequently gone on to greater things; the National Indigenous Music Awards, which will continue to grow and are fast becoming recognised as the Indigenous equivalent of the ARIA awards in stature and significance; the Sista Sounds and Desert Divas initiative, which focuses on aspiring female Aboriginal musicians and singer songwriters as well.
Music NT will also be conducting the intune music conference, which will bring music reps to the Territory to check out our talent and pass on advice and education. A highlight of the program will be the Bush Bands Bash, which will allow a large number of performers to hone their skills and performances, gain industry knowledge and put it all into practice at an impressive concert.
The program has resulted in a number of great outcomes for Indigenous music, such as identifying and supporting young band managers and creating opportunities for bands to tour nationally. Organisations such as Music NT need drivers to achieve goals. In this case, those drivers are members of its board. Without these board members and their direction, enthusiasm and commitment, Music NT may not have gone as far as it has. Cain Gilmour is Chair, Simon Pedder is vice-Chair, Lesley Faehse is treasurer, Jess Black is secretary and other members are Scott Large and Justin Quinter. Programs under the direction of the board are a great asset to the Territory and the music industry.
When we move to the operational side of Music NT, I must congratulate Mark Smith, a wonderful young man who has been with this organisation for seven years and is the innovator and driving force who gives inspiration to the other parts of the fantastic team who make up Music NT. Those people are: operations manager, Anjea Travers; Milyika Scales, the Central Australia manager; Phillip Eaton, the artistic development officer; Lisa Buchanan, the admin officer; Amy Hetherington, comms and marketing officer; Jessica Laruffa, Desert Divas coordinator; Jaspa Wood, Bush Bands coordinator; and Fiona Carter, with the most important job of finance officer, as she has the money. Without those things and without the team, we would not have some of the great things happening in Music NT.
I will mention a few of the things they do. The Bush Bands Bash and the Bush Bands Business are fantastic exercises. There is a Hot Shots photography competition within Music NT. There is Music NT’s workshop series, where they have people working with young people to give them the confidence and ability to work with their bands, manage their bands and make sure everything happens as it should.
The Northern Territory Song of the Year is another great initiative of Music NT, along with the Regional Areas Music program. That is taken far and wide through the Territory.
Music NT takes the Desert Divas and Sista Sounds programs to remote areas of the Northern Territory, where you have people with talent. We have all seen the talent shows on TV; we have seen people who come from the back of beyond, from nowhere. They come from a kitchen or a bathroom where they sing, from little houses, caravans and a range of accommodation, and we see them come to the fore simply by people facilitating that to happen. We have great talents in the Territory. Our great talent is Jessica Mauboy. I remember, as a school-based constable, borrowing sound equipment for the school so she could run a school concert when she was just a young girl of seven or eight. These things bring these people to the fore.
Yuliana Pascoe is another great product of the Territory, a young lady with a fantastic voice who writes music and performs it. In fact, she was in the hall of Parliament House last year at a Christmas function, out of the kindness of her heart, entertaining people with some beautiful songs from other writers and performing some of her own stuff.
We have the talent here, and Music NT teases that talent out and gives people the confidence to have a go. We should encourage anything that helps young people gain that confidence so they have the capability and self-confidence to have a go. It is those people who, when we get them up, realise they can do it and go on to do fantastic things and become role models. We need more role models for more of our young people.
I will keep talking about the things Music NT does. The intune music conference is another great initiative to get people together. The National Indigenous Music Awards is a fantastic recognition of people from all over the Territory who have that talent and can put it on show at these music awards.
We go to the Original Recipe Music Festival, which is another great, fun thing to do. I met some new people there. I know members of that organisation, but I met quite a few new people and they are great. They love having a good time and they facilitate other people to have a fun, relaxing time while enjoying some really terrific music.
We then have the Green Room and a space for answers, another great initiative. We see so many people getting together in this environment, and it might be timely to talk about programs like the NT Song of the Year, where winners have gone on to perform at national festivals and record albums. The National Indigenous Music Awards last year attracted more than 3000 people. Sista Sounds and the music conference bring Australian music industry representatives to the Territory to meet local performers. We have a wealth of talent here.
I was surprised because I had not heard this figure before, but when I was chatting with Mark Smith and had the opportunity to thank him for his hard work – a few people had a chat to me before we opened and said it would be really nice if I could thank Mark. I intended to do that, and I thanked him for his many years of service to Music NT, which is a non-profit organisation he manages, and he looks after over 3000 members. I was stunned that this organisation has over 3000 members across the Territory. It is with great pleasure that I thank him for inviting me to open the 2014 program. I thank the board, the crew and, in particular, I thank Amy Hetherington and a young lady by the name of Melissa Honey, who accompanied me as a result of an invitation to the International Women’s Day breakfast. I congratulate you all, a great bunch of people and keep having a great time. Thank you.
Mr VOWLES (Johnston): Mr Deputy Speaker, I will speak about a very positive organisation within the Johnston electorate at the Rapid Creek Business Village. I would like to focus the Chamber’s attention on a project which is very close to my heart and is run out of Rapid Creek village by Down Syndrome NT. It is Project 21.
Project 21 can be described as a bridge to adult life and success for those with Down’s syndrome. Project 21 builds skills in this group of young people at a crucial time in their lives: in their late teens and early 20s. That has proven to be a time when many students with Down’s syndrome are really ready to learn.
We know access to such learning is impossible to obtain. Tertiary pathways do not exist for students involved in Project 21, so it is crucial in addressing this paucity of services. Students gain skills with Project 21; they undertake Certificate I in Education and Skills Development, while others have just begun to learn barista skills and are serving great coffee to the businesses and shoppers who come to the centre at Rapid Creek.
These skills are further honed in Social 21, a space for students who hang out, perhaps rustle up a snack and practice social skills. A real favourite at the project is Dance 21, and as I speak students are busy rehearsing for their fascinating show 21: The Journey, which is on for the second time at Darwin Entertainment Centre on Friday 21 March. If you missed it the first time, like I did, make sure you go and show support for these talented young adults. I will be there, I know the member for Wanguri will be there and I encourage everyone to go along and support Project 21’s show at the Darwin Entertainment Centre tomorrow night.
This show includes yet another skill taught by the amazing staff and helpers: sign language. This helps students who struggle with communication to express feelings and emotions. In the show on Friday, you will see a signing choir, which will both amaze and move you. Project 21 is an invaluable resource and support for those with Down’s syndrome, and yet the founder, Rachel Kroes, is going through another round of applications for funding, with eight due before the end of April, all taking up priceless time that would be better spent with students, engaging in many facets of their learning.
The coffee served is another fantastic Project 21 initiative. There is a shop known as Walking in My Shoes, where shoes, jewellery and accessories are recycled and where students learn how to greet customers, handle money and look after stock. Students gain a real sense of pride in who they are and what they can do, as well as learn life skills to assist them to find employment and fully participate in adult life.
They are taught about cyber safety and how to spot scams and potential threats online through Media 21. Digital cameras are skilfully used by participants in Media 21 to photograph other students’ achievements. They are taught how to make an access podcast, manage software, live streaming and all this in the dynamic and supportive environment that Project 21 delivers.
Arts abound in Graphics 21, encouraging self-expression exploration, as well as marketable artworks as a result.
Students learn how to effectively participate in conversation and modulate speech through Music 21 and how to breathe deeply, retain posture and recognise lyrics in Sing 21.
We need support for this initiative to continue. My colleague, the member for Wanguri, held a morning tea there, and there were many calls for Labor and this government to support these initiatives that Project 21 and Down Syndrome NT provide for their clients. We need to ensure we secure ongoing funding and recognise it for what it really is. It is a shining light in the lives of its participants and a genuine beacon among youth services.
Motion agreed to; the Assembly adjourned.
DISTINGUISHED VISITOR
Dr Chris Burns
Dr Chris Burns
Madam SPEAKER: Honourable members, I draw your attention to Hon Dr Chris Burns in the Speaker’s Gallery. Welcome.
Members: Hear, hear!
STATEMENT BY SPEAKER
Breach of Standing Orders
Breach of Standing Orders
Madam SPEAKER: Honourable members, I remind you that pursuant to section 30 of the Northern Territory (Self-Government) Act the Legislative Assembly may make standing rules and orders not inconsistent with the law of the Territory with respect to the order and conduct of its business and proceedings.
The standing orders are the formal rules governing the proceedings of the Assembly. They are the rules adopted by resolution of the Assembly, and while new and amended standing orders can be adopted, the rules we have should be observed until any such change occurs.
Standing Order 306 permits suspension of standing orders when the Assembly thinks it is necessary, and Standing Order 309 provides they remain in force until a resolution to change them.
While it is a matter for the Assembly as a whole, I am concerned that last evening during General Business a clear and deliberate breach of the standing orders occurred. While it is always understandable that members are in contest of ideas in this Chamber and seek to gain an advantage, the Assembly expects its members to comply with the rules and not to try to get away with breaking them.
There is no need to record a division for unanimous votes. What happened last night during General Business Notice No 1 on yesterday’s Notice Paper appears to have been a display of political tactics for the sole purpose of some members saying the government had to cross the floor. That is not what occurred.
The question was put to me on the voices. It was clear to the Chair from the voices that the ayes had it. However, pursuant to Standing Order 156, the member for Namatjira called for a division. That is her right, but she needed support. I asked for the required support from other members and the Opposition Leader indicated support, pursuant to the requirement of Standing Order 157. However, the Assembly then divided and no member recorded a no vote.
The members who called no and voted yes breached Standing Order 159, which states a member may not change their vote. This was an extraordinary move and one that will not be tolerated into the future. I will be seeking further advice with regard to the member’s action.
As you will recall, I sought clarification at the time and even put the question twice last evening. I expect all members to support the observance of the standing orders and to assist the Chair with the procedure and dignity of the Assembly being upheld.
MOTION
Proposed Censure of Chief Minister
Proposed Censure of Chief Minister
Ms LAWRIE (Opposition Leader): Madam Speaker, I move that this House censure the Chief Minister for lying, failing to govern in the real interest of Territorians – urban, regional and remote, ignoring election commitments, and focusing instead on his own benefit.
There is no doubt people have never witnessed in the Territory parliament what we witnessed last night. The extent of turmoil and crisis the CLP has plunged itself into under the failed leadership of the member for Braitling, is chaotic, dysfunctional and getting in the way of good government of the Northern Territory.
Shane Stone said these things before the remarks the member for Greatorex made – the bullying and abusive language and behaviour towards the member for Namatjira – came into the public domain. This crisis has been looming for a long time.
It does not matter where you go in the Northern Territory, you hear complaints about the government’s mishandling of the economy, and the protracted, devastating disputes it is having with teachers across our education system because of the very real and drastic cuts it has taken to education, which ultimately affects the future of the Territory because it diminishes the education of our children. There are complaints that the non-government sector, which is there to provide care and support to Territorians, has had budgets slashed under the CLP. Not only have budgets been slashed, but they then received threats. ‘Zip your lips. Do not talk about what is occurring in the reduction of social services in the Northern Territory or you will have the rest of your budget taken from you.’
The fear, intimidation and bullying purveys the style of this government. Why? Because it is the way the Chief Minister likes to go about his business. Not only does he go about his business that way but, as a leader, he presides over members of his team to go about their business in that way.
I know their favourite sport is to attack me as Leader of the Opposition, to go after me because I am holding them to account; however, I hold you to account by reflecting on what Territorians are saying to us, and we make no apology for that.
We have done that consistently. Yes, we have plans and visions. We are proud Territorians on this side of the Chamber. For the Territory to truly become the place where you can yield the opportunities and benefits the Territory has, you must hold education dear and to your core. You must strengthen, not diminish, education. You must find new and innovative ways of delivering improved learning outcomes into our classrooms. You must provide our students across the Territory with choice, not only of subject matter, which we have seen affected by your cuts to education, but about where they go to school. That is a huge threat looming - very real right now - in our remote schools. You stated that policy before your Indigenous education review even got under way, which has – surprise, surprise! – recommended cutting secondary education from remote bush schools.
Shame on you, Chief Minister, and shame on your Education minister. Little wonder you have some real problems amongst your bush MLAs. Little wonder we see what is happening on the ground, member for Greatorex, despite you wanting to gloss over the loss of jobs through the repairs and maintenance contract.
Yes, we have a vision for a fairer and better society, one which does not include bullying across any workplace, anywhere or anytime.
The fairer and better society does not include taking an axe to critical services across the public sector or going into protracted disputes with people across frontline service delivery, such as firefighters and paramedics. These are all people who are saying to your government, ‘We cannot accept the way you are treating us. We cannot accept the fact you do not care, and the wages you are offering us are less than the cost of living.’ In real terms, under your government, families are going backwards and struggling to pay the bills of the household in the Northern Territory.
We have a vision for a fairer society, where government understands that whilst you have wages constraint – and we did that in government ourselves – you must understand where CPI and inflation are running so people have real wages rather than a reduction in wages. You will not do that. Instead we hear from your Minister for Public Employment an ideological attack on unions, ‘That is just unions, Labor and its leftie mates’. No, you are talking about people providing frontline services such as paramedics and firefighters.
We have a vision of a better healthcare system, where you are not sending the message to the remote healthcare system that they can have community clinics, and you will step away from government’s responsibility to provide a level and quality of care of health service, regardless of where people live in the Northern Territory. We do not share the Chief Minister’s view that you can exit from the real and core requirement to deliver quality healthcare in remote communities and they become community centres. With what resources and what funding?
That debate is mirrored in education where a review of the Education Act talks about school councils having the responsibility on one hand – for example, ‘We will give you a budget and you manage it somehow to get by’ – but on the other hand responsibility of the hiring and firing still rests with the principal, who is then hired and fired by the CEO of the department. What a farce! You are washing your hands of the responsibility of government to deliver services.
Our vision is of a fair government, delivering quality education and health services in the Territory, valuing and respecting the critical role of the public service in the Northern Territory to deliver services across a vast land mass with a small population. It is our vision and we pursued it in government. We created Territory 2030 which was a dynamic plan to provide for core policy initiatives across research and development – you do not hear the words ‘research and development’ ever coming from this government – education, law and order, health, the environment and housing.
Yes, we had plans and we still hold dear those plans of giving people a leg up, an opportunity to get into their own housing and get off the rental roundabout. We would bring back HOMESTART Extra which was scrapped. It was a fair scheme structured reasonably to provide low- and middle-income earners with a chance to stay in the Territory, get off the rental roundabout and own their home.
We would not evict public housing tenants and then sell that public housing stock. That is not our plan; that is your plan. Our plan is to be fair. Our plan is to reduce the Territory Housing public waiting list, not to increase the waiting list and sell off stock. We put in the plans and policies required in planning to set aside 15% of all Crown land release for social and affordable housing. We put in place an affordable housing rental company that could oversee stock we were funding through the budgets. I notice the CLP has continued with that Labor plan and vision to provide affordable rental housing stock.
We showed you can do it. We showed you can redevelop old rundown public housing areas such as Wirrina and create a new type of urban planning, delivering real outcomes for Territorians with a mix of public and private, leveraging private investment, delivering improved housing outcomes in an urban environment and improving that entire urban environment. We had plans to do the same at Kurringal. We had plans to roll that out across rundown public housing estates.
The CLP is copying some of those plans, rebranding, naming them as its own. But, on the other side of that ledger, what they are not doing – because through those redevelopments, you lose some housing stock – is creating new public housing stock in the new suburban divisions across Palmerston east. They are not giving Territorians on that waiting list a chance to get into housing.
A government that turns its back on homeless Territorians is a government devoid of compassion, and that is what they have done. They have shown no compassion in the approach they have taken to understanding the very real and present need of people to have shelter. I was listening with interest to people recently who were talking about what is occurring with homelessness, particularly of women and children fleeing domestic violence situations. There is a pressure point and people are being turned away. Shelters are full, and they have no other option but to turn people away.
I was proud to be part of a Labor government that worked to produce additional funding into short-term crisis accommodation. We worked with the non-government sector providing the short-term crisis accommodation. All of that has come to a screeching, grinding halt under the CLP. That has stopped for a non-government sector used to working constructively with a government to find answers to what is a horrible social problem that has a very real and present impact on women and children primarily, but also on families more broadly; men are on the list as well.
You show no compassion. I get to the fact that you show no compassion because your leader has no compassion. He shows arrogance, ‘It is my way or the highway. I do not have time to deal with the issue you have raised.’ He pretends the issue does not exist. He pretended the member for Greatorex did not use abusive language and bully his own colleague. Even when the member for Araluen, the Health minister, said, ‘I will not be part of a cover-up’, he continued the pretence, because if it does not suit his narrative or the Chief Minister’s script, it does not happen.
That is not leadership. Leadership is about accepting that with all the difficult issues and challenges that arise, you must take responsibility for dealing with them fairly and appropriately. That does not happen under this Chief Minister. It has not been fair, member for Greatorex, for you not to be disciplined. The actions you took are reprehensible. You should have been disciplined …
Mr Conlan: I cannot believe you can say that with a straight face.
Ms LAWRIE: Member for Greatorex, the parliament, including you, last night voted for you to be disciplined, and you have done nothing. Have you suggested to the Chief Minister what course of action you would take, what discipline might be appropriate, whether you will sign up to an anger management course – anything? Is there any consideration at all to the motion of the parliament last night? Nothing?
That was what we heard from the Chief Minister in Question Time today. We heard him dismissively saying, ‘He has apologised’. He apologised, we heard, some two to three days after this abhorrent incident after being forced to by the six female members of the government. That, Chief Minister, is not discipline. There is not a shade of discipline in that.
You failed to govern in the real interest of Territorians wherever they live. Territorians in the urban environment of the high-growth centres of Darwin and Palmerston have a very real, urgent need for the government to deliver on its commitment to lower the cost of living. Instead, after 18 months, you have doubled the cost of living. It has not just gone up marginally, you have doubled the cost of living, fuelled, of course, by those spikes in power, water and sewerage tariff increases.
Yet you pretend that is not happening. You do not acknowledge the 5% in January that has hit families again on their electricity tariff. You do not acknowledge the 4% coming their way in July as a result of CPI running at 4.4%. You do not acknowledge the 5% that will hit the families on their electricity tariff next January. That is another 9%, Chief Minister, locked in and signed off under your watch, that you think Territorians can absorb – that, somehow, while they are already struggling under the strain to pay their power bills, they can absorb it. Chief Minister, they cannot.
People are hitting the wall in their family household budgets scenarios – the meat is thin, they are struggling. There are too many stories of too many Territorians packing up and having to leave town because of the cost of living. For those in rentals, who have been locked out of the home ownership property market by your government’s decision to axe My New Home, which was a home finance scheme for the medium and above income earnings, HOMESTART Extra, the finance scheme for the low- and medium-income earners and, perhaps a cruel cut as well, axing the First Home Owners Concession Scheme. Those three actions have trapped people into a rental cycle that is growing at about 8%.
You will rail, as you always do, about what Labor did not do. However, what we did not do was say one thing and do the exact opposite. We did what we signed up to do. We said we would fast-track the release of land to help with the housing squeeze in the Territory, particularly the high growth area: the Top End. We created Palmerston east. We funded and resourced all the new infrastructure required to get Palmerston east to be realised as new suburbs: the land and housing that is turning off now.
We worked with Defence Housing to create Lyons, then roll across the road to Muirhead. We created a quota system within Muirhead to allow more Territorians, rather than Defence only, to buy into that environment. We agreed to an MOU with Defence to take 15% of the new Crown land release in Palmerston east. This is yielding the housing today.
We created Venture Housing, the affordable rental housing company which had 50 stock. That is often what you will laud – a scheme you pretend is yours. The Labor federal government created the NRAS scheme which is the 20% discount you are relying on for your 30% rental. These are Labor initiatives, but you will pretend and rail we did nothing. It is the big pretend and railing you hang your hat on as an excuse to do the things you want to because you have different priorities.
Your priorities are having fun. I remember being shocked when I saw the vision of you after being sworn in as Chief Minister when you came out on to the steps to do your first interview. The core thing you said the whole time was, ‘We are going to have fun’. Chief Minister, while you have been having fun, Territorians have been suffering.
Three of your own team threatened to break away, to shout out loud that Territorians in the bush are suffering too much and they require your election commitments to be delivered. It is not unreasonable for people to say, ‘We took you on your word at what you promised in the election, and now you must deliver’. People in town are saying that about the cost of living and the great big lie about their jobs being safe, then 600 public servants were sacked. No, do not count 600, only count about 240 because those 240 were permanent employees and the others were contractors. Do not count those contractors who lost their jobs because that does not matter to you, Chief Minister.
A picture is worth a thousand words. If you could take a snapshot of the Chamber right now, this picture speaks volumes …
Mr Chandler: Defending the line.
Ms LAWRIE: … about the lack of support for this Chief Minister. Member for Brennan, you are hanging in there because you believe in the job you have been given – to take an axe to education – and you will defend that, to your shame because it is wrong. You could not even remember the name of your own CLP candidate in Palmerston this morning. Unbelievable!
Chief Minister, in the regional towns people are also suffering and are crying out. In your own town of Alice Springs, comments were made by the Chamber of Commerce about the economy being in a dire situation and businesses closing. It became so bad the Chief Minister had to quickly throw a couple of capital projects at the town of Alice Springs. They were not planned for, not announced in the budget, but popped up within the last two months. You found the money for that, Chief Minister, because you could not face the very real prospect that companies like Sitzler, a formed and proud Territory company created in Alice Springs, were about to pack up and leave that town because the economy was so bad.
Those projects were not in the capital works program and they were not announced as initiatives in the budget. The new court house was not a budget initiative. But you found the money for that – millions of dollars. You found the money to take an $82 000 private jet back from Vietnam to get a photo shoot with Prime Minister, Tony Abbott.
The parade of our troops had been scheduled; we all knew it was happening. Why did you not want to attend the parade in the first place, which was something so important to our nation that the Prime Minister and the federal Leader of the Opposition attended? You were happy to sit in Vietnam until you heard there was a photo shoot opportunity. Quick, you better get that $82 000 private jet and get back to Darwin.
Chief Minister, people do not appreciate the waste. We have seen an incredible number of overseas jaunts by ministers. We have always been big supporters of our relationship with Asia. We were strengthening our relationships with China and Japan. We do not have an issue with ministers needing to travel. However, on one of the trips there were three of you together. I quipped that it was because every time the Chief Minister needed to leave town he had to take some numbers with him.
You cannot keep ignoring the suffering that occurs in the regional towns. Tennant Creek has had horrendous issues with alcohol-fuelled violence. You say we are devoid of policy, except the BDR. We will proudly talk about the BDR. The Health minister said Labor needs to stop talking about the BDR. We will keep talking about it because you have turned 2500 people who had a problem with alcohol back on to consuming vast amounts of it. You can see the difference in our regional towns such as Tennant Creek and Katherine.
I have friends who live in Katherine. Do you know what is going on in that regional town at the moment, Chief Minister? Have you bothered to find out that residents are saying they have to take some type of action to stop the rising, unacceptable level of crime and violence? People are saying it is getting harder to go to Woolies to shop. What is happening? The member for Katherine is a senior member of Cabinet.
I meet with the allied health sector; they are desperate to see the BDR come back. I heard the clinical nurses at the hospital saying, ‘We are swamped in the emergency department at Katherine Hospital; we cannot deal with it all.’ They are desperate for the BDR to come back.
Call it another name, but it is a supply tool that helped those regional towns. It helped in Darwin and Palmerston. We are bigger and it is a problem which is less in your face, but it is here and is real in the Top End towns.
Alcohol is not a core social value. We are better than that in the Northern Territory. We socialise with our friends, but alcohol does not and should not define us, and it should not be described by our Chief Minister as a core social value. A core social value is caring for others and making sure we have the programs and support to care for those who need support. You have taken an axe to that in the non-government sector.
The Health minister said yesterday, ‘No, we are not taking the sobering-up shelter off BRADAAG’. Funny, because that is what BRADAAG has been told. They have been fighting the decision for a while now. When the CEO challenged the Department of Health on it, they were told the decision went all the way to the top, to the Health minister. ‘Bad luck! We are taking the sobering-up shelter away from you.’ Really? That is not okay. Tennant Creek needs a sobering-up shelter.
You formed your alcohol policy on the $50m election commitment – not realised or even touched on yet – to build mandatory rehabilitation centres, but you have not built any, you have taken over everyone else’s infrastructure. Roseanne, in gaol in Western Australia, needs to be in secure care in Alice Springs. At least half of the Alice Springs secure care has been taken over by your alcohol management rehabilitation program. The other half, we hear, has only two clients in it because you have slashed the funding to that secure care program.
Everywhere we look you have failed to deliver your election commitments, but there are compounding problems and issues arising out of that to our society. When those compounding issues come down to hard-end suffering by people, even your own are starting to walk away from you.
You have only 11 numbers in this Chamber. Yes, your Speaker has the casting vote and she will cast for you. You have taken your party to a point of crisis where they have never been before. We hear in your CLP Central Council meetings it becomes a shout-fest towards you – significantly, at the last one because of the way you have failed the Territory’s fourth-largest regional town of Nhulunbuy.
Let us look at that failure, because I have touched on the big regional towns of Alice Springs, Tennant Creek and Katherine, but I have not touched on Nhulunbuy.
Nhulunbuy is losing over 1000 jobs. Families have no choice but to pack up and leave the town they call home. It is affecting generations of locals. People born and raised in Nhulunbuy have lost their jobs; they have to pack up and go under your watch, Chief Minister, by your hand, because you reneged on the gas to Gove deal the previous Chief Minister, Terry Mills, said was a done deal. He said he had signed with Rio Tinto to deliver gas to provide for the refinery to switch from heavy fuel to gas. On a public holiday, Darwin Show day, you reneged on that deal, and after that it was one big downhill slide to the loss of jobs with the refinery curtailment decision. Anyone who says in July, ‘I am reneging on that deal, Rio Tinto’, would surely then, at the very least, put in place a plan B: if Rio Tinto curtails the refinery and we lose 1000 jobs in a regional town, ripping the heart out of the job sector there, what would you do instead?
You would first have a socioeconomic impact analysis done, in your pocket, ready to go, to understand exactly what you need to do as a government to leverage proper funding from the Commonwealth government and, indeed, the company Rio Tinto, to say, ‘Here are the alternative industries’. We have seen this happen. BlueScope Steel in the steelworks in Newcastle did it; BHP could do it. The New South Wales government did it, but, Chief Minister, you did not do it. You walked around the Territory, pretending Rio Tinto would keep going with the refinery and that all was well. That was a catastrophic failure of you to do your job, and the people of the township are bearing the consequences of that today. They are suffering because of that today. Why? Because you have been focused on yourself and your benefit every step of the way with the nice jets, the junkets, being taken care of, putting the suit on, ‘I am the Chief Minister, it is all good, I am having fun’.
Chief Minister, while you are having fun, the rest of the Territory is not. Our economy is the fastest growing in the nation because Labor delivered the second-largest major project in the history of Australia: the Ichthys project. The oil and gas sector has been sent the most bizarre signals by you ever since then. The reneging on the gas deal stopped the doubling of the domestic gas policy. Announcing the fracking inquiry without so much as giving them a heads-up sent them into another tailspin. You are more intent on taking care of yourself than taking care of Territorians. It is little wonder three members of your own party are breaking away.
Mr GILES (Chief Minister): Madam Speaker, I am pretty sure I did not hear anything about a plan for the Territory’s future should Labor come into power – not one word. We heard carping, whining and whingeing.
Let me outline what the Northern Territory government is doing. Under the principles of economic development, the way we foresee driving economic reform into the future is around four key principles: economic, social, cultural and environmental. You must get those four pillars working properly to be able to drive economic reform for the Northern Territory. That is why we released our Framing the Future blueprint draft document last year. It went public; it has been out for consultation for some time now. We are just about to finalise it. We received a number of submissions and inquiries about Framing the Future and how we set forth the direction for the Northern Territory.
It will not be too much of a broad-ranging advertised document, but it is something that guides the principles of how the Northern Territory will govern into the future. That is the draft document; the final document will be released soon.
Underpinning the Framing the Future document and the strategic approach of how we operate will be our philosophical and directional approach to the development of northern Australia. The development of northern Australia has a key component, and that is the Northern Territory. Fundamentally, we have said we should be driving the northern Australia developmental approach. It should be driven through Darwin, the capital city of northern Australia, but it should encapsulate the whole of the Northern Territory.
When it was first announced by Prime Minister, Tony Abbott that he was supportive of that approach, he took the Coalition, in opposition, towards northern Australian development. Kevin Rudd, the then Prime Minister, quickly followed that approach. To be honest, that followed what we were always investing in from the Northern Territory government point of view. From where we stood it was the whole of the Territory, not just north of the Tropic of Capricorn. That is why I was very pleased a couple of weeks ago that the Prime Minister announced that Central Australia has been included.
Under the banner of northern Australia you will soon see promotional material, advertisements and collective ideas about how that will be achieved. It will have different audiences. It will have an audience of the public service, Territorians, Queenslanders and Western Australians to come on board with the Territory. It will also have a national and international audience. That will be about selling the message of northern Australia, but from the point of view of the Northern Territory. From the Northern Territory’s point of view, it is about being who we can be, who we want to be in the future, and ensuring we set forth the direction to provide jobs for the future so the kids who are going to school today have jobs for tomorrow.
When I answered a question in Question Time today I talked about the need to build the pipeline between the Northern Territory and the national gas grid, which includes everywhere except Western Australia. The purpose of that is because that will be not only nation building, but job and economy building for the Northern Territory.
For those who like to research these matters, go to North Dakota or do some research and see how the realisation of shale gas has completely reinvigorated communities across North Dakota in the way they have seen economic growth. People who were down and out in an economic sense are now in the vast environment of jobs and economic growth. It has been completely transforming.
When we talk about the estimated opportunities of 240 trillion cubic feet of gas in the Northern Territory, we start thinking about how we realise that. The pipeline is part of realising that. We need to work out how we can get some of that gas into New South Wales or Victoria, whether some goes through Gladstone, what we can use for cheaper gas in the Northern Territory, what we need to use to swap gas, and the investment in building a pipeline.
This is a significant project for the Northern Territory’s future. Whether it comes off or not, we will wait to see. However, it has a significant amount of investment and commitment from the Northern Territory government, and we already have several companies interested in pursuing the construction of that pipeline. We are talking with the Australian government about that.
It is important to look at a number of key areas of the direction of government. I will touch on six key issues.
Crime is much reported in this Chamber and across the Northern Territory. We know property crime is at its lowest level in the Territory’s reporting history. Dating back to the late 1990s when statistics were first collected, property crime is at its lowest level. With the introduction of Alcohol Protection Orders as a suite of measures designed to target change in social and community circumstance around the consumption of alcohol, we are seeing positive signs already. We spoke about what is occurring with mandatory alcohol treatment. We have already seen in relation to the APOs which were first introduced mid- to late December, with early figures, year on year, February 2014 to February 2013, a drop of around 22% in assaults across the Northern Territory. We have seen the lowest levels of motor vehicle theft and crime in the Territory’s history.
You talked about the removal of the Banned Drinker Register. The only feigned promise Labor has is bringing the Banned Drinker Register back, which we do not support, because since we removed the Banned Drinker Register we have had a significant, positive change in the consumption of alcohol. For example, we have had a 4% drop in wholesale alcohol supply across the Territory. That is pure alcohol.
In Alice Springs, for example, where we know there have been significant challenges, there is a drop of 7%. Anyone who can tell me the Banned Drinker Register was working when we had a 7% alcohol supply drop after we removed it …
Mr Gunner: Alcohol-related assaults are up in Alice Springs.
Mr GILES: … is giving unwarranted criticism.
I note the interjection about the number of assaults going up. Member for Fannie Bay, the easy way to stop assaults from going up is to reduce the number of police on the beat. We have put an additional 20 police in Alice Springs and additional police across the Northern Territory. If we had not done that, there would be less policing and fewer people being picked up.
The other component is that the police who are picking people up are now prosecuting those who commit assaults, rather than leaving them sit in a gaol cell for 12 hours overnight and letting them out at 6 am or 7 am. They are being convicted of their crimes, and that is starting to send a strong message too.
Some of the changes we have made in relation to the Attorney-General’s portfolio on one punch homicide legislation and protecting the rights of the workers on the front line with mandatory minimum three-month sentences are causing positive changes. They are starting to have a positive reflection in the community.
If I move on to the economy under the guise of Framing the Future and the north Australia development policy agenda, a range of things is happening here. We agree the INPEX project is having a positive influence on the statistical numbers within our economy, but you also have to look at what we have been doing with building approvals and land release. I heard the comment about Kurringal flats from the Leader of the Opposition, saying it was their idea. If it was their idea why did they not do anything about it? Why did they not put out an expression of interest or talk to developers? Why did they not talk to tenants and neighbours? Why did they not put out a plan, a map, a glossy brochure, a letter or anything? They had 11 years to do something with Kurringal flats and did nothing. We have taken quick action and put out expressions of interest. We have a plan and are implementing the project now.
Look at some of the other projects under way and all the building approvals for units in the Top End right now. There are 26 applications at the moment. Sure, 13 were approved under Labor after many years, but in our 18 months of government an additional 13 have been approved to the point where there is $350m worth of construction on units occurring now and another $450m soon to commence.
The other day I was in Palmerston in the seat of Blain with Nathan Barrett, the Country Liberals candidate, looking at what we can do to speed up Zuccoli. We have made a $3.1m commitment for the dual lane section of Roystonea Avenue which will allow us to get Stages 3 and 4 of Zuccoli up and running early – 1300 new blocks of land with an additional 400 coming in Stage 5 of Zuccoli. We are releasing land like never before, not just in the seat of Blain or in Palmerston, but across the Northern Territory and all our urban areas. We want to start doing that in some of our remote locations as well.
I will not go through all the statistics and talk about the fastest growing economy in the nation, the highest rate of building approvals, the highest rate of land release, because people know these things are occurring. However, I will mention some of our structural changes such as our reforms to the Pastoral Act so it is not just pastoral activities that can occur on a pastoral lease. For 30 years, 30% of the property can have non-pastoral activities such as horticulture, which can start driving the development of this great unknown towards being the food bowl of northern Australia.
Today we heard the announcement that the Northern Territory is one of the most supportive and positive environments as a jurisdiction for mining and investment activity, and that will continue to grow.
The Leader of the Opposition spoke a little about education. We need to make sure our kids are at the right level to be able to undertake the jobs of tomorrow in the development of northern Australia, that we have engineers who can work in the gas industry and people to study at Charles Darwin University in the Northern Territory to increase accreditation to a higher level and drive the leadership and growth of this nation. As we are seeing a contraction in New South Wales and Victoria across many industries, we have the opportunity now to ensure the Northern Territory is driving the economic direction and the future growth of Australia.
We have to ensure kids are properly educated. We know the NAPLAN results of the majority of students in the Northern Territory – their educational levels of attainment – are simply not at national standards. For many it is nowhere near national standards and we have to fix it. We have made some structural reforms. We have copped a lot of criticism about it, but this is where we say we have a plan and are able and willing to look into the eyes of those who criticise and make those changes so we have reform.
The Education Act is being reviewed. It is 30-plus years old and we are trying to revitalise it. We are looking at facilitating the potential around global school funding models so schools get their bucket of money and can be truly and fully independent and able to decide where the allocation of those resources goes. That is the opportunity for principals and school councils to do that.
We have undertaken a remote education review looking at some of the challenges in education. Why are the results so bad? What can we do to reform that? That review has been undertaken by Mr Bruce Wilson, an education expert, who has come back with some findings and told us where we need to make changes. Part of it looks at how you can get the best economies of scale in delivering education in the secondary education sector, and how many students are available and attending school, or enrolled. If you want a suite of subjects offered to students in remote areas, you have to ensure you have the students to turn up to those classes.
Anyone can understand that if you want to run a physics class, it is very hard to do for one student, the same as with a chemistry class or an Indonesian class. You have to get some opportunity of critical mass, not only for the economics of delivering education, but so students can learn from each other, both in and out of the classroom, whether it is tutorial services at night or networking with each other. We have to get a better model of education, which is why I believe Bruce Wilson has recommended in his review we move to a more regional-based secondary education model so the kids have economies of scale, can work and learn off one another, and we get better outcomes for the Territory.
When I talk about better outcomes for the Territory, it is not saying I want our kids at this level, it is making sure those kids get the opportunity in life to get the education. They then get the opportunity to get a real job. That is why the overarching theme of Framing the Future is facilitating, through the northern Australia development agenda, the creation of jobs for the future.
There is no doubt we have a chronic demand on health services in the Northern Territory. We made a commitment to increase elective surgery by 400 places each year. The Health minister has being doing a good job in overseeing the facilitation of driving down the pressures on the elective surgery wait list by having an additional 400 places. We have spoken about our mandatory alcohol treatment program relentlessly. I am a big supporter of it, as are we all on this side. I understand the philosophical dilemma of incarcerating people because they have a chronic alcohol issue, but we want those people to get off the grog and have an opportunity to make choices in their lives. I appreciate the concerns those on the left and many others have about the incarceration of people in mandatory alcohol treatment. However, we want to give those people an opportunity, and this is the area we are moving towards. That is why you are starting to see an opportunity for change in people’s lives.
Criticism comes from the opposition about bed block in Royal Darwin Hospital. Bed block is a result of a lack of capacity to be able to provide service to everybody at any point in time. It is a challenge we have to try to make change for. Having been in government for 18 months, with the whole issue of facing a $5.5bn Labor debt legacy – the enormous deficit we have – we cannot click our fingers and build a new hospital and provide hospital beds overnight. It is a challenge.
There has always been a plan to build a hospital at Palmerston. We promised it and committed to it in 2008. We were not elected into government in 2008. We did the same in 2012 and when we came in then we looked at what promises had been made before. The promise by the former Labor government was to build a hospital at Palmerston. All they had on the site after eleven-and-a-half years was a bit of cyclone mesh fencing and a sign saying, ‘Future site of Palmerston Hospital’. That does not deliver a bed to treat someone who is currently suffering due to bed block at Royal Darwin Hospital.
We needed to go back to the drawing board, identify if we would develop northern Australia, look at our population of around 239 000 in the Northern Territory, foresee what we think the population growth will be - ensuring we balance our lifestyle at the same time - and what our hospital demands will be. We need a brand new regional hospital for the growth of the greater Darwin area in the development of northern Australia. We have been working intensively with the Health minister in identifying what a hospital will look like and what the design requirements are to have a hospital to last the next 50 years.
This is where we are at the moment. Our scoping study has come back. I have been relentless in my conversations with colleagues, saying we must take the community with us. We will not design a hospital and build it without talking to anyone. We have to make sure we design it right, that the clinicians understand the model we have, and we take feedback from them if we have to redesign it. We need the health and hospital practitioners to tell us if we need to change the design parameters or make modifications.
We have found a site 15 times larger than the previous hospital site Labor had. They were going to build a Mickey Mouse little hospital with about 10 beds that would not have met the needs of a growing Northern Territory in a growing greater Darwin area. We are building a hospital for the next 50 years. I have said, and anticipate that, work will start this year. I am committed to making that happen. However, we are really committed to making sure we build the hospital of tomorrow to meet the Territory’s growing demands.
I will move on to the area of culture which fits under Framing the Future. To me it is about who we are as Territorians. It is about ensuring we do not lose who we are in our psyche as Territorians, as people who are proud to be different to the rest of Australia, who are proud to have a lifestyle that is different to the rest of Australia.
There are people in the Northern Territory who like to go fishing or shooting, or go for a Sunday drive and enjoy the open spaces. When we develop northern Australia, we must ensure we hold on to those passionate dynamics of what we all love and why we love the open spaces, the fresh air, and the warm weather if you are in the Top End, or the cold weather if you are at the bottom in the middle months of the year. That is the balance we always have to ask ourselves about. Do we impinge, with development, on our lifestyle? It is a question we ask ourselves every time a Cabinet paper comes through our government: how do we balance that? That will continue to be the way.
In regard to culture, we make significant investments in a range of areas, whether it is working in the fishing sector or ensuring we have arts and museums. We have just seen a change in the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory and how that will be facilitated. We are looking at new museums and display products, and making sure we invest in Indigenous culture and have growth and renewal in that sector long into the future.
The last area I will touch on is remote areas and this assertion that there is little happening in the bush. There may be little promotional marketing activity in the bush, but the amount of work going on in the bush is profound and significant. The Minister for Housing was talking about the change in dynamics with the housing contracts. On the surface it can be said that people have lost their jobs through a change in contracts. Yes, there were 81 people working in the past, but much of that work was going through the shires at extremely high cost. There were delays in getting works done, and the amount of expenditure that could be made through the spread of work on the ground was very minimal.
The new contract model has enabled the government to seek to employ more people at the local level, with more supervisors, to be able to provide a better response time in getting repairs and maintenance work done at a lower cost. This means we can do more work in the bush, particularly on remote housing. I have gone up hill and down dale with these contracts to look at the reforms. While at the start I had a couple of questions, the reforms will be very good for the bush in getting the work done.
We went to the election talking about reforming the shires. As the former Local Government minister, when first elected some 18 months ago, I did a fair amount of work in establishing a shire working group, or a local government working group, looking at some of the issues and putting out a discussion paper. That was then handed over to the minister at the time, the member for Namatjira, to run some community feedback models and community consultations with the department.
The new minister for Local Government, minister Tollner, is now facilitating the roll-out of reforms in that area. While the regional council component has changed, the breakup of a shire council into a small regional council will be occurring in the member for Daly’s electorate in the area between Daly River and Port Keats/Wadeye. That is delivering on some of that reform.
It is not easy because it has changed. We must make sure we get the model right. However, there is no doubt the cost structure of shire councils is quite large through this centralised model. We must be able to facilitate reforms to bring that cost structure down in delivering increased services.
We have also been working very hard on bush road funding. There was a question raised about a previous announcement made on either 6 or 8 August 2012 by Warren Snowdon, the member for Lingiari, in the eyes of a Territory election campaign, about doing some road works for $106m. I also made an announcement two weeks ago of $106m for road works. I am not sure how on earth those two figures are exactly the same, as convenient as it seems.
As the previous Transport and Infrastructure minister, immediately after coming into government I was working to ensure how we could facilitate works on the Santa Teresa Road, the Sandover or Plenty Highway, the Tanami Highway, the Port Keats Road, the Roper Highway, the Carpentaria Highway, Central Arnhem Highway, the Top Road, and the road to Pickertaramoor on the Tiwi Islands.
We came up with a few different funding equations and models we put to the federal government. One of those surrounded the model we announced the other day, which was $106m, $16m of which comes from the Territory government, and $90m which comes from the federal government. The works included in that have changed a number of times over the last 18 months in trying to get that approved. We got no glory out of the previous federal Labor government. It refused to sign up and provide that funding.
I am very happy that Warren Truss, now the federal minister and Deputy Prime Minister, has agreed to that funding and the works will start rolling out in April this year. The first leg of the continuing work will start on the Port Keats Road. How that ended up being the same, I am not quite sure because it changed a number of times while I was the minister. Since I have been the Chief Minister, I have had my hands in, trying to ensure we get bang for the buck in that area.
There are other roads we have been seeking funding for which have not been approved. They include the work on the Plenty Highway, or the Outback Highway, as the general road between Perth and Cairns is sometimes known. There was an announcement by Warren Truss in the federal election campaign of $33m over three years to do joint road funding works on sections of that road between WA, NT and Queensland. We put in an early bid to try to get the majority of it. I am advised there was a deal done with the Queensland government a couple of weeks ago, that we were unaware of, to try to get a little extra of that money. We have since advised we will match every dollar the federal government is prepared to put in. We believe we will be getting a good announcement or outcome from that, which hopefully we can announce in the budget.
We want this budget to be about building the Territory – building roads, bridges, infrastructure, schools, releasing land and growing the Territory under the frame of northern Australia. We believe we have a good plan to move ahead.
While I am on the topic, I heard comments from Labor about our investment in the bush. There is no doubt there have been decades and decades of failure and lack of investment in the bush. The infrastructure simply is not there, whether it is mobile phone reception, bridges, roads, housing stock or kerb and guttering in communities. Whatever it may be, there are challenges.
I also include investment into power infrastructure. Most people are still running on diesel generators. Why have we not got greater networks of power out there? That is part of the reforms we would like to see. It is not easy to do. You cannot simply find $500m and network the majority of bush communities, but it is an area we are working towards which will provide downward pressure on pricing for electricity in remote areas. We are working towards being able to make it happen.
We need to start somewhere to reform years of neglect. Look what happened when I was the minister for the Department of Corporate and Information Services, or DCIS. It has a responsibility for telecommunications within that portfolio. All credit to DCIS, it has never had a broad role in mobile phones, NBN or any of that broader external telecommunications aspect outside the internal machinations of government. We went to the Telstra board, spoke to Mr Thodey and had the board up here. We said we would like a partnership as we want to invest in bush communities. We want more mobile phones and more data broadband so people can be connected a whole lot better.
Through that partnership arrangement we now have eight additional communities that have, or are getting, mobile phone or broadband technology. We are working on how we can extend that to Groote Eylandt and Minjilang as two other communities able to facilitate greater connectivity. You need that connectivity to achieve greater social and economic change, and create the opportunity of creating jobs for all Territorians.
These are parts of the infrastructure we are trying to do. You cannot simply roll out $450 000 for every community that does not have mobile phone connectivity. There are, I believe, 34 communities which are hardwired to hard-line telecommunication across the Territory. Those communities are easier to get mobile phones to, but for the ones that are not on that hardwire, that becomes a challenge. That is why we were not supportive of the NBN in the bush. I still believe the NBN model roll-out in the bush is deplorable and should not be accelerated. There needs to be better ways to do business. The NBN is failing under the Coalition government, but it was failing under Labor. There needs to be better ways to roll that out. We will continue to work to get better connectivity for people in the bush.
To get reforms in the bush we are working on a policy, which should not be too far away, about home ownership and asset sales to tenants in remote communities so they can own their own homes and have greater pride and investment opportunities in their home. We have been working on it for about 10 months now and it is not very far away. We believe we will come up with a model of home ownership in Aboriginal communities that will provide a long-lasting opportunity for people into the future. We can start realising some of that capital in foreign investment funds through the markets Westpac, NAB, ANZ and the Commonwealth Bank could access to get more foreign investment – as it would technically be called – money and loan products into Aboriginal communities in the bush. That will be a fantastic outcome.
One of the major things we have to do to drive change in remote areas is build economies. Most communities have a school, a health centre, local government and all the essential community infrastructure or service delivery models, but we have to build economies. We have to build them in Darwin, Katherine, Alice Springs and Tennant Creek, which has been neglected for many years, and in remote communities. That is a challenge.
That is why I am so excited about what we are doing on the Tiwi Islands with the new port that has been invested in through the private sector, with Mitsui and the woodchip, what we did with the Tiwi ferry, what the Minister for Health is trying to do at Wadeye and in the Daly region, and what we want to do at Ngukurr in opening up farming opportunities and road access. These are the changes we want in Alpara and Utopia in getting farming opportunities there. Creating jobs provides hope, inspiration and opportunity for those kids going to school today – or those kids who should be going to school – so there is a future for people.
In the Northern Territory our remote landscape is different from much of the remote landscape in other parts of the country. In other parts of the country there is social engineering where economists or Treasury officials believe the centralisation of populations around large urban centres is a cost-efficient model for delivering services. Many communities and populations move, but in the Northern Territory the cultural connection to land, law and culture is quite different, and people are not always prepared to move. We …
Mr STYLES: A point of order, Madam Speaker! I move that the Chief Minister be granted an extension of time, pursuant to Standing Order 77.
Motion agreed to.
Mr GILES: Madam Speaker, I was wrapping up. Many people in remote or regional areas of the Northern Territory have a significant cultural connection to land and place the priority of that connection above and beyond any other responsibility in their lives, whether it is having a job, access to healthcare, housing or whatever. As a government, we recognise that.
We have to facilitate the more effective localised roll-out of local government. To be able to facilitate greater investment in housing – and it will not all come from government – you must have private sector investment. That is why the home ownership model is such a good one. It is about making sure land is freed up to invest in without touching sacred sites or hurting traditional owners’ opportunities for their traditional lands.
That is the vision of this government which all fits within the Framing the Future document. Whether it is about economics or social, cultural or environmental priorities, it is about developing the Northern Territory and northern Australia. It is about saying to the rest of the country, ‘We are in charge. We have a plan. This is the direction we are heading. Jump on board and we will help solve Australia’s economic woes’, because we know the economic woes of this nation will continue to get worse.
Everything I have said is directly opposite to what Labor says in opposition. Apart from whingeing, whining, carping, fighting from the sidelines, and trying to talk about us rather than talk about the Territory, there are no plans for the future of the Northern Territory on the other side. There is not one policy in their show book, and that is a real concern.
I listened to the debate in this Chamber. In answering questions in Question Time, sometimes we have a bit of fun and sometimes we roll out policy and talk about our achievements. However, often it is hard to answer the questions because they are of such poor quality. I am not reflecting on individuals, but they are poor quality and the strategy of opposition is so poor it provides a poor reflection.
To have good government anywhere around the world you must have a robust opposition to hold you to account, to make you achieve higher levels and perform better. In this Chamber we see a very poor opposition. People talk about different opinions on this side of the Chamber. I welcome it; if people are having disputes, good on them. People are fighting for their electorates and for the Northern Territory. If we cannot get opposition from the other side of the Chamber, we will get it from our side, because the opposition and debate that comes from our side of the Chamber grows our policies and programs, and the direction we want for the Northern Territory, to ensure we have a better northern Australia for the future and we drive reform so we lead this nation.
We will not be supporting this censure motion. It is all about playing politics, once again. It is unfortunate, as I have reflected upon, that we have such a poor and weak opposition. It is not contributing to good debate in this Chamber or in the Northern Territory, and Territorians are being let down. As Chief Minister, I assure you we will continue to provide a good plan for the future, develop northern Australia, invest in economic, social, cultural and environmental aspects, and make sure there are jobs for tomorrow.
Madam Speaker, we have a plan and we will achieve our plan.
Mr VOWLES (Johnston): Madam Speaker, it gives me no pleasure to support this motion against the Chief Minister, but he leaves this side of the House no choice.
It is a little over 12 months since he took power, and it has been a year of missed opportunities, broken promises, financial pain, spiralling power costs, sacking the public sector and, now, the swearing scandal. This morning the member for Greatorex uttered verbal abuse towards me. He has form and he continues to do this …
Madam SPEAKER: Please pause, member for Johnston. This is a censure motion against the Chief Minister. If you believe there are issues in regard to the member for Greatorex, you can state them by way of a substantive motion. I ask that you refrain from making those comments and stick to the censure motion against the Chief Minister. If you wish to make a substantive motion at a later time, it is your choice.
Mr VOWLES: What a tawdry two weeks this has been. Chief Minister, Conlan-gate was your opportunity to make a new start, put a stamp on your leadership, support your values and regain the confidence of your backbench. I will recap my speech last night on the workplace bullying behaviour of the member for Greatorex.
On ABC on 11 March 2014, the member for Namatjira said:
- … I want to put this matter to bed. On Monday 17 February at 4.25 pm at our wing, Matt used the words, 'Why don't you do us all a big favour, Alison? F off, you c.’
The ABC presenter had asked her a direct question ...
Madam SPEAKER: Member for Johnston, I spoke earlier about the House of Representative Practice, which says you do not use quotes for other people and put words in mouths. I ask you to be careful of what you are saying. You may be quoting, but you are also using offensive language.
Mr VOWLES: Okay. Without hesitation, she answered firmly:
- … Matt used the words, ‘Why don’t you do us all a big favour, Alison, and …’
Ms Lawrie: It has been reported.
Mr VOWLES: That has been reported – disgraceful, abusive, disrespectful language. Again, I will quote from an interview on March 11 on ABC:
- I brought it to the attention of the Chief Minister and said, ‘Chief Minister, this man has just called me …’
- We have a full agenda; let's get on with business.
I ask this House and everybody, is that leadership? In other words, the Chief Minister did not bother with such minor matters as workplace vilification – bullying is verbal abuse – and wanted to sweep it under the carpet. He failed her and he failed in his leadership. At a time when leadership was called for, when any leader worth their position would have intervened and taken action, this Chief Minister failed. Not content with letting down his colleagues, his values and everyone who heard the comment, the Chief Minister decided it was best to cover it up. He had a chance to come clean, and when he did he said he was not:
- … aware of any offensive language that may or may not have been used.
That was on 8 March on ABC TV. Maybe he was mistaken. Maybe he had forgotten what the member for Namatjira said. He had another chance to set the record straight on Channel 9 the same day, and the Chief Minister said he was not aware of any offensive language that may or may not have been used.
I ask this House again, is that leadership? On Territory FM, the Chief Minister said:
Matt Conlan did not say that.
Is that leadership, trying to sweep it under the carpet? The final insult in this whole Conlan-gate saga was on 10 March on Mix FM. The legendary Pete Davies asked:
- Are you going to sack Minister Conlan?
The Chief Minister laughed. That is right, the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory showed leadership by laughing. He laughed at somebody being verbally abused. Verbal abuse is not a laughing matter.
To his credit, Pete Davies said to the Chief Minister, ‘Why not?’ The Chief Minister replied, ‘Why would I?’
It was the biggest political story in the Territory that day, and the Chief Minister showed his leadership by saying, ‘Why would I?’
Pete Davies tried to jog his memory by saying, ‘Well, I mean, he referred to one of his colleagues as a …’
It was a word that has previously been said in this Chamber in another debate. The Chief Minister said, ‘Well, Pete, I would actually challenge that. I do not believe that to be true’.
That is right, he showed leadership by saying, ‘I would actually challenge that. I do not believe that to be true’.
We cannot believe that. The cover-up lasted for a few days, and the Chief Minister showed his leadership of the Northern Territory by staying silent. It was only after the member for Namatjira told other listeners on ABC radio, after she was asked if she was offended:
- Oh, look, I think any woman would feel insulted. I felt absolutely insulted.
Chief Minister, as I said earlier, Conlan-gate was your opportunity to make a new start, put a stamp on your leadership, support your values and regain the confidence of your backbench. We all know the member for Greatorex should have been sacked from the ministry. If you had taken this immediate and decisive action against the member for Greatorex when he swore in the most disgusting way at the member for Namatjira, people could finally say, ‘At last Adam Giles is showing some leadership’. They could say this leader has principles and standards. Despite the chaotic events of the past 12 months, they could say he may have made a litany of errors as Chief Minister, but now he is showing signs of leadership.
But he has failed. The Chief Minister supported last night’s motion to discipline the member for Greatorex. During debate, I made it clear you perpetrated a media cover-up of what happened from 8 to 10 March. You spoke in that debate. For some reason, the tacticians on that side of the House thought it was a great idea to hang you out to dry as the only speaker on that motion. But enough of the crazy tactics of your backroom boys, the fact is, you spoke. You might have even received that advice from the member for Port Darwin.
It was a debate. I had accused you of covering up, and you let it stay on the record unchallenged. That is right: unchallenged. In a debate, Chief Minister, where there is no rebuttal, the facts stand: you have covered it up. But, enough of Conlan-gate, it is merely the last chapter in the story of the government which may very well be the worst state or Territory government Australia has ever seen.
I want to go into more about the bullying. Reading some of the information in Preventing and Eliminating Workplace Bullying in the Northern Territory Public Sector Framework:
- Bullying is NOT acceptable to anyone, anytime, anywhere!
Let us go through what was said to the member for Namatjira. I am going off number one, ‘What is workplace bullying?’ I go to some of this:
- Bullying behaviour may include … intimidation …
I ask this this House, was the member for Namatjira intimidated? I say she was. I am sure everybody in this House would be intimidated by the words the member for Greatorex used towards her.
- Bullying behaviour may include … isolating a person from others …
Considering we are hearing that the three bush members have been banned from Caucus meetings, I say that is isolating them from others. The members for Arnhem, Arafura and Namatjira cannot attend Caucus meetings ...
Mr Elferink: Well, they are Labor meetings for a start. They were in the parliamentary wing this morning as they are every day.
Mr VOWLES: Your parliamentary wing meeting. You play on words, mate. You have banned three of your own colleagues from meetings.
We are going to bullying behaviour, isolating …
Mr Elferink: It is untrue. Get your facts right.
Mr VOWLES: Listen! I know you are interjecting. I look forward to your response …
Mr Elferink: You are not telling the truth. You are required to tell the truth in this.
Mr VOWLES: Isolating a person … I will pick up on that. The member for Port Darwin has just said I am required to tell the truth. The member for Namatjira informed me of this. So, once again, we are telling the truth.
Let us go to the next ones: shouting, teasing, sarcasm. Seriously, we know the member for Greatorex and the Chief Minister – I suppose we could put in a few things about being bullied in this workplace as well.
Let us go to taking credit for someone’s work. The CLP, the government, should be accused of bullying us because they are taking credit for all the work we have done. We could probably take you on workplace bullying.
Then, we go down to racist and sexist. The member for Namatjira is a respected Indigenous woman. Racist! I will let other people talk about that. I would say the disgusting use of a female anatomy description by the member for Greatorex is sexist.
Let us go to the resolution process. Under ‘Key principles. Treat all matters seriously’, it says:
- Treating all reports seriously, encourages reporting and shows employees the organisation’s commitment to its no bullying policy.
The one I really want to get to is ‘Non-victimisation of a person who reports’:
- It is important to ensure that anyone who raises an issue of bullying is not victimised for coming forward.
Debate suspended.
MOTION
Proposed Censure of Chief Minister
Proposed Censure of Chief Minister
Continued from earlier this day.
Mr VOWLES (Johnston): Madam Speaker, I would like to clarify what I said in the House earlier today. I misunderstood what the member for Namatjira was telling me when she said she felt uncomfortable in CLP wing meetings, which is completely understandable. I misunderstood when I said she had been banned, which is not the case, and I apologise to the member for Namatjira for misquoting her. It was not my intention to misrepresent her and what she said, so I apologise for that.
Going back to the censure, I was talking about a resolution process and spoke about the non-victimisation of the person who reports. I repeat that it is important to ensure anyone who raises an issue of bullying is not victimised for coming forward.
The member for Namatjira was victimised for coming forward and, as I said last night, I applaud how brave she and the member for Araluen were for not being part of any cover-up, as the Chief Minister was.
We are here to discuss this censure and I have been focusing on the leadership of this Chief Minister. It is the day of closing the gap on Indigenous disadvantage. Most of us on this side of the House were at a breakfast this morning sponsored by the Menzies School of Health’s Rioli health fund. It was great to see the members for Araluen and Stuart there. We had the Leader of the Opposition, the members for Fannie Bay, Nhulunbuy, Casuarina, and me. It was great to be there and hear of the great work Menzies is doing. Guess who was not there? The Chief Minister of the Northern Territory was not at the closing the gap Menzies breakfast.
What is going on? Territorians are asking, ‘What is happening, where are you, what are you doing?’ You are so involved with your internal politics, trying to keep your own leadership, that you are not attending events. For me, and obviously, the members for Araluen and Stuart, it meant a lot to be there. It meant a lot for voters in the Northern Territory – people who attended and people in the industry – to see their politicians are supporting them when they can. The Chief Minister did not attend.
During the luncheon break, the Leader of the Opposition and I attended a closing the gap event held by Danila Dilba at the Jingili Water Gardens. There was no CLP, no Chief Minister and no leadership. All we heard was, ‘Sorry we cannot attend because sittings are on’. The Leader of the Opposition and I attended and got a great response. The Leader of the Opposition made a short speech, as did I, saying we will provide support in any way we can to close the gap in Indigenous disadvantage. We will support in any way we can in assisting Indigenous people’s lives. We have an Indigenous Chief Minister of the Northern Territory who cannot attend a closing the gap event. It is disgraceful and people are talking about it.
Not only that, Territorians are talking about power bills which have gone through the roof. People are leaving the Territory because they cannot afford to stay due to the cost of living, and those who stay cannot rely on the electricity supply. The worst blackout in our history, with a plethora of smaller blackouts either side of it, has happened on your watch, Chief Minister.
Then there are the broken promises to the bush. Little wonder your bush-based colleagues are in revolt. You promised so much, yet you delivered so little. You had to win the bush to win government, and you did it under false pretences.
There it is. The House must censure you on numerous counts. Territorians are hurting as their household bills skyrocket. The bush is being neglected, despite promises to the contrary. Finally, last night you voted in favour of doing something you, as leader, should have done without this House having to prompt you. In voting the way you did, you let the record stand that you misled Territorians in a clumsy cover-up on radio, on TV, and in the press. You basically voted to question your own honesty. If you do not trust yourself why would Territorians? You show no leadership to your colleagues. We know it, your colleagues know it, and Territorians know it. You have failed as a Chief Minister and as a leader. You need to go.
Mr ELFERINK (Attorney-General and Justice): Madam Speaker, I defend the integrity of our Chief Minister and our government. Why would I not? Since coming to government, I have striven, as has the government, with one clear thought in mind.
I invite all members to visit my office. I have had a number of members from the opposition and the Independent member in my office from time to time since coming to power. Those who have paid more attention would have discovered there is a single line plastered on every door in my office. You cannot walk through a door in my office without running into a sign. The sign is the last line of the prayer we say in this parliament every day. It is my mission statement and my vision statement. It simply says, ‘For the true welfare of the people of the Northern Territory’.
When I was, many years ago – it seems such a long time ago now – a flat foot in Central Australia and a police officer in the Top End of Australia, I saw things around me which needed to be attended to. Whilst at the time it was a political longshot to stand for the then seat of Macdonnell, against the political monolith that was Neil Bell, I thought, ‘Why not?’ If there is something I believe in, it is that we should stand up and pursue those things. I admire all members of this House, as I admire nearly all political candidates who put themselves on the line to stand for election. The vast majority of political candidates do not achieve office.
For those of us fortunate enough to be given office, we are given a rare and precious opportunity. When I was the member for Macdonnell I learnt many things. I had the seat of Macdonnell for eight years and it was a remarkable opportunity to do something and learn about people from different backgrounds.
In my electorate of Macdonnell, at the time, I could count seven independent languages and cultural systems. It was impressive and it left a lasting and indelible mark upon me for the following reasons. If you go into the bush, into these remote Aboriginal communities, you see a microcosm of what the rest of the community is, but in a much starker relief. For argument’s sake, if you travel to Hermannsburg you will meet some of the most pious human beings you will find anywhere on the face of the planet. They are good church-going folk. They do not drink or smoke. They are people of deep faith, if not a simple view of the world. In every sense of the word, they are good people. I learnt a lot from that because as a police officer you can develop, over time, a jaded view of the world. To find there were many good people in remote communities was almost a surprise to me, despite the fact I had served in some of these places. Of course, the pious and the good are not the types of people you come into contact with as a police officer. Unfortunately, you only come into contact with others.
The others, sadly, were overrepresented. I always felt the urge to see if we could do something better. In saying that, doing something better did not necessarily mean we should intervene in their lives in a fashion where we take their lives over. One of the things I have always believed, and even more deeply believe to this day, is that if you try to take over a person’s life – which is what things like the intervention, welfare and charity attempt to do – it has the effect of removing responsibility.
While responsibility is something uncomfortable, it is an important skill to learn. The more you discover about responsibility, and the more you try to apply responsibility to others as well as yourself, the more you start to understand how important it is. A person who says, ‘I am responsible’, is a person who, essentially, does not need any law to govern them because they will govern themselves automatically. Fortunately, the vast majority of people in our society and in our community will do so.
For the rest, we need a response. That response needs to be firm and to remind people of responsibility. Unfortunately, what I hear from the other side is not a world view I can subscribe to. They argue government should be compassionate. I understand that is their motivation; that is a word used several times by the Leader of the Opposition. Unfortunately, the way it is used by members opposite is an attempt to try to interfere with a person’s life and absolve that person of responsibility.
I cannot subscribe to their world view because, in a practical sense, when you have moved to make, adopt or be compassionate in the way described by members opposite, it is something that is immediate. It is something that has charitable intent, but does not better the person who is the subject of your charitable action; it simply provides for them. As the Chief Minister has said in this House, we need to create an environment where we do not necessarily provide for people, but we find mechanisms by which people learn to provide for themselves in better ways of thinking, behaving and acting.
The members opposite would argue that a compassionate society is one that says we can spend and borrow as much money as we like in the pursuit of the compassionate. That is exactly what they did prior to losing government. That is easy. Today we could say we will be very compassionate and start borrowing lots of money. However, we have seen the results of that sort of compassion in countries such as Greece and Italy. Compassion one day must be paid for the next and, unfortunately, in those communities, money that was spent for compassionate reasons – for arguments sake, keeping retirement rates low and those sorts of things – has to be paid for by someone. That someone is my seven- and eight-year-old daughters. I do not want to burden my girls with the costs of paying today’s compassion on the credit card bill into the future.
The policies of compassion, as outlined by members opposite, are policies which are there to satisfy the immediate. But that is not the legacy that I and members on this side of the House desire to leave behind. The legacy I want to leave behind is a legacy where people stand up and say, ‘I am accountable for who I am. I am accountable to my community, to my family and, ultimately, to myself.’ In doing so, what we then do is look at policies which focus on accountability.
Compassionate policies lead to the concept of things like the BDR, that we, as a society, are collectively responsible for the actions of a few. We have seen arguments about the BDR once again being thwarted by the reality of the statistics that were discussed on ABC last night.
What we do as a government is say we will hold those people who misbehave or engage in conduct which is bad for the rest of us directly responsible for themselves. For that reason, we have mandatory alcohol rehabilitation, not sweeping alcohol reform for the whole community. We say to a person who lies in a park so drunk three times in two months that they have to be apprehended and taken into custody that they have a problem they need to address. As a consequence of that, we have mandatory alcohol rehabilitation targeted at those individuals who are the problem. That is the difference between us and them.
We have Alcohol Protection Orders. We have gone down the path of demanding Alcohol Protection Orders because the person who commits the offence that attracts the order is the person who is answerable to their community, their family and themselves.
I do not know of any person in this parliament who has been subject to an Alcohol Protection Order. I suspect nobody in this parliament has been subject to an Alcohol Protection Order because we do not need them. If we were to commit offences where we had to have one thrust upon us, then we would deserve it. We, as a group of people, do not need them. But, the alternative government of the Northern Territory would inflict one rule for all.
The problem with the one rule-for-all attitude is you are often trying to fit square pegs in round holes. This is the reason the intervention failed. It failed because Canberra tried to say, ‘We know what is good for you in Yuendumu, Hermannsburg, Milingimbi or wherever else’. The moment you try to create policy in that fashion, you run into the problems you always will run into. Local solutions need to be driven by local community members. This is the what this government is pursuing and will continue to pursue.
We are not soft on the community with regard to crime – quite the opposite. We are harder than the former government ever wanted to be. It is for this reason we introduced mandatory sentencing for assaults that occasion bodily harm. It is for this reason we introduced things like APOs and mandatory alcohol rehabilitation. It is for this reason we introduced a number of legislative instruments that will see people go to gaol for longer. It is for this reason we have introduced instruments into this place which will enable us to keep serious sexual offenders in custody beyond the expiration of their sentence because of the likelihood they will offend. It is making those people accountable through those processes. For those people who do offend and find themselves within the system, then the system must be engineered in such a fashion that a person is encouraged – nay, almost pressed – into a response where they will ultimately become more responsible for themselves.
This is the reason we have the Sentenced to a Job program. This is the reason we are going to, increasingly over time, make the prisons a place of rehabilitation through labour, self-worth and self-understanding, rather than a concrete box to do some time. If we are going to correct, then we need to do that which is necessary to correct.
Madam Speaker, if any member wants to see my philosophy on rehabilitation, it is stuck to my office wall, right next to the posters of ‘For the true welfare of the people of the Northern Territory’. Also on my office wall is an artwork by a rape victim. It is not a particularly brilliant piece, but it is poignant because of its darkness. Underneath I have written as a reminder to my staff that this person was a victim of rape. Those of us who work in the Attorney-General’s department look at the artwork, remember what it looks like, take it on board and remember these are the people we are working for and trying to protect. That is what impels me and my colleagues, because we are driven to succeed for the people of the Northern Territory.
Consequently, when the Chief Minister says he has a plan for the people of the Northern Territory, it is because we have a plan which is coherent and makes sense. The Pillars of Justice plan which is being rolled out extensively across government agencies marries up all of these philosophical constructs so there is a philosophy operating which is consistent from the point of arrest to the end of parole and beyond. The police understand their role, the courts know their role and the corrections system knows its role. We can then overlay that with a juvenile justice policy which matches that philosophy, a domestic violence policy – which will very shortly be announced – which will overlay the same philosophy, and we will construct a civil system around it to support it which will reflect that philosophy. It is a consistent, logical, methodical approach that we have taken into this House.
However, it takes time to build and construct these things. It takes time and effort to build something that is of value and worth to the people of the Northern Territory.
I am personally driven by this. I do not want to give the sense that I am boasting, but last night when I completed my last file and looked at the clock, it was 11.05 pm. This morning I started work at 6 am. I relish the opportunity given to me to work on behalf of the people of the Northern Territory and their welfare. I will consistently put my nose to the grindstone as long as the people of the Northern Territory continue to ask me to serve their interests. I am passionate about what we do.
The members opposite would drag this government down and cast it to the four winds if they could. I ask them what they would offer in return. Twice in two weeks the member for Johnston has had to apologise to people for misrepresenting them. He had to apologise to Ms Carney in the newspaper and issue a media release. Twice he had to apologise and he is clumsy in the way he approaches his job.
This is what the Leader of the Opposition would offer in place of me or any other minister in this House? This is who the Leader of the Opposition would offer up? I ask honourable members: really? Is this the alternative government? Is this the alternative minister we would happily see? I suggest to honourable members that is probably not a wise choice.
There are other members on the other side who consistently misrepresent the truth in this House. We have heard it again and again. They continue to misrepresent the truth in this House because they have nothing to offer other than deceit. They have nothing to offer the Territory …
Ms LAWRIE: A point of order, Madam Speaker! Offensive.
Madam SPEAKER: Member for Port Darwin, you should withdraw that. It is a reflection on all the members of the opposition.
Mr ELFERINK: Yes, Madam Speaker, I agree. I withdraw and I will press on. Clearly, there is a sensitivity about these issues on the other side.
I will continue to focus, as I know all members on this side of the House will, on that one fundamental and guiding principle. I urge all members in this House to turn their minds to that one fundamental and guiding principle the next time they hear it. We should take a moment to reflect that we do not work here because of what goes on in this House, on the fourth floor, or on the fifth floor. I urge all members to occasionally walk to their balconies and look out at the real reason we are here. What they will see is the Northern Territory and the people who live here.
Madam Speaker, I ask all members to listen to the prayer again on Tuesday when we say it, and remind themselves when they hear the line that this is who we work for. We work for the true welfare of the people of the Northern Territory.
The Assembly divided:
- Ayes 8 Noes 13
Ms Fyles Ms Anderson
Mr Gunner Mr Chandler
Ms Lawrie Mr Conlan
Ms Manison Mr Elferink
Mr McCarthy Mr Giles
Mr Vatskalis Mr Higgins
Mr Vowles Mr Kurrupuwu
Ms Walker Mrs Lambley
Ms Lee
Mrs Price
Mr Styles
Mr Tollner
Mr Westra van Holthe
Motion negatived.
MOTOR ACCIDENTS (COMPENSATION) AMENDMENT BILL
(Serial 71)
(Serial 71)
Bill presented and read a first time.
Mr TOLLNER (Treasurer): Madam Speaker, I move that the bill be now read a second time.
This bill is being introduced to align the Northern Territory’s Motor Accident Compensation Scheme with the National Injury Insurance Scheme minimum benchmarks for motor vehicle accidents.
In August 2011, as part of the National Disability Strategy, the Productivity Commission released a report into disability care and support in Australia which found the sector was underfunded, unfair, fragmented, and a lottery based on the type of disability and in which jurisdiction the patient lived.
To address this issue, the Commonwealth established two schemes: the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the National Injury Insurance Scheme.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme will provide individualised care and support for eligible people with a significant and enduring disability, while the National Injury Insurance Scheme will provide lifetime care and support for people who are catastrophically injured in accidents.
The National Injury Insurance Scheme is to be phased in over several years and has been established to provide nationally consistent, no-fault, lifetime care and support for catastrophic injuries caused by four types of accidents: motor vehicle accidents, workplace accidents, medical accidents, and general accidents.
The first stage of the National Injury Insurance Scheme centres on standardisation of statutory attendant care provided under state and territory mandatory motor accident compensation schemes. The Territory is required to implement the first stage of the National Injury Insurance Scheme by fulfilling nationally consistent minimum benchmarks for motor vehicle accidents. This involves providing no-fault, lifetime care and support for people who are catastrophically injured in motor vehicle accidents from 1 July 2014.
Currently, the Northern Territory’s Motor Accident (Compensation) Act establishes a no-fault compensation scheme. This means if a person is injured or dies as a result of a motor vehicle accident, there is no requirement to prove the fault of somebody else in order to receive compensation, allowing for equitable care and support for all Territorians.
The scheme is underwritten by the Northern Territory government and funded by contributions from motorists when registering a motor vehicle or trailer. The Territory Insurance Office (TIO) administers the scheme on behalf of the government. The act prescribes compensation benefits for medical and rehabilitation costs, loss of earning capacity, attendant care, and compensation for the dependants of a person killed in a motor vehicle accident.
Attendant care benefits are personal and household support services required by people who are seriously and permanently injured. While the scheme does not limit medical or hospital benefits, attendant care benefits provided for home-based care and support are currently capped at 32 hours per week and paid at a rate less than what can currently be purchased in the market.
The National Injury Insurance Scheme establishes minimum requirements in relation to eligibility, scope, exclusions, level and range of long-term attendant care benefits for people who are catastrophically injured through motor vehicle accidents. For the Territory to comply with these minimum benchmarks, amendments to the current benefits provided under the MAC scheme are required.
In relation to attendant care, a key change under the National Injury Insurance Scheme will be that long-term attendant care benefits for future accidents involving motor vehicles will be uncapped and assessed against what is regarded as necessary and reasonable for individual claimants. Robust assessment tools supported by evidence-based clinical and practice guidelines will be used to ensure the boundaries of what is necessary and reasonable remain well-defined and clear.
Rates will be set with reference to the market and specified in a fee schedule to be gazetted. This represents a substantial improvement in compensation benefits for the catastrophically injured, as benefits will no longer be capped, but will be aligned with each individual’s needs for care. Other changes to the act relate to eligibility requirements for receiving benefits under the scheme.
In relation to unregistered vehicles, currently, the MAC scheme entitles drivers and owners of unregistered vehicles, on both public and private property, who are catastrophically injured in a motor vehicle accident to medical and attendant care benefits, but benefits for economic compensation of loss of earning capacity and permanent impairment benefits are excluded when the accident occurs on public property.
Under the amendments to the legislation, owners and drivers of unregistered motor vehicles involved in a motor vehicle accident would be excluded from all benefits for accident occurring on either public or private property. A three-month grace period will continue to apply for unregistered vehicles, and this will assist in the fact that the Territory no longer uses registration stickers on vehicles.
In these cases, people who are catastrophically injured in an unregistered vehicle would be eligible for National Disability Insurance Scheme assistance. Benefits provided under the National Disability Insurance Scheme include medical benefits such as clinical health services, medical and social rehabilitation, therapies and care, and home and vehicle modifications. Drivers of unregistered vehicles who can establish they did not know the vehicle was unregistered will be eligible for benefits under the scheme.
Importantly, passengers and pedestrians involved in accidents with unregistered vehicles would continue to be covered under the Motor Accident Compensation Scheme.
As a consequence of the National Injury Insurance Scheme minimum benchmarks, the owner or driver of an unregistered vehicle which is involved in a motor vehicle accident with a registered vehicle would receive attendant care benefits under the scheme.
The amendment removes the inconsistency that currently exists, providing the benefits and exclusions for accidents that occur on public land should apply equally to accidents that occur on private land. Where vehicles are being driven on private property for work-related purposes, then other forms of insurance are available such as workers’ compensation and personal insurance. A safety net remains through the National Disability Insurance Scheme, as well as the public health system.
The exclusion of unregistered motor vehicles is based on the rationale that owners of unregistered vehicles have not contributed to the scheme. Unregistered vehicles often represent a higher risk and cost because they can be poorly maintained, and unregisterable vehicles such as motocross bikes, quad bikes, and dune buggies may be involved in higher risk activities. Covering these costs creates a cross-subsidy which results in a cost impost to premium-paying Territory motorists.
Exclusion of unregistered vehicles from the scheme will encourage people to contribute to the MAC fund and also encourage the registration of vehicles for road safety reasons, as unregistered vehicles often do not meet the roadworthy standards and undermine the identification of vehicle owners as a means of managing driver behaviour.
Additional measures will be put in place to promote greater vehicle registration in remote areas, including increased compliance activity and driver awareness campaigns. TIO currently partners with the Department of Transport to run DriveSafe NT, a remote Indigenous licensing and registration campaign which aims to capture remote Indigenous Territorians who find it difficult to obtain a licence and to register their vehicles.
In relation to conditionally registered vehicles such as Segways and all-terrain vehicles that collect litter on the side of the road, they will be included in the scheme so long as the vehicle is being used for the purpose for which it is conditionally registered when the accident takes place. This recognises that a MAC contribution is paid as a requirement of conditional registration, and owners, drivers, and injured third parties should benefit from their inclusion.
In relation to racing, competitions, demonstrations and trials, the MAC Scheme is significantly exposed to racing events on both private and public land. Even though the current legislation excludes injured parties from economic benefit such as a loss of earning capacity and permanent impairment, the medical and attendant care component of the Motor Accident Compensation Scheme benefits can impose a significant cost burden on the Motor Accident Compensation Scheme. Also, covering races and motor sports events is out of step with provisions in other no-fault motor accident schemes.
Through amendments to the Motor Accidents (Compensation) Act no benefits will be payable for a person’s injury or death as a result of a motor vehicle accident if the motor vehicle involved in the accident was taking part in a motor sport event such as a race, competition, demonstration, trial, or high-speed vehicle test. This is regardless of whether the vehicle was registered or not. Spectators at these events will be eligible for benefits if they suffer an injury during the event.
The proposed exclusion is consistent with the National Injury Insurance Scheme minimum benchmarks, and represents a public policy consideration regarding the equity of providing benefits for individuals engaging in risky activities and where a contribution has not been made to the scheme, particularly where there are other forms of compensation available. This exclusion places the onus on an event organiser to take out appropriate insurance to cover participants and officials in a manner similar to that required for the Confederation of Australian Motor Sports membership.
Territory residents involved in accidents in unrestricted speed limit zones will still continue to be covered under the Motor Accident Compensation Scheme so long as the vehicle is registered and the driver is complying with the road rules.
In relation to seatbelts and helmets, at the moment a 25% reduction from all benefits applies with the exception of medical and rehabilitation expenses if the driver in a motor vehicle accident is not wearing appropriate safety equipment, such as a seatbelt or helmet, at the time of the accident. We are now going to change this so the reduction does not apply to benefits for appliances and special facilities, attendant care, emergency travel and funeral costs.
The proposed amendments restore a greater number of health-related benefits to align with the National Injury Insurance Scheme minimum benchmarks where reductions for contributory negligence are not applied. A 25% reduction remains in place for benefits of loss of earning capacity, permanent impairment and lump sum death and dependency.
There are other minor amendments. A series of relatively minor amendments to the MAC Scheme have also been included in the amending bill. This includes increasing the pension entitlement age in line with the Commonwealth government’s incremental increase for the purposes of calculation of loss of earning capacity benefits. There is also a change in the working hour week from 48 hours to 38 hours for the calculation of loss of earning capacity consistent with national legislation, and a provision that excludes acts of terrorism involving a motor vehicle from MAC benefits, which is consistent with the National Injury Insurance Scheme scope of cover.
A provision has also been included which enables the Territory Insurance Office to reject a claim if the driver involved in the accident does not report it to police as is required under the Traffic Regulations. This is aimed at trying to reduce the number of fraudulent claims received by the scheme.
In relation to the financial impact, TIO commissioned PricewaterhouseCoopers to examine the impact of the proposed changes on the scheme’s outstanding claims liability and break-even premium. The report was based on claims history held by TIO. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates the financial impact of the proposed reforms to be approximately $49.4m as a one-off impact at the time of implementation, to improve the attendant care benefits for existing claimants, and an annual impact going forward of $40 per vehicle.
TIO also estimates there will be additional implementation costs, as they will be required to take a greater role in assessing eligibility for benefits and in approving service providers, particularly in remote areas of the Territory.
Due to automatic indexation of MAC premiums and prudent management by TIO in recent years, the scheme has accumulated significant capital reserves. Given the financial position of the scheme, the adoption of the National Injury Insurance Scheme minimum benchmarks can be funded initially from existing premium indexation arrangements and capital reserves. On this basis, MAC premiums will increase from 1 July 2014 in line with indexation, as is normal.
The amendments to the Motor Accidents (Compensation) Act will provide for increased benefits for those catastrophically injured in a motor accident from 1 July 2014, and is consistent with the Territory’s commitment to the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the National Injury Insurance Scheme.
Madam Speaker, I commend the bill to honourable members and table a copy of the explanatory statement.
Debate adjourned.
HEALTH PRACTITIONER REGULATION (NATIONAL UNIFORM LEGISLATION) AMENDMENT BILL
(SERIAL 67)
(SERIAL 67)
Continued from 19 February 2014.
Ms MANISON (Wanguri): Madam Speaker, I support the Health Practitioner Regulation (National Uniform Legislation) Amendment Bill before the Assembly today, but I also highlight the need for continuing work by the minister and this government to fully support private midwifery practice and home birthing options for mothers and families in the Northern Territory.
The bill has been introduced by government so it can create the ability for private midwifery practice as part of the health sector in the Territory. At present there are no privately practising midwives; however, they are in place in other jurisdictions.
Looking back, it was in 2002 when privately practising midwives across Australia lost their ability to access professional indemnity insurance due to the withdrawal of these insurance services. Following on from this, the Territory government invested in supporting a home birth service so women could access publicly-funded home birth care and continue to have choice of care pathways for their pregnancy. Midwives were able to work within the public health and private hospital system as they had access to legal support from their employer. However, a privately practising, self-employed midwife looking to assist with home births could not access indemnity insurance and did not have the support of an employer in the event of any legal action.
To enable privately practising midwives to operate in the Territory health system, this bill will seek to amend the Health Practitioner Regulation (National Uniform Legislation) Act by inserting section 4A, thereby enabling national legislation which aims to allow privately practising midwives to practise without professional indemnity insurance that covers the intrapartum or birthing period.
The amendment seeks to explicitly outline that privately practising midwives in the NT will be covered by the exemption provided for in section 284 of the national law. That national exemption is in place until June 2015. However, there is no clear answer yet on what will happen after that date. I urge the government to start working with its state and federal counterparts to seek a resolution on this matter in the near future. Attracting privately practising midwives to the Territory will be all the harder, given there is no answer yet to what arrangements will be in place next year. All jurisdictions will be facing this same issue.
Seeking an earlier resolution will help give everyone certainty going forward and will help in the case of establishing privately practising midwives here. This legislation goes some way in ensuring the government has a genuine desire to integrate privately practising midwives into the Territory health sector.
The amendments being debated today have followed on from significant pressure on the government from home birth advocates regarding changes to the current government-funded home birthing services, particularly for access to home birth service and one-on-one continual midwifery-led care they seek.
The opposition believes it is important that women have choice when it comes to their options of care when they are pregnant, continuing through to their birth and postnatal care. We believe women should have access to strong antenatal, intrapartum and postnatal care, and have appropriate choice on how they decide to go through birth.
We appreciate that everyone wants to have the strongest and safest care and to ensure the health of the mother and baby is top priority so there are minimal complications and issues occurring through the pregnancy and birthing process. We appreciate this legislation will go some way to increasing access to care options and maintaining high standards around birthing practices in the Territory.
We will support the bill before the House on the basis it will create more choice for Territory families on birthing options and give midwives more pathways for their careers. However, we have concerns about whether this legislation, in some ways, is just a mechanism for government to continue appeasing home birthing advocates while reducing publicly-funded services and midwifery resources for people seeking to birth at home and at the RDH birthing centre facilities. This could be seen as a mechanism to assist government in reducing investment and access for women wishing to seek one-on-one midwifery-led care for their pregnancy.
We have some concerns regarding the process that has been followed in preparing the bill, and the level of consultation with the community and health sector. When I approached some key stakeholder groups with interests in the outcome of this bill, it was clear that government had not been engaging with them about the detail of the bill before the Assembly. They have subsequently been offered briefings and some were only briefed yesterday. Clearly, if you want to get it right, it is important you engage with those groups up front and have those discussions in order to get the best legislation in place.
With anything new, it will take time to get a new arrangement up and running, and for people to arrange the setup on how they will operate, where they will work from, and get appropriate registration and insurance.
I understand the Department of Health is looking at putting in a framework on how privately practising midwives can operate in the Territory. There is a real desire from home birthing advocates in the community to see this framework completed as soon as possible. Understandably, everybody appreciates it is very important to get it right. Everybody wants to ensure the very best practices are in place. Clearly, consultation will be a very important part of that. I am sure the appropriate medical and home birthing advocates would like to be part of that process to get the best resolution for all.
It will be good to hear from the minister about how the framework will be put together and who will be consulted in the process – the time line given, June 2015, is not too far away – to ensure we give privately practising midwives the best opportunity to operate in the Territory and create the right environment for people to come into the Territory or decide they want to go down this career pathway.
In my consultations, several questions were raised about privately practising midwives accessing indemnity insurance and how it works for the intrapartum stage, which is the birth. In the minister’s second reading speech, she stated:
- Midwives practising in a private capacity will be expected to access professional indemnity insurance for antenatal and postnatal care. They must inform a woman wishing to have a home birth they do not have professional indemnity insurance for intrapartum care so the woman can make an informed choice. The woman will be required to give informed consent to proceed with the home birth, knowing the midwife does not have professional indemnity insurance.
There are also other relevant mechanisms to place a grievance or complaint, so it is known and can be investigated through the Health and Community Services Complaints Commissioner of the NT, the professional board, the regulating authority, which is the NMBA, the patient advocate and the Department of Health.
However, there is no real clear direction in this legislation on the following: where does a mother go if she has complaints or grievances about the birth; when utilising a privately practising midwife, if something does go wrong, how are issues arising from that resolved? Clearly, given that most of the privately practising midwifes will be self-employed and given no insurance cover during that birthing period, they are left significantly exposed. This may also make it harder to attract privately practising midwives to the Territory.
If a privately practising midwife becomes the subject of legal action, will they have access to any government support to a system through that process? We know there would be a range of support for the community home birth service funded by government. However, privately practising midwives appear to be left out on their own.
The minister’s office has advised us there will be professional support relationships built between the Department of Health and the privately practising midwives to ensure they are following best practise and everybody gets to see the best possible outcome. However, there appears to be no real direction on what support there is in whether there are any legal issues that result during that birthing period.
The minister, in her second reading speech, referred to the issue that will also require ongoing attention from the government, that is, the national legislation reflected in the Northern Territory’s Health Practitioner Regulation (National Uniform Legislation) Act provided for an exemption for privately practising self-employed midwives holding professional indemnity insurance for the period ending by the national agreement in June 2015. That professional indemnity insurance exemption period, for both public and private midwives, is under review. What happens after June 2015 is yet to be agreed at a national level through the Australian Health Ministers’ Advisory Council.
Amendments contained in the bill make it possible for privately practising midwives to practise in the NT in line with both the Northern Territory and national law, but what happens after June 2015? I have been advised that the main options at present include:
1. that the national exemption is further extended
2. that insurance companies determine conditions upon which they will offer professional indemnity insurance to privately practising midwives for the intrapartum phase of midwifery care in a home birth situation, and the exemption is no longer necessary
3. the current exemption is withdrawn and, in the absence of professional indemnity insurance provisions, privately practising midwives providing home birthing service will no longer be eligible for national registration with the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia.
That is what I mean about the necessity of the minister continuing work in this area, because clearly she has a very high level of commitment to delivering privately practising midwives to operate in the Territory to facilitate more choice. Clearly at the national, state and Territory levels there is much work to do. Given we are sitting in March 2014 and it expires in June 2015, time is running short.
We all agree that with any new system and services it is important to have checks and balances in place to ensure we have quality practises. When it comes to pregnancy and the delivery of new babies, we all want to know the systems are working well and issues are dealt with effectively.
The bill today imposes requirements on privately practising midwives to report back to the Chief Health Officer so the government is able to effectively monitor home birthing cases. All privately practising midwives will be required to provide reports under section 4A(4) in clause 3 of the bill:
- A midwife must give the Chief Health Officer a written report in relation to a private midwifery case, prepared in accordance with any requirement prescribed by a law of the Territory and in any event not later than 60 days after the end of the case.
It was also stipulated within the amendment bill that the privately practising midwives will be required to inform the Chief Health Officer of their practising in the Northern Territory before 31 May each year after they register. It would be good to hear from the minister about what type of reporting on the progress of the implementation of the new privately practising midwives will be available to keep track of how it is all progressing.
There were some concerns relating to the collection of perinatal data. It would be good if the minister could outline, with regard to the reporting practises of the new privately practising midwives, what data will be collected and how this data will be used and reported on so we can get that clear today and see exactly how that will all work.
Another issue that has been raised is how privately practising midwives will work with public hospitals and staff within them. The feedback I have received loud and clear is that it is crucial that privately practising midwives have strong working relationships with the hospitals and appropriate staff within them to deal with any issues that may arise during the pregnancy or the birth and, if a mother determines she would like or needs to transfer to a hospital from home, there are mechanisms in place to ensure seamless transitions to hospital services.
Community home birth advocates have recommended to the government that it develops guidelines to admitting the practice rights to public health facilities as part of the privately practising midwives framework. Their recommendations include that mechanisms for visiting access by eligible midwives to public hospitals are essential, all Australian states and territories commit to facilitating women’s access to hospital care by eligible midwives under the National Maternity Services Plan section 1.2.2 which requires a generic process for eligible midwives and medical practitioners to secure clinical privileges, admitting and practice rights to public health facilities is implemented and monitored, and there is an ability to consult and learn, utilising the lessons learned by public hospitals from Toowoomba, Gold Coast, Bundaberg and Ipswich, all of which have cooperative arrangements with eligible midwives.
It will be good to hear from the minister regarding this matter and what work will be done to ensure privately practising midwives have strong working relationships with the hospitals to ensure the best level of care for mothers and babies. It is important that Territory women have choice when it comes to their pregnancy and birthing options.
Last year there was strong community pressure on the government about reduced access to home births and one-on-one midwifery care for women who had previously had a caesarean. This brought the home birthing debate back into the public domain and onto the steps of Parliament House.
Many home birth advocates and mums have challenged the blanket approach by government to dealing with women who have previously had a C-section, rather than individually assessing that woman and her pregnancy. For many of these women it is not just about having a home birth, it is about getting access to one-on-one care from midwives through the home birth service, and they were devastated to lose this option. Their choice had been reduced and a pathway of support they wanted to receive through their pregnancy had been taken away.
The home birth advocates believe a Lancet article published in September 2013 and the Cochrane review of home birth outcomes support that stated midwifery-led care models lead to cost savings for government as well as quality care for mother and child. A key finding from the Lancet article stated they found that using an individual caseload midwife led to significant reduction in rates of non-emergency caesarean section births. Women under the care of a named midwife were also more likely to experience spontaneous labour, required lower doses of painkilling drugs and suffered less blood loss after birth. They stayed in hospital for less time than women given standard care, and they were more likely to breastfeed their babies. In addition, employing a caseload midwife led to a cost saving of $566 per woman giving birth.
With this bill before the House and the changes which have been introduced to access the home birth service and the home birthing centre, there are concerns the government is moving away from fully supporting access to publicly-funded home birth services. There are real concerns that the reintroduction of privately practising midwives could lead to a further reduction of access to publicly-funded home birth services and one-on-one midwifery care for Territory women.
I call on the minister today, as part of this debate, to outline the plans for the future of the home birth service and access for all women wanting to seek one-on-one midwifery care. Will there be cuts or changes to publicly-funded places within the home birth service and midwives and the birthing centre? There is an opportunity today for the government to put on the record if it is planning any further changes.
Clearly, for privately practising midwives to be an attractive option for some families, price will be a consideration. Just like the choice families weigh up of whether they go to the public or private system, weighing up whether they can afford the services of a privately practising midwife will be another issue for many families.
Some midwives will be eligible to provide Medicare rebates for their services which will make accessing them more attractive to families. It would be good if the minister could outline how the government will support privately practicing midwives eligible for these rebates in the NT and help make new home birth arrangements accessing privately practising midwives more affordable.
The Australian Medical Association has raised some concerns regarding the establishment of privately practising midwives being reintroduced into the Territory. They are concerned about midwives practising outside the current systems in place and health issues which may arise when home births go wrong. They also have concerns regarding the fact that during the birthing period there will be no access to insurance.
This raises the critical point of strong working relations with the Top End and Central Australian health services in the Department of Health. For a woman and the baby to get the best possible care it is essential those relationships are seamless and, if it comes to the case where they need to go into the care of hospital staff and services, there are practices and a framework in place to ensure they are able to be accessed at the earliest possible opportunity.
There are still some questions around whether privately practising midwives will be able to start operating in the time we have left before June 2015. It is positive the government has shown their intent and desire to have privately practising midwives, but I hope this is not at the cost of publically-funded access to home births, the birthing centre, and access to continued one-on-one midwifery care.
There are also questions about privately practising midwives’ inability to get insurance support in their practice in the intrapartum period of pregnancy. There are questions we need answered today about how privately practising midwives will build strong relationships with the hospitals to ensure women and babies get access to the best possible care when they require their services and staff.
On a personal note, I wanted to get the ear of you and some Health department staff in the House today. As somebody who has had to recently explore the wonderful world of birthing options and pathways available in the Northern Territory, there is not a huge amount of information on the Department of Health website. It is pretty limited. The most I could find was a couple of pages. It would be great if you could get your communications staff to work with the Health Department to look at it. I might have missed it online, but it was something I could not find a huge amount of information on. Some more would be wonderful.
I acknowledge and say thank you to the Department of Health staff who have worked on this bill, and staff in the minister’s office - Alex and Anthony - who have been very helpful and always help in getting a brief in a timely fashion. I appreciate it. I thank the ANMF and the AMA for their feedback when I asked them their thoughts on the bill. Mostly, I thank and pay tribute to the home birth advocates in the Territory, to the Child Birth Education Association of Australia, the Darwin Homebirth Group, particularly Hilary, Lisa and Alison who have given me an education. It has been your work and advocacy which has helped get us here today. It is wonderful to see people standing up in the community for what they feel is right and give people more options as they go down this special journey of pregnancy and giving birth. You have done a wonderful job which has been outstanding. We are in this place today because of the work you have done. Well done and thank you.
The opposition will support the bill today, but we see there are some obstacles still in the way to getting privately practising midwives operating in the Territory. We believe access to choice during pregnancy and birth is important and must always be done with the health and wellbeing of all involved held in the highest regard.
We will be monitoring the government’s investment in home birth care, one-on-one midwifery care and access to the birthing centre, to ensure Territory women continue to get access to these important services. We welcome seeing privately practising midwives practicing again in the Northern Territory.
Mr WOOD (Nelson): Mr Deputy Speaker, I too support this bill. When I first came to parliament, one of the first issues raised, when I was quite green, was midwives. There was quite aggressive debate on the matter. It was, at that time, a learning curve for me, especially when I had just arrived in parliament and someone started talking about midwifery. There are people in our community – and some of those people are here today – who have long wanted more choice for mothers on where they can have their babies, and home birthing is one of those choices.
I thank the department for the briefing I had the other day, and I thank the member for Wanguri, who has raised many other issues.
The core of what has been put forward today is to allow an exemption from the Health Practitioner Regulation (National Uniform Legislation) Act so midwives can practice without contravening section 129(1) of the national law, which states all health practitioners must have professional indemnity insurance. The amendment will give privately practising midwives in the Northern Territory coverage from section 284 of the national law.
There are other requirements, which the shadow minister spoke about and are in the explanatory notes. The clause provides a risk management strategy by requiring the midwife to give notice to the Chief Health Officer of their intention to practise private midwifery in the NT. This will enable the CHO to keep records of privately practising midwives and to monitor outcomes.
There is another clause which requires midwives to provide written data on cases and outcomes to the CHO. This will be in line with the requirements for perinatal data recoding – I do not know whether that is meant to be recording – under the Public and Environmental Health Act.
As we know, the exemption applies to the intrapartum or birth stage, so mothers are covered for the prenatal and antenatal parts of the birth. The issue has been around indemnity in relation to intrapartum. I raised this issue in the briefing, because I understand there are many safeguards. We are dealing with professional people in the hospital who are well-trained. There are some limitations on either the distance from the hospital or the travel time from the hospital this can apply. It is not for everybody. You have to be, I think, within a certain distance of the hospital. There are some limitations, and on top of that you are dealing with professional people.
What concerns me is what if something goes wrong? You do not want anything to go wrong. It seems the legislation says if the person having the child signs a form – I will read from the second reading:
- Midwives practising in a private capacity will be expected to access professional indemnity insurance for antenatal and postnatal care. They must inform a woman wishing to have a home birth they do not have professional indemnity insurance for intrapartum care so the woman can make an informed choice. The woman will be required to give informed consent to proceed with the home birth, knowing the midwife does not have professional indemnity insurance.
I raised this at the briefing. I know it sounds like it comes out of left field, but I will put the case of the Howard Springs Reserve where for many years people were able to swim. The Health Department then checked the water and said it was too dangerous and people could not swim there anymore. There were two legal cases where the department – it would have been the Department of Parks and Wildlife – had to check whether by putting up a sign, Parks would be indemnified from any problem that might occur if someone swam in that water. My recollection is that both legal opinions said the department would not be exempted from any actions that could result from someone being permanently sick, or even dying from entering that water.
My concern is the government is saying, ‘We will indemnify you by passing this legislation’. The mother will sign a consent form which is a bit like saying, ‘I understand there is a sign up there that says you do this at your own risk’. However, what happens if something goes wrong? Of course I hope nothing goes wrong. However, we are passing legislation which allows an exemption from insurance at one stage – a very important stage, the point of intrapartum.
I am interested to have it on record from the government whether, by making this law, if something goes wrong they are exempt by ensuring the mother gives informed consent? Does that remove any liability from the government if something goes wrong? In general, I am happy that people can have their children at home. I realise there are some risks, and it is not for everybody. However, there are some people who would prefer, where possible, to have their children born at home. That is my concern, minister, and I am interested to see whether government has any responsibility. Is their responsibility removed if something goes wrong, simply by a woman giving informed consent?
I thank the shadow minister for her excellent response to the bill. It raised a few issues which have been discussed before. The issue about caesarean birth is a topic there has been much discussion about. People on both sides of the argument have very firm ideas. Also, there was the issues of the relationship between the hospital and the mothers who are having their children at home.
The other issue was about the website and looking for information. Some departments have good websites and others have difficult websites. I have not checked this matter on the Health Department’s website. Some sites are not easy to gain information from. I do not know whether it is the way they are designed. It could be me, of course. I am not the greatest person when trying to get information from a web page.
Mr Deputy Speaker, I support the bill subject to getting some clarification on the issue of the government’s role or where the government’s responsibility lies if something goes wrong, simply because we are passing an exemption from the bill. We are giving mothers the right to do this, so I am interested in the response to that.
Mr ELFERINK (Attorney-General and Justice): Mr Deputy Speaker, I also speak in support of this bill. In supporting the bill, I sound out some cautions. I will bring, if you like, a legal perspective to this legislative instrument before the House. I pick up, in particular, on the questions raised by the member for Nelson in this area, and the shadow minister.
The structures of this bill are quite clear in their intent, but it would be remiss of me, as the Attorney-General of the Northern Territory, to not point out quite clearly the implications that associate themselves with this instrument for people who are seeking to take advantage of the permission it enables.
The bill before us does a simple thing: it enables private practitioners or midwives to operate away from clinics and other environments. This, of course, is something the AMA, and obstetricians in particular, have signalled some cautions around. It is my understanding and belief that a woman who is pregnant is not sick. The heart of many of the arguments in support of legislation like this is that births will occur regularly without any form of complication whatsoever.
With the birth of my two children, we had clinicians involved in both cases and those births were in the hospital. One could have been forgiven for thinking afterwards what we were spending all the money on because Mother Nature took its course, and, whilst it was uncomfortable for my wife, nevertheless, it went as it was supposed to.
I am mindful that one of the great truisms of the later part of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st century is that we have become used to medical interventions. We often question why we need those medical interventions. This can be revealed in a number of debates we have in the modern world.
In the immunisation debate we now see in the west, we often hear parents say they will not expose their children to immunisation processes because it represents a risk to the child. Yes, there is an element of risk, but one only has to remember what polio and smallpox was like and, in more recent times in Darwin alone – in the last few weeks – the revisiting of diseases like measles …
Oh no. Is she all right? The poor mite’s taken a tumble. Is she okay?
I am somewhat thrown. For the Hansard record, one of the kids in the public gallery has just gone A over T down the staircase. It looks like she is being well looked after, but we can hear her through the soundproof glass. On the subject of risk, perhaps we have to look at those steps.
We have to look at medical interventions as a greater risk than the thing that can potentially go wrong, and we can often forget the risk it represents. If you look at something like immunisation, we now have smallpox existing, as far as I am aware, in a petri dish in a refrigerator in a lab somewhere in the world. There is a debate as to whether or not we should extinguish that species from the face of the earth. Somebody hit that thing with a can of Baygon please and let us be done with it. I invite any member to Google – for those of you who have your computers open –images of what smallpox looks like. Take the Wikipedia entry to remind you of the reason we have immunisations.
I speak of these things because obstetricians like to be close to medical attention on those occasions where something can go wrong. That is the argument from the medical profession. I believe a large slice of the bills I paid when my two children came into the world were paid onwards by the obstetrician to insurance companies.
Obstetricians are, like any other practitioner, potentially subject to malpractice suits. When those malpractice suits come through the door they are big figure payouts, because often when something goes wrong in the intrapartum stage of a birth, the effects can be permanent and the payout can be literally for a lifetime. This is considered a risk, so much so I am led to understand the insurance companies will not make the product available at all to a privately practising midwife. If this is the case, you understand the risk must be substantial, particularly considering the amount of money which has to be paid out.
If an insurance company gets to the point where they are not prepared to insure for something, they must determine there is too must risk to carry. If there is ever an organisation which can conduct an effective assessment on risk, it is an insurance company. They are only slightly down on risk assessment from casinos and their capacity to determine what is worth covering and not worth covering.
They are more than happy to provide insurances for antenatal care. They are more than happy to provide insurances for the postpartum environment for privately practising midwives. I imagine the risk factors represented in both those forms of indemnities are not substantial and the payouts - or the risk carried in what is potentially paid out - is not necessarily so large. The fact insurance companies say, ‘No, we are not prepared to cover this sort of practise away from the clinics’ speaks volumes to me as a legislator.
However, this bill clearly says we will allow it to occur, but only in certain circumstances. There will be high levels of reporting required and high levels of oversight by the Chief Health Officer – the CHO is the expression - and that oversight means this legislative instrument is trying to mitigate risk. However, we on this side of the House are Liberals, and by definition we believe in choice and in people being responsible for those choices.
I rose to my feet because I want to make it abundantly clear – these are the questions raised by the shadow minister and the member for Nelson – this is us saying to those midwives, do this and you take the risk, because we, as a government, will not indemnify you against your decision. If you want to do it, by all means do it, but follow these rules, not least of which is a full and open declaration to the mother-to-be that you are not carrying indemnity insurance. Should something go wrong, you will still be liable to the full extent of the common law in relation to your tortuous liability – standard of care, duty of care and proximity being the tests, particularly the first two. However, if the midwife acts in a professional fashion and satisfies the requirements of the standard and duty of care as required by tortuous law, the responsibility and expense of caring for that child will fall upon the parents.
There will still be a claim against the state because there will be requirements for medical and health interventions. We are not such a callous society that we would not provide medical assistance for a child who has suffered as a result of being too far away from medical intervention during the birthing process. But having said that, this legislation is making clear to the community at large that the risk is substantially theirs. Obstetricians, the Australian Medical Association and many other organisations will tell them not to do it and stay close to medical facilities in case something goes wrong. If they want to do this, go and do it, but the risk is theirs to take.
I suggest if it came to a place where a person had a child not close enough to medical care and something went wrong, they could still sue the practitioner. If the practitioner was found wanting in the standard of duty of care, I suspect the practitioner would very quickly find they would not have the resources available to provide support out of their own pocket for the child indefinitely. The response of a tortuous action, I suspect, would lead, in one case going wrong alone, to bankruptcy for the practitioner. That does not help the child, and it is this debate which has raged and brought us to the House today.
As I said, we should expect to live in a society where people can make their choices, but the implication of this legislation could not be clearer. It is that while we allow people to make their choices, they also carry the risk of those choices if they do not take all steps available to them to avoid possible outcomes. It throws the responsibility on the practitioners to make sure they provide a standard and duty of care which is acceptable within the terms of their profession. We expect parents to contemplate these decisions very carefully indeed and, should it go wrong, essentially, what this bill says is they are largely on their own.
Having made those observations, I have sounded the caution I wanted to sound in this House today to any Territorian contemplating taking advantage of this legislation. I wish any Territorian who does take advantage of this legislation the very best, and I wish them a wonderful and beautiful experience. If it does go wrong – and the insurance companies will tell us, by their response, that the risk is unacceptable for them – then the responsibility will ultimately lie upon the shoulders of the person who has made that choice.
Mrs LAMBLEY (Health): Mr Deputy Speaker, I thank all members who have contributed to this debate on the Health Practitioner Regulation (National Uniform Legislation) Amendment Bill 2014.
Yesterday the Department of Health held a stakeholder briefing on the legislation with representatives from the Australian College of Midwives, Darwin Homebirth Service, the Child Birth Education Association and the Darwin Homebirth Group. I understand it went well. I acknowledge the contribution those groups made to bringing about this amendment to the legislation, which will allow privately practising midwives to again function in the Northern Territory. They have been the true advocates, as the member for Wanguri said and, without their enthusiasm and pressure on us as a government, this would not have come about. I acknowledge their hard work and dedication to something they truly believe in.
Adequate consultations were undertaken for what is essentially a very small piece of legislation. It is just two pages. It brings us into line with all other jurisdictions in Australia when it comes to giving privately practising midwives an exemption to practice within the Northern Territory. It is fairly straightforward legislation, but it has significant implications. I do not make any apology to the allegation that our consultation was not sufficient; I believe it was. It is, as I said, fairly simple in nature. What happens in the implementation of the legislation, the guidelines, the regulations if required, is perhaps where we could have some more direct consultation with the various interest groups. In the first place, it is fairly straightforward and brings us into line with the rest of Australia.
It has taken a long time to get to this place in history. Privately practising midwives have not been able to practice in the Northern Territory for many years. It surprised me there was this lack of choice in the Northern Territory for a long time.
To take a political position, it surprises me that Labor left this gaping hole in services and choices for women having babies in the Northern Territory. However, we have moved on, listened to people and tried to plug this hole. It is not ideal. We will be revisiting this space in just over a year when the national legislation, effectively, expires.
In response to some of the questions the member for Wanguri raised about what will happen at that point, it is not clear. I have attended several Standing Council on Health meetings, which are the meetings in which the Health ministers gather to discuss these type of national policies, and it is not clear. In fact, at the last meeting it was deferred. There are many differences in opinion on how we should move forward. One view – and the member for Wanguri raised this – was an option around this issue of giving admitting rights to privately practising midwives. That is something I would be very open to. However, the whole solution beyond June 2015 is very unclear. Across the jurisdictions of Australia there is much division and difference in opinions as to how we will proceed.
I will keep the various groups updated as to how that proceeds. I am due to attend a Standing Council on Health ministers meeting in April. I have no doubt this will be on the agenda because it is something we all have to put our minds to. It is a situation that is not ideal on many levels.
First I will address some of the issues the member for Wanguri raised. This amendment to the legislation was a reaction to an issue that came about at the end of last year whereby we, as a government, were advised that, after caesareans, vaginal births taking place in a home birth setting were not safe. We were advised very strongly by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists that having high-risk births – for example, vaginal births after caesareans in a home birth setting – was too high risk to approve or to allow within a public health setting. We had to stop that, and I make no apologies for following the advice of those clinical experts.
It was met with great resistance by various interest groups across the Northern Territory who felt that was very unfair. I spoke to several women late last year on the lawns of Parliament House who said they had gone on to have very successful vaginal births in a home birth setting, or otherwise, after a caesarean, and they felt very disenfranchised by this decision we felt compelled to make. In talking to the stakeholder group of some women on that evening outside Parliament House, it was drawn to my attention that another option to give people choice in this space was to allow privately practising midwives to operate again in the Northern Territory.
That was something we thought we could do fairly quickly. It was my commitment at the time that we would try to expedite this and get it up and running. It has eventuated like that. The reaction to us not allowing VBAC in a home birth within the public health system was around October/November last year. Here we are in March debating this amendment to the legislation to allow privately practising midwives back in the Northern Territory. We have met our commitment. The Department of Health has worked very expeditiously to have this legislation enacted. We all feel committed to ensuring women have this choice which was not allowed to them for quite some time.
We appeased the home birth advocates but, on reflection, it makes perfect sense. When we did the research into what was happening across other jurisdictions, it made even more sense. Why this gaping gap in choice in the Northern Territory existed for so long was quite puzzling.
We are committed to best practice and choice; there is no doubt about it. Most contemporary thinkers in this space – and I regard myself as one, it was not such a long time ago I had children – think it is extremely important that we provide best practice, best quality services in the Northern Territory, and choice in all areas of birthing: antenatal, intrapartum and postnatal care.
However, it raises big issues, and the members for Wanguri and Nelson highlighted some of those. The issue of complaints or grievances around the services provided by privately practising midwives is something I have not put my mind to. These people will be self-employed, will have their own ABN, will be registered as a private business and, I imagine, would have a mechanism in place whereby consumers of their service can make complaints or grievances.
It means, without the indemnity insurance for that intrapartum period, these privately practising midwives will be exposed to legal action. It is a reality the Attorney-General put very succinctly and clearly. That is the reality of this model. It is not ideal and has all sorts of implications for people who are choosing to access these private services.
The Department of Health will be working very closely with these privately practising midwives. The obligations the privately practising midwives will have to report regularly to the Chief Health Officer are self-explanatory. They will be required to adhere to the various guidelines – the Australian College of Midwives, National Midwifery Guidelines for Consultation and Referral – and will be monitored to ensure their practice is consistent with all guidelines and professional regulations in place.
They will have to be registered. They will have to adhere to the Code of Professional Conduct and all other requirements that are expected of any midwife, regardless of whether they are practising in a public or private setting.
It is very difficult to preempt what will happen in the case highlighted very clearly by the member for Nelson when something goes wrong. I can only look at what has happened in other jurisdictions. There have been some very sad cases. I do not feel it is the time and place for me to go through those cases. However, things do go wrong in health and medicine all the time, despite the regulations, monitoring, reporting, best practice guidelines and the best of intentions. Health is like that. All we can do is ensure the risk is minimised.
Things will go wrong and, technically, the government will have no liability during that intrapartum period. All we can do, as a government, is require that these privately practising midwives practice according to all the standards and requirements.
We are fully committed to continuing home births within our public health system, there is no doubt about that. The home birthing service has been a success. It was initiated by the former Labor government and is very successful in Darwin and Alice Springs, and we will continue to provide it.
There is an integrated maternity services policy which was approved by the former Labor government. We agree with the policy, as it is about improving pathways for women. Part of that is ensuring there is a greater and more efficient use of the birthing centre in Darwin. There are some concerns about accessing the birthing service, and some people feel it may not be used as effectively or efficiently as it could be. We will continue to provide the one-on-one birthing model. Having the option of privately practising midwives means it is a one-on-one birthing model of care. If you can afford to pay for the service it is what you get. By allowing this legislation to go through it is saying we recognise the need for the option of a one-on-one model of care on a private basis.
I thank the Department of Health for its great work in this area. As I said, it has jumped on it very quickly. It was able to get the legislation written in a very short period of time. These things can often take many months. For us to have this before parliament within a six-month period is extraordinary, and I acknowledge the hard work undertaken by the department.
I look forward to working with the department, the sector and the community to further explore reforms in this important area of government policy, including looking at admitting rights for privately practising midwives.
Let us get this system in place first. We will get it operating and see how it evolves over time. In time, we can tweak this to make it better and continue to listen to the very strong advocates, the passionate people who have a very strong vested interest in this subject.
Motion agreed to; bill read a second time.
Mrs LAMBLEY (Health)(by leave): Mr Deputy Speaker, I move that the bill be now read a third time.
Motion agreed to; bill read a third time.
MOTION
Note Statement – Challenging Convention – Shaping the Future of Education in the Northern Territory
Note Statement – Challenging Convention – Shaping the Future of Education in the Northern Territory
Continued from 27 November 2013.
Ms FYLES (Nightcliff): Mr Deputy Speaker, much has happened since this statement was last before the House in November. We have seen the government force teachers to a ballot on enterprise agreements. They overwhelmingly rejected the government’s offers; 81% voted no. It was a strong message from our teachers to the government about the importance of education.
The CLP did not listen to Territorians who, last year, said to the government, ‘It is time to stop the cuts’. Hopefully, they will soon listen. This matter is too important not to. The Minister for Education continues to claim his cuts do not matter. They do matter; they are hurting our schools every day. I again call on the CLP government to stop the cuts right now.
We went to the election in 2012 with a clear message from the CLP government that jobs were safe. It said one thing before the election and the exact opposite afterwards. We all remember the commitment by the CLP that frontline workers’ jobs would be safe, but they have gone about sacking hundreds of public servants on contracts. They are still jobs which have gone.
Before the election, CLP members and staffers stood outside public sector offices with the notorious CLP placards claiming, ‘Your jobs are safe’.
I repeat some of the job security promises they have broken, ‘The Country Liberals plan to strengthen the NT public service. Your job is safe. We will immediately provide secure employment for our teachers. We will immediately support and strengthen the NT public service. If your base salary is $110 000 or less, your job is safe. If you are on the front line, your job is safe.’
The minister constantly talks about our NAPLAN results, and I challenge the minister to go to any Territory school and tell the students, face-to-face, that they are ‘the bottom of the pile’. It is offensive and misleading. The government is wrong to say that education in the Territory is going backwards. The NT has had the largest gains in Australia between 2008 and 2010, made by Indigenous students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in reading, spelling, grammar and punctuation for a start. These results are a great tribute to the hard work of public servants in schools across the Territory: teachers, families and the students.
These improvements are being put at risk by the actions of the CLP government. Minister, is this how you improve outcomes? Do you improve educational outcomes by denigrating public education and students? Do you improve educational outcomes by slashing jobs?
It is not just the Labor opposition which has made the point that the NAPLAN results of Indigenous Territorians are improving at the greatest rate in the nation. I quote the former Education minister, minister Lambley, who said:
- The NAPLAN figures show the percentage rate of improvement in AANMS …
at or above the national minimum standard:
- … in the Territory is stronger than other jurisdictions and that Territory students tested in 2008, 2010 and 2012 showed the greatest gains nationwide.
That was from minister Lambley’s media release in September 2012. We are seeing gains and improvements, and we need to keep up that hard work.
We are all appalled at the proposed real cuts to education. Last year, we saw the Open Education Centre move from its home of 25 years. The minister said:
- Finally, Open Education will get a huge boost this year as design work on the new purpose-built NT Open Education Centre begins at Darwin High School.
That was earlier this year. I ask the government to consult on its plans and I ask the minister’s to give us a timetable of dates in his wrap speech. Has the design work started? When will construction commence? When will the construction be completed? What consultations are taking place? In the meantime, what was the cost of the temporary move of the Northern Territory Open Education Centre from its location on Chrisp Street to Nightcliff Middle School? What was the rush? What was the cost of moving the music school from its location so the Open Education Centre could move in? What was the cost of rebuilding all the music studios at Sanderson Middle School? Do you still commit to the centre opening at the start of the 2016 school year? I hope these questions can be answered.
In relation to Nhulunbuy and education in that region, the Commissioner for Public Employment committed to no changes to the employment of school staff in Nhulunbuy until the end of semester one, except for Years 11 and 12 when there will be no change until the end of 2014. Why is there no change for every school level and every year? In contrast, the Nhulunbuy Christian College guaranteed staff a full year for this year, 2014. I urge the Northern Territory government to do the same.
On 3 December in Question Time, the member for Nhulunbuy asked the Chief Minister about this matter, and he admitted the school population of the town is expected to drop from 947 to 275. There is no certainty for students and their education beyond June, and I call on you, minister, to provide it. You could give certainty today. You could guarantee every teacher in Nhulunbuy now will still be teaching at the end of the year. Families want that, as it would make a big impact on their decisions. If they know they could get certainty for their children’s schooling for the year, they will make an effort to stay in that town for the year. People need that certainty.
I visited Nhulunbuy recently. It is a beautiful spot, but people are upset, they are feeling the pain. The students at that school now have a wall of pictures of students who have left. Each week, new faces go up. You, by guaranteeing teachers will stay until the end of the year, will help families make that decision to stay in that town, and at least help make that journey of change a little smoother.
The past few months have been characterised by the failure of the Chief Minister and the government to stand up for Territorians and the people of the East Arnhem region. The minister can give some clarity around, at least, their education future. It feels like the minister and the Chief Minister just do not care.
There are not many Education ministers in Australia or overseas who celebrate cutting budgets and staff, and saying no to additional funding from the federal government. In the NT we have an Education minister who has used a variety of excuses over the past year to justify cutting education funding and individual attention from our classrooms.
In parliament, the minister admitted the CLP cuts were about budget rather than education. He said:
- Let us face it, if we were in a far better fiscal position we would love to see every teacher still here.
It is your job, minister, to fight in Cabinet for our teachers.
He is also on the record saying:
- There will be a nett loss of teaching positions across the Territory.
At the Estimates Committee, the minister said about teachers in middle and senior years:
- At the moment, that is an overall reduction of 126.
Late last year we saw you jump up and down and say:
- No one jumped up and down when we lost 50 teachers, now everyone is jumping up and down that we have lost 35.
I again call on you, minister, to release the school-by-school breakdown of teachers, not the 14 000-odd pages you released under FOI. People deserve to know what is going on within our schools. I call on you to release the full staffing figures for all Territory schools.
At the end of last year, we saw absolute chaos. Some teachers were verbally told, ‘By the way, come back next year, we need you’, and other teachers did not know what was happening. Schools had been telling us for months they did not have their allocations. As I understand, some schools received their allocations in the last week of term, while others went back to school this year with their allocations still all over the place. The government cut teacher numbers and support staff, and you need to explain the impacts on each school by releasing the staffing figures.
At the start of this year, in fact, we saw Madam Speaker, the CLP member for Goyder, relay her concerns of teachers and families in her electorate and how they were facing uncertainty. They were not sure what was happening with the start of the school year so close. That level of concern was widespread across the Territory.
The government has not been transparent, open and accountable with these changes. It changed the teacher to student ratio which meant we had fewer teachers in our classes, larger class sizes and less subject choice. They have not been open and accountable about it.
Schools are suffering under the burden of the budget strain. Many already, early on in the school year, could not afford emergency relief teachers. Many were concerned about how they would pay their utility bills. Teachers and parents are concerned and frustrated at the government’s refusal to stop and listen. More recently, we heard there are more budget cuts in education for Territory schools to come. Minister, we cannot cut. There is no more room, no more fat there. You need to stop.
I do not know what will happen. This is from people within schools – parents, teachers – who do not know what they can do. We have lost teachers; we have larger classes and less individual attention. We have seen support programs go. We have seen the GEMS program go. If we see …
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Member for Nightcliff, your time has expired.
Ms FYLES: Okay, thank you. I will continue my comments in adjournment.
Mr WOOD (Nelson): Mr Deputy Speaker, education has been a hot potato in the Northern Territory since the CLP gained government. It has caused some major issues in the schools in my electorate. The member for Goyder has had concerns as well about some of the cuts to Taminmin College and the effect that has had. We both are concerned about not only the cuts to some of the teaching positions, but to the ancillary positions that are so important to making a school run smoothly.
I do not want to talk about that today. The issue I would like to raise is in relation to the government’s education reforms which the minister released on 26 February 2014 in the hope everybody would have an answer for him by 16 April 2014. I raised the issue in Question Time yesterday about the government doing a lot better in bringing people along. They have said. ‘Here is the document we will send out. It is called Reform of the Education Act (NT) Discussion Paper. It will have some Discussion Starters and a second section called Reform of the Education Act (NT) Discussion Paper for Consultation.’ I do not know why there are two separate documents. Why not have one document and part of that document would have the starter next to the section in the document dealing with consultation? It seems to be an overlap.
Minister, the department says in its information about the discussion paper:
- The paper sets out a wide range of ideas for reform of the act, based on concepts and strategies from across Australia and overseas. Parents, teachers, principals, students and other interested community members are encouraged to provide comments on the ideas provided and suggest other ideas to assist in developing a new Education Act.
That is fine but, having been to a couple of school council AGMs and having been on school councils for many years – I cannot always get to them because I have so many schools in my area – changes to the Education Act would require a little assistance.
I understand you have a starter pack to encourage people to try to work their way through it, but although you are saying there will be another paper later which will be like a draft of the act, before you get to that stage you need to offer the services of the department to visit school councils and talk them through this. At the beginning of the consultation discussion paper the Table of Contents has:
1. Objects and Guiding Principles
2. Local School Autonomy
3. Parent, Community and Education Partnerships
4. Safe Schools
6. Government School Operations
7. Non-government Schools
8. Accountability
9. Streamlining.
In that document there is a huge number of issues and many are important. If you look at local school autonomy, basically, this paper is saying school councils should have more power. I have mentioned before that when one of our school councils used some of its power the principal got a rap over the knuckles from the department saying, ‘Pull your school council into line’. This paper is saying something different.
There is also discussion about the independent public school idea which has been put forward. At the AGM I attended recently, one of the parents made the point that she thought in Victoria, where there are these schools, it had not made a lot of difference. I do not know. Minister, you say in the beginning of this document:
- The paper sets out a wide range of ideas for reform of the act based on concepts and strategies from across Australia and overseas.
You have to remember parents on school councils are interested in the running of their school while, at the same time, raising children. They do not have a lot of time to read these documents and understand them. If you are a departmental person, sometimes it is not so bad. If you have been on school councils for umpteen years, you might have a fair idea. I am sure there are new people who would have little understanding of some of these important issues.
You talk about autonomy; that is a big issue. One of the concerns raised is a principal is not there just to look after the school, but is also a part of the teaching and learning of the school. If you are to give the school global funding, as you mentioned yesterday, there are concerns that we will not need a principal with educational background in charge; instead we will need a finance officer or a business manager to run the school. You are putting much of the responsibility back on the school principal.
There is a bigger question. If you give all this power to school councils and you make schools autonomous and independent public schools, why not scrap the department? Give each school the curriculum. You can put it on the web page and say, ‘There you are, if you need a hand we have a 1800 phone number. But you are on your own.’ It would save a lot of money, because you are saying ‘It is all yours’. The question then would be, what is the role of the Department of Education now? Is it just to fill a spot in Mitchell Street? There is danger that you are moving away from your responsibility, which is the overall proper running of education in the Northern Territory. There is concern that giving too much autonomy could turn schools into businesses and not educational facilities.
I might be wrong, but why is the department not going out and talking to schools, or at least offering? They may not be able to get to every school. In the rural area they may have a meeting at a school and interested people can come, and a few other schools. This is a big, important change, minister. You said the Education Act had not been changed for 35 years. It sounds like we need to at least look at it. This does not mean it is bad. Just because something is old, does not mean it is bad ...
Mr Chandler: Exactly.
Mr WOOD: Thank you, minister, I appreciate that we are in the same boat.
We need to look at it, but we do not need to throw everything out. People have been looking at this and saying one of the problems is that many things in the Education Act are in here. They should be identified, otherwise this looks fantastic. Look at all of these things we have to discuss. There needs to be something which says these things already exist in the Education Act. These are the new things you are asking people to comment on.
We have Safe Schools, a very interesting section, which talks about the expulsion of kids who are noisy or disruptive. I understand that can be a major problem in some schools, but it needs to be balanced with what we are doing to make sure kids are not like that. What are we doing to make sure we have facilities to help those kids? You cannot throw them on to the street. I know we have the Malak centre and the Edmund Rice or St Joseph’s facility in Alice Springs for kids who have dropped out of the system; however, we need to make sure if you are talking about kicking kids out of school, we also have processes which look after those kids in some way. Are we putting emphasis on making sure we do not get to that stage through early intervention?
There is also Enrolment, Attendance and Youth Participation. We know that is a hot topic in the Northern Territory. The Commonwealth has introduced a team of truancy officers to try to increase the number of kids at school. It is something we are all interested in. I do not think I have ever seen a school which has put in reports that it has 100% attendance. There is somewhere between 85 and 95%, and it goes up and down a fair bit. Discussion may discover how we can improve on that. I do not know how our enrolments, especially in urban schools, compare with urban schools down south. These are issues we need to discuss thoroughly before we have any major changes.
There is a section called Government School Operations which has a lot of subheadings that talk about the curriculum, children with special learning needs, international education and home education – I have a group that meets regularly in my community room that deals with home education – fees and voluntary contributions, additional services to government schools, accessing distance education by choice, charging regimes, student records and data, religious education, power for the closure of a school, advisory councils, etcetera. Some of those issues are important.
Regarding fees and contributions, public education is meant to be free, but we charge. Most people are happy to have those relatively moderate charges applied. Not everyone pays them, but it has been a standard thing to pick up some of the things that schools cannot afford.
A person at an AGM said some of the independent public schools now charge quite a bit, and you start to get competition between schools. Some of these schools do charge fees, and one school starts to look better than another, possibly because they come from a higher socioeconomic area where parents do not mind paying a few more dollars. I do not know whether that causes a problem with one school losing students and another gaining them. Again, these are issues that have been raised and on which the department needs to hear what people have to say. If there are answers for them, fair enough.
Non-government schools – my children went to St Mary’s – also have issues. They are an important part of the Northern Territory education system. About a quarter of schools in the Northern Territory are non-government schools, and they play an important part in the education of our children.
I am not saying there are not a lot of good things in this document, but you should have highlighted what already exists in our schools. We would expect to have some of these things currently. We do need some objects and guiding principles, that is for sure. That is something many parents would like to speak about and give their opinions and feedback on.
I do not think the feedback, just by putting this out to groups and hoping they will write back, is adequate. If the government is sincere in its desire to improve education programs in the Northern Territory and the way we access and deliver education, it needs to be proactive in talking to people.
You said we are looking at 12 to 18 months before anything will happen. What is the hurry? Surely, it would be better not to put 16 April on it? You have to remember many of these school councils only met for the first time last month, or probably even this month. They will have their first formal meetings either late this month or next month. Then someone hands them a document, which is pretty heavy going for the average person, to comment on.
Minister, the department could do it better. One of the faults of the government is its lack of communication at ground level with the people who have to deal with these matters every day. I do not think you are bringing people along. You can issue a media release, do an interview on the TV and the radio, bring out a nice document – it is nice and neat and tidy, there is no doubt about it – but you have not sold it. The way to sell this is to take it to the people and give them the opportunity to understand. It may take several workshops, because some of the issues will take up more than an hour at a local school just to talk about the objects.
If you want to have some basic foundations to education, you have to have some objectives and guiding principles. Whilst you have those down here, there may be other guiding principles people think should be there, or ones they think should be deleted. Not only can the department listen to what people say, it can also give a guiding hand and say, ‘The reasons we put these here were such and such’. It does not need to be a workshop that says, ‘This is what the government thinks and too bad if you have a different point of view’. It needs to explain what is in this and then listen to what people have to say, and take your time, because there are a many schools with many parents, teachers, students and principals.
Education is one of the pillars - should I use a CLP word there, the pillars? I must admit I keep thinking of Asterix when I think of pillars. He used to pick them up and throw them in the Roman Empire. One of the pillars is education, so I hope we spend the time and do not hurry it. The minister said there is 12 to 18 months. Let people have a chance to understand it, and the feedback you will get will be informed feedback where people will have a chance to give you something that will be beneficial to your concept of improving the Education Act and improving education in the Northern Territory.
If you bring the people along, you have a better chance of succeeding. If you leave it out there for people to, hopefully, read a piece of paper, then either you will get very few answers or you will get the criticism and many answers you did not really want because you already have a predetermined agenda. You can always say you consulted, and the consultation will be this book. The government needs to do better than that. Take your time, involve the people, talk to the people, listen to the people, then come back with a document that will gain more support than if you just hope people will be consulted by having this document.
Mr STYLES (Young Territorians): Mr Deputy Speaker, it is a pleasure to support my colleague, the Minister for Education, in his statement titled Challenging Convention – Shaping the Future of Education in the Northern Territory. That is exactly what this government is doing in so many different areas: taking the Territory to a better place than it was when we found it.
We were all taught when we were younger that when you get hold of something, always leave it in better condition than you found it. Sadly, that was not the case when we inherited government from the Labor Party, but we have plans. Country Liberals are the only people in this House with plans at the moment. We do not hear anything about policy from the other side.
I will talk about some positive things shaping the future of education in the Northern Territory. I refer firstly to the ABC 7.30 Report and the story of a lady by the name of Amanda Ripley who wrote a book called The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way. She is a journalist and writer who spent a lot of time talking about how the world can increase its education systems. She went all over the world, looked at all types of systems – a range of things. I quote from part of the transcript of that interview where Leigh Sales, the interviewer, put the question to Amanda Ripley:
- We know that in good education that teacher quality is vital. In the case of Finland, how have they improved the quality of their teachers?
I will quote the answer because I will go on to speak about what is happening in the Territory. Amanda Ripley answered that question:
- Finland is a classic example of a country that partly by accident and partly on purpose made teacher preparation and selection far more rigorous and has been reaping the benefits of that for decades. So, in the late 1960s, Finland shut down its education colleges where they train teachers, which were like most education colleges around the world at that time – they were of wildly varying quality and selectivity, and they moved those education colleges into the most elite universities in the nation. And as a result, it really – you had to be very accomplished and very well-educated yourself to even consider studying Education to become a teacher.
In this debate, and debates late last year, the member for Port Darwin was talking about how we need to increase the professional development of our teachers, and I agree with him. We have some wonderful people in the system and they need to be given every opportunity to increase their knowledge base and work with our universities to increase their capacity, to give that information so vitally needed by young people if we are to have economic development and an increase in our position in the world in relation to education.
In that interview she talked about South Korea. One can look on the Internet to find an article called the Saturday Essay by Amanda Ripley. It is about a South Korean named Kim Ki-hoon who earns about $4m a year in South Korea. I am quoting from this article by Amanda Ripley which says:
- Kim Ki-hoon earns $4m a year in South Korea, where he is known as a rock-star teacher – a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the world. Mr Kim has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the country’s private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his skills – and he is in high demand.
I do not want to bore people with the three or four pages of the transcript, but it makes the point that this guy has some techniques in the way he teaches people. He also sells his stuff for $4/hour through people watching on the Internet. He sells a lot of it, because he is one of the best teachers in South Korea. That makes the point of investing in our teachers.
Talking of education direction, one of the points I saw in the minister’s statement was about developing a centre of school leadership to provide improved professional development for our teachers. It is a great idea and has been around for a while, and we should look at doing whatever we can to help that ...
Mr Gunner: You cut funding to it by $1m.
Mr STYLES: Sorry, I cannot hear those interjections, so I will ignore them.
Mr Gunner: You do not want to hear that one.
Ms Walker: You do not have a comeback, that is the problem.
Mr STYLES: I will pick up the interjection. I am happy to answer it. What was it?
Mr Gunner: You cut funding to the Centre of School Leadership in the last budget paper by $1m.
Mr STYLES: I do not have any figures on it. All I know is we are looking at how we can develop. We are developing the centre, and I am sure you will see, when the budget comes out, that things will be appropriately funded. If I have anything to do with it, I will be convincing my colleagues it is a good idea. It is about professional development and raising the standard.
There are many good teachers and we should give them every opportunity to become better teachers. The better the teachers, the better the students. I do not know how many times it has been said in my lifetime, and in this House, when we were at school, if you had a good teacher, liked a teacher, got along with them, and they did a good job, exams were easy. If you know your material, you walk out of exams saying, ‘That was really easy, what a great test’. But it is only when you have good teachers you like and you like the environment that you can do those things.
On this side, in shaping the future of education in the Territory we are also refocusing on key aspects of reading, writing and mathematics to develop competencies in these areas.
In my former life as a school-based police officer, I watched that scheme deteriorate under the previous government. When we visited schools we empowered young people, including kids who felt bullied and not capable of handling certain situations. I spent a lot of time in classrooms empowering young people so they could walk into a classroom, hold their head up and know there was someone on their side. Sadly, that scheme was wound right back under the previous government. In 2001 I was shown a letter signed by the then minister for Education and minister for Police, Mr Syd Stirling, instructing the police to wind back the school-based policing program. Fortunately, at that time, the community pushed back and it did not happen. However, slowly it was wound back to the point that we now have Youth Engagement Officers. I am talking to people about trying to re-engage a range of issues the school-based police officers used to be engaged in within schools.
As we all know, it is important that kids feel safe at school. In the schools where you do not have much access to school-based policing, I am sure there are many kids who do not attend simply because they do not want to be bullied, are a bit scared or there appears to be no one on their side who will look after them. It is good if we look at all those things.
Going back to the reading, writing and arithmetic – the three Rs as they are commonly known in the community – they are very important. Sadly, I have seen many kids who reach high school and can hardly write their own name, let alone put a sentence together. It is a bit sad. It is about social promotion and a range of things, but the saddest thing about social promotion is when these kids get to a stage where they know they do not have the same capability as - not the capacity, we are not talking about capacity, we are talking about capability. These young people who are normal human beings have the capacity to do it, but they do not have the capability, because either they did not go to school, felt they could not be at school, or no one got them up in the mornings. There is a range of issues. It is important we focus on those three Rs and many life skills kids need to learn at school and as young adults going through middle school, high school and university – where not all of them end up. It is about looking at curriculums and refocusing.
In this statement and in the discussion since, there has been talk about the establishment of a behaviour management task force to drive policy change so we can tackle behaviour issues which have a negative impact on education outcomes. It is sad that these young people who do not get to school suddenly get to a point where they all think it is too hard to pick up back from day one. It is important we do that.
There are many things that have occurred to encourage kids to go back to school, such as the Clontarf program and other programs in schools where we get young people engaged in sport. I recall the minister for Sport announcing further grants to parents – the $75 Back to School voucher, another $75 to help kids get into sport and maintain their membership and issues like that.
I also note in the statement the minister talked about developing relationships with international education and having a training hub here so we can build prosperous relationships with our international neighbours. It is all in tune with developing northern Australia.
We all know the Prime Minister wants to spend some money here, and we are doing our very best to get some of that in the northern development area. Education is a great export we have in the capacity of our universities and colleges to train people from overseas.
It is also about developing strong educational links with Asia and teaching Asian languages in our schools. I did not have the opportunity to study a foreign language when I was at school; they just did not have it in my primary school. By the time I got to high school, French was it. It did not look as though I would go to France, so I did not participate in that. I took other subjects. Since then, I have learnt the niceties and pleasantries in a number of different languages. I have learnt some Indonesian, so at least I can survive going through Indonesia.
It is something we need to do in our schools. Given the 2.5 billion people within six hours flying to our north, it is essential, in relation to our economic development and developing the north, that we ensure our young people have access to these languages and can choose to do one, two or three. Most kids in Europe can speak four or five languages fluently, and read and write them.
Due to our isolation, we have not previously had the opportunity to learn many languages or to use them. If you live in Europe, you can bet your bottom dollar there will be people walking down your street every day from at least 12 or 15 different countries. Here, that is not the case.
I was in Singapore recently, where I had dinner meetings with some people. Of the senior Singaporean people around the table – there were about five of them – three of them were educated in Australia. I was talking to a member of parliament, the former Transport minister of 12 years in Singapore, who spent eight years studying in Australia. He also had a very good time here because of the hospitality offered by Australians. Many people from Southeast Asia come to Australia because of the hospitality we offer them.
I took a tour of Singapore last year to look at economic development opportunities and how we could transfer that knowledge back to northern Australia and industrial parks here to create more jobs, because that is what it is about. The two people running that economic development tour were educated in Australia and spent considerable years here studying at colleges and universities, and gaining masters degrees and other qualifications. That was great to see. It is good to see we have so many international students coming to Darwin. We would like to grow that.
It is good to see the minister supporting the development of these educational opportunities for people from overseas. I recall, as a child in my own home, my mother hosted students from Southeast Asia to live with us while they studied. It was a fantastic learning opportunity for a small child, to gain access to people from other countries and other cultures, to learn that it is what is on the inside of these people, not what is on the outside. I found them to be wonderful people. I thought they were really terrific, they put up with me as a child. Like most people, when we are children, we are not perfect. But they developed a relationship with me and to this very day I continue those relationships at festive times. Whenever I get overseas I drop into various places, and we get together and have dinner with those people – terrific people who have also been very successful.
When I look at the advantages of those things and where my life went with the acceptance of other cultures and other people who look different, it was a massive learning curve where you learn that these are good people who love their children, their country and their culture. That is a terrific way to find yourself being accepted in any circle. When you are genuine, people from all races will pick up that you are genuine. That is what I found as I was growing up. Those people accepted me when I visited them with my parents. When I was a teenager they still accepted me. It is one of those intrinsic things you have that you do not realise until you move through life a bit.
In my role as the Minister for Multicultural Affairs, I can work across so many cultures, and I love what I do. People tell me that it shows. I said, ‘It is really easy. It is a great job because if you love what you do it is not work.’
I encourage the minister to pursue developing those strong education links with Asia, and the teaching of Asian languages in schools.
When I look at other highlights of the statement on shaping the future of education in the Northern Territory, I see we are developing the teacher performance and development framework to monitor the ability of teachers and provide professional development as needed. That all comes with the school leadership that is developing school leaders. It also comes with the professional development of our teaching staff who are at the coalface. It is a great thing to have, along with many other initiatives that have gone into this report.
The expanded School of the Air teaching model to 10 outstation schools is another great initiative. Obviously technology plays a big part in this. It is great to see the NT Open Education College is also moving along with the expansion of the School of the Air. However, I have heard some criticisms from the other side about shifting the Northern Territory Open Education College. There will be a state-of-the-art building built at Darwin High School. I find that exciting because that will open up to so many young people the ability to get online, save this material and be able to go back over lessons.
However, more importantly, one of the reasons I was really impressed with this is the principle of what will happen. There are kids who have a wide variety of interests in relation to their educational subjects. Those young people would like to have the ability to choose various subjects. Of course, if you have teachers in the NT Open Education College who are in one place and only have a certain expertise, you say to these young people, ‘Sorry, you cannot have this subject because we do not have anyone at the NT Open Education College to teach that’. Whereas if you locate this at Darwin High School and have three kids who want to do some particular chemistry – biological chemistry or chemical engineering – and we do not have a teacher at the NT Open Education College, you get teachers from the general school population who have an interest in that or an ability to teach it. Then you pull them in for a lesson. Those teachers are also in classrooms each day interacting with kids, developing their own knowledge base and keeping up to scratch with what they are teaching young people.
I see that as a fantastic opportunity for people to increase their professional development. If we have subjects we are not quite sure of, there are teachers who can apply for extra professional development. If we have extra professional development, kids at the Open Education College could also access School of the Air. With the technology we have today we can do that. I find that exciting.
Regarding some of the things I have heard from the other side in this debate, I will quote some of the facts and figures my colleague, the Minister for Education, stated:
- Over the previous five years to 2012, education staff had increased by 790, or 20%, from 3857 full-time equilvants staff in 2007-08 to 4647 staff in 2011-12.
- At the same time, the government Education budget increased by over 46%, from $467m … to $683m ... Interestingly, these increases in staff and funding were not matched by … increase in … students …
The graphs I have used in this House before showed we had 173 students over the same period of time.
There was an increase of 790 staff and 173 students over the same period of time, with an increased budget of 46%. Sadly, we did not see the results in outcomes. We are debating NAPLAN results and doing a range of things like that and, basically, the other side said everything was great. I find that interesting because when you have kids struggling and our NAPLAN results are not good, a situation – I am on four school councils with ladies I know very well who are grandmothers, but not older grandmothers, they are okay …
Mr CHANDLER: A point of order, Madam Speaker! In accordance with Standing Order 77, I ask for an extension of time for the member for Sanderson.
Motion agreed to.
Mr STYLES: I have been on school councils since the mid-1980s when my children went to school. It was around 1985 or 1986 when I joined my first school council at Nakara Primary School, and I stayed on school councils. I became a school-based police officer which meant I had a unique position on school councils. I have been on school councils ever since, so for close on 29 years I have been a continuous member of school councils. You hear many things and get to understand much of the debate and discussion that goes on. I was around when devolution was taking place.
I was also at Nightcliff High School in the late 1980s and early 1990s when they had one of the first Aboriginal units in that school run by a lovely lady by the name of Marg Parks. She was a great teacher and would take these kids who had come in from way out bush in remote areas and did a fabulous job working with them
I also met many urban Aboriginal people. A delegation of those urban mothers, who I knew 25 years ago-plus at Nightcliff High School, came to see me late last year. They complained about what is happeing in the education system. It was probably a couple of years ago now, but they visited me again at the end of last year. They were saying, ‘I am a grandmother, I can read and write and do all of that. My kids are not too bad, but my grandkids at school are really suffering.’
I am looking at the time frame when we were spending all this money, using time and resources to get extra people into the system, yet going backwards. I heard the member for Nightcliff in her closing remarks say she has people coming into her office saying all sorts of things. I find it very interesting because they are not coming into my office. A delegation of teachers I have known for many years has come in to have some words about how they would like to see things go. I have not had any parents come into my office yet. I have been to school council meetings, and I encourage people at them to lay it on the table for me and give it to me straight. There are no frills, nothing. If you have an issue, tell me. If you need to beat me up, beat me up – verbally, that is. Have a go, let loose.
Some have small concerns about various aspects but, generally, what we do in education has not had a huge response from the school councils I am on. I heard the member for Nightcliff say her school councils are up in arms. It would be interesting to do a survey of school councils and see how many of them are severely up in arms, as espoused by the member for Nightcliff.
We need to change what we are doing. There is a famous quote by Einstein, I think, about doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result. The minister quoted in his statement Justine Ferrari’s article in the Weekend Australian recently where she talked about the $40bn a year we spend on students which has doubled in real terms since 1995, yet student results in international and national literacy and numeracy tests have flatlined or fallen. We have a major problem where we are slipping in the educational ranks worldwide because of a system which does not seem to be working.
As Amanda Ripley reported about Finland, the system there, from the 1960s, which is considered the most successful in the world, is followed very closely by South Korea, and we are way behind. The US is way behind Finland. What have they done? We should perhaps look at that system, which is what we did. All the OECD countries are moving to the model we have been espousing since the Minister for Education first announced these changes in this Chamber. It is important for us to look at what is best practice around the world. People tell us best practice is this, so we should consider it.
The other thing which comes to mind is that in every report are the two words ‘early intervention’. This is where we are going. We are looking at early intervention, putting the money into preschool and the early years of schooling, reducing class sizes and giving teachers professional development so they can ensure these kids get the best possible start. That is where you need to put the effort in – at the beginning.
My mother always said, ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.’ As a school-based police officer in my former life, I saw the results of people who missed out and fell through the cracks, or went through the early years of school and did not quite pick it up. We propose we do that and look at what we do in relation to early intervention in children’s lives, especially in their educational life.
Geoff Masters, who heads up the Australian Council for Educational Research, said Australia had to focus resources on initiatives that have been proven to work. The Finnish model has been proven to work. That is not exactly where we are heading. The Minister for Education would enlighten me, if I had the time to sit down with him for several hours, and tell me exactly where we are going. When I read his statement, I looked at things Geoff Masters said. For instance, there are quotes from Geoff Masters, including:
- Simply spending the money won’t achieve the outcomes. It is a question of how the money is spent.
You would hear the former Treasurer, when she was in government, saying they had spent so much money and much more money than we did when we were in government. That was the only answer: ‘We spent lots and lots of money’. I do not want to drag my graph out again, but we all know how much trouble we are in financially after she said, ‘We spent more money’ on issues and problems. It is not about spending more money, it is about how the money is spent and value for money.
It would appear the previous government struggled to get value for money. It spent a lot, got a lot of people in, but we did not see any corresponding increases in what was happening. In fact, we saw results going backwards.
Geoff Masters went on to say we cannot keep spending the way we have been, doing the same things over and over, and expect things to change.
I listened to the contributions by those opposite, and they just want to keep things going exactly the way they are. The member for Nightcliff said, ‘This is terrible, you cannot change this. We must keep doing it.’ But it is not achieving anything. I think it was Einstein who said if you keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result, that is insanity. I am not suggesting that anyone on the other side is insane, but it is a quote that is put out there …
Mr Chandler: You have said that about three times now.
Mr STYLES: Sorry, I just want to make sure they get the message.
On this side, the Country Liberals have plans. We looked at world’s best practice and that plan fits in with the overall plans. On this side of the House there is an integrated planning approach. When we are planning this, we work out how each of us can contribute to each other’s portfolios in the most positive way possible, so the whole plan to develop the Territory economically, to have strong culture, have the environment looked after – those pillars we have – are all integrated and form part of the overall and overarching plan to ensure the Northern Territory is a great place to live and bring your kids up, to educate your kids, for them to get a job and to work and play. We hope those people will not only live and work here, but stay here, raise their families and continue to live here. The Country Liberals are the ones with that plan.
Ms WALKER (Nhulunbuy): Madam Speaker, I contribute to the minister’s statement on education delivered on 27 November. Since then, things have become progressively worse in public education in the Northern Territory. I am very worried about the future of education in the Territory under the CLP government, and I am not the only one.
I am an ex-school teacher, married to a teacher, and I am also a consumer of public education services, with two teenage boys at Nhulunbuy High School. On that front alone, schools in the electorate and township of Nhulunbuy have had a double whammy, not only with cuts to education from this very mean-spirited government, but also with the announcement of the curtailment of Rio Tinto’s operations on 29 November, two days after this statement was issued. The incredible uncertainly for schools – as the member for Nightcliff, our shadow, talked about in her contribution on the floor this afternoon – has rocked our community. The government was very slow off the mark to redress the situation of senior schooling when the announcement was made on 29 November, without providing any certainty beyond the end of semester one.
It was a foolish stance they took when they, obviously, bowed to pressure and committed to guaranteeing education for senior students in Years 11 and 12 at Nhulunbuy High School until the remainder of 2014. As the member for Nightcliff said, why not guarantee all school levels until the end of 2014, given that Rio Tinto has provided a good deal to its workforce to be able to stay on in their accommodation? I believe in the vicinity of about 150 families are taking up that option because they want to allow their children to finish the school year.
At least the Minister for Public Employment announced yesterday he has pushed out the guarantee for public service jobs from 31 March – less than a fortnight away – to the end of June. That is a bonus because it was insane in our schools. Whilst teachers have been really anxious about how best to cater for their students, understandably they have also been really concerned about their jobs. We have this bizarre scenario where permanent teachers were guaranteed until the end of June, yet all other public servants were only guaranteed their positions until 31 March. Obviously, we have many public servants in our schools, hard-working staff who are there to support teaching staff. There was a complete misalignment of that. Some hope public servants now have until 30 June. However, it is no different for permanent teachers who are still only guaranteed until the end of semester one.
I respond to some of the remarks the member for Sanderson made about an interjection from the member for Fannie Bay about cuts. He said he did not know about those cuts. We know for a fact the Centre for School Leadership funding cuts in the 2013-14 financial year were $250 000, and in the next financial year $0.5m was cut from the Centre for School Leadership. For this government to say our schools are well resourced is staggering. We know for a fact that cuts to resources, spending, teacher positions and teacher support positions are, without a doubt, going on across schools in the Northern Territory. It is shameful.
On a brighter note, I was delighted to learn the Education minister arrived in Nhulunbuy last Friday for a visit. I have been asking him for some time, and his predecessors. He is the third Education minister in the Territory in the past 18 months. But, he did it. He got to Nhulunbuy and visited schools. He met with some teachers and, I believe, some school council people. I believe at the meeting – it must have been at the primary school – he even sang the praises of the local member – me – and noted how I had advocated strongly for the community. I would be delighted if you could pass that message on to your colleagues, particularly the gentleman who sits in that seat in front of you, Mr Education minister, because I have, indeed, advocated very strongly for my community in my electorate in what is an incredibly difficult time.
Obviously our local media was interested in your visit. I am sorry it is only a small copy; I was hoping to have something a bit bigger. But there you go, you got a page in our local paper, or about three-quarters of a page, with a couple of nice photos and a little write-up about your visit. Well done, minister, for handing over a $50 donation to Maddi McSherry in her cause to raise money for the Shave for a Cure. I have known Maddi McSherry for many years. I have a son the same age ...
Mr Chandler: She had beautiful long hair.
Ms WALKER: Yes, all that long hair is gone, I believe. Good on you, minister, for visiting.
I want to quote from the local newspaper because the headline of the article says, ‘Teacher Conditions Best in Country: Chandler’. The minister is quoted in our local paper as saying:
- All our schools here in the Top End are really well resourced, Mr Chandler said.
There was a rebuttal to that and I quote from our paper:
- Not so, argues teacher at Yirrkala School and Acting President of the local branch of the Australian Education Union, Jarvis Ryan.
‘I’m not sure if Mr Chandler was able to resolve any issues he was looking at while he was here.
But there is a real sense that teachers are very overworked this year – this is not sustainable.
You do get to the point where you can’t get any more blood from a stone.’
I have no reason to disbelieve the quote from that teacher, who I know, and other teachers there and around the Territory who have been very vocal about what they have to deal with in their schools where there are cuts. Where you have cuts you have increased demands upon teachers and you also have reduced outcomes for kids. Kids cannot learn, believe me. I know the CLP has a flat-earth view of the world, but you cannot have improved outcomes for students when you reduce resources and have larger classes. Believe me, I know, I am an ex-teacher. Every teacher would disagree with you, minister, and the view the CLP holds on that subject.
As we know, teachers have been very proactive and very vocal in objecting to the cuts that have been foisted upon them. We are in the midst of an EBA for teachers and they have been strident. Let us be very clear, it is not about pay or the quantum for teachers. They are protesting the cuts to resources and the conditions, and the fact those conditions, whilst becoming unworkable for them, are disastrous for kids in our schools.
Again, from our local paper, was coverage of the strike in Nhulunbuy on Friday 7 March. Let us remember that the teachers were planning a two-hour stop work on Tuesday 4 March, earlier that week. Thanks to the minister responsible for public education – we know the CLP hates unions – who took teachers to task and said, ‘If you are going out for two hours we might dock you one day’s pay’, teachers – and I do not blame them one bit – said, ‘Okay, dock us a day’s pay and we will be taking Friday 7 March. We will surrender our pay for that day to protest to the government about our working conditions and the impact this has on kids.’ It is not about their pay, as we know.
To add insult to injury, the Minister for Public Employment accused teachers of wanting to take a long weekend. I want to put on display a photograph I took when I attended the rally in Nhulunbuy. Ruth Micka is an incredibly dedicated teacher who works in homelands, and she was carrying a placard which said, ‘Not camping, not fishing, striking for our students.’ Minister, I cannot begin to tell you how angry people at that rally were at the insinuation they picked Friday so they could take a long weekend.
When they left the rally in Nhulunbuy, these teachers, all of them, were going home to work, not going back to their schools, but home to do preparation work because they are inundated with a workload which is not sustainable. Teachers are stressed but are determined to see this campaign out, and I wish them every success in it. It is worth fighting for; it is not about them, it is about their students.
Interestingly, I met a group of teachers from Gapuwiyak who had driven to Nhulunbuy to attend the rally that was held in Nhulunbuy town square. I will talk about my subsequent visit to Gapuwiyak last week, one week after that teachers strike.
I want to touch on the draft report of the Indigenous education review. I believe the consultation in Nhulunbuy was held on Friday 21 February; I know it was a Friday immediately at the end of one of the sitting weeks. I understand that around 80 people attended the consultation session with the consultant, Bruce Wilson, which was held at Yirrkala School. That is quite a turnout. It does not surprise me because there are two aspects of the draft Indigenous education review and two recommendations in particular that people at Yirrkala – not just Yirrkala – are really concerned about. One of them is the recommendation about boarding facilities for students in secondary education in their senior years, and a suggestion they will be losing secondary education in some remote schools and students will have to come into larger centres. We do not know where these boarding facilities are. The other was the recommendation about teaching in English. You can imagine, in the bilingual heartland at Yirrkala, how upset some people were about that. That was the feedback I got from that consultation meeting at Yirrkala.
I attended the session that was scheduled at 5 pm at Nhulunbuy Town Hall. It was not an ideal time for a consultation session, and perhaps that was reflected in the numbers. I believe about 15 people attended that session, mainly teachers. There was a school council representative there, and I was there. We certainly appreciated the overview that Bruce Wilson provided and the frank discussion we had. Not surprisingly, the issue of boarding facilities arose again during that consultation session.
The question was put to Bruce Wilson that earlier in the week the Chief Minister had released a statement about Nhulunbuy and had suggested there were a few things the Northern Territory government was looking at in trying to find some new economic activity with the downturn of Rio. Among the list of those possible economic drivers, what those potential new industries or services might be, was a series of boarding facilities, not just one.
The question was put to Mr Wilson at that consultation session, ‘Given you have been talking to us today about boarding facilities and the fact it would be a carefully managed process, these boarding facilities would be on a trial basis, they would be identified and would progress in a highly consultative fashion, is your recommendation about these boarding facilities in any way linked to the Chief Minister’s statement in this same week about boarding facilities in Nhulunbuy?’ The reply was, ‘No, definitely not, there is absolutely no connection’. That in itself was interesting, but the reason people take umbrage at the suggestion of secondary boarding facilities and the removal of secondary education, particularly senior years, from some of the remote communities, is it completely removes choice. We know that in more than two decades of CLP government there was no secondary education in the bush; no students graduated from Year 12, and that was an incredible deficiency for more than two decades.
If delivering secondary education in the bush is challenging, it is because the former Labor government had so much ground to try to cover when we came to government in 2001, and we had a commitment to establish secondary education in the bush. There have been and will continue to be families in the bush – I am talking about Indigenous families – in homelands and remote communities who choose to send their children to boarding schools. I know of a number of families who choose to send their kids to boarding schools, and it is important they have that choice. What they also have, by way of choice, is the option to remain on their communities, for many of them anyway, to allow their children to have access to senior secondary education.
What I am alarmed about is, again, the sort of policy on the run, ad hoc decisions the CLP government is making. With the announcement this week of Rio Tinto’s $50m, for which the Chief Minister can accept no credit whatsoever, Rio Tinto has made its decision and has put a dollar value on what it will be contributing. The Chief Minister announced that the CLP government’s contribution, in terms of new money, will be $2m – which is paltry – then in his media release he had a bit of a wish list. He said he has written to Prime Minister Abbott, saying, ‘We need you to do this, this, this and this’. It is a bit of shopping list, and there is no harm in prodding the federal government because it has been absolutely useless. It has done nothing other than send Senator Scullion and Minister Billson out for a meeting, just less than two weeks ago, which has delivered nothing. However, from this media release, we understand the Chief Minister has written to the Prime Minister and asked him to provide $40m to establish a secondary boarding facility.
I am not sure where he is talking about and, most importantly, I am not sure who he has consulted. Where does this proposal to get hold of $40m and whack up a secondary boarding facility somewhere around Nhulunbuy fit with an Indigenous education review where submissions only closed last Wednesday, with a number of those submissions strongly objecting to the proposal?
The other big question people in my electorate have is: whatever happened to the commitment for a secondary boarding facility at Garthalala? Whatever happened to the commitment of the CLP government, when in opposition, that had committed to homelands, and had said it supported people’s right to live on their homelands, to receive education and services …
Mr McCARTHY: A point of order, Madam Speaker! Pursuant to Standing Order 77, I move the member be granted an extension of time.
Motion agreed to.
Ms WALKER: There has been no formal announcement from the new federal government that they are axing the secondary boarding facility planned for Garthalala, and when a Chief Minister writes to the Prime Minister, the $40m he is requesting is simply a transfer from a facility that was to be built at Garthalala, but now will be built somewhere else.
Consultation has been missing from this whole process. The Chief Minister is simply looking for quick fixes, in complete contrast to the words of Bruce Wilson during the consultation in Nhulunbuy during the evening I was there. He talked about the need to develop strategy around public education in the Northern Territory and to plan over a period of time that transcends and goes beyond political cycles. I could not agree with him more, and yet by the same token, we have the Chief Minister announcing we will build a boarding facility.
The Chief Minister will have a fight on his hands with Yirrkala people, homelands people and people in the remote areas of northeast Arnhem Land who will be outraged that the secondary boarding facility will be nowhere near Nhulunbuy. That will really get people up in arms. It is staggering we can have, on the one hand, a consultation process through an Indigenous education review and, on the other hand, a Chief Minister making policy on the run and writing to the federal government to say, ‘Thanks very much, we need $40m, Mr Abbott, for a boarding facility’.
I will talk briefly about truancy officers. We are seeing some success, insofar as kids are getting into school. Are they getting an education? There is a difference there. They might be getting into school but are they getting an education?
It is expedient for the federal government. It is looking for some quick wins to be able to say, ‘Yes, look, we have increased attendance rates. Isn’t that fantastic?’ Senator Scullion said, ‘There are no excuses for students not getting to school’. I wonder how sustainable this will be. I am not the only one; there are many people who think this is not sustainable.
We have kids who do not attend school for all sorts of reasons, and very complex reasons, as I am sure the minister who has responsibility for child protection knows. It is not just parents at home being lazy and not sending their kids to school; there are some complexities in people’s lives, particularly among our Indigenous families, as to why their kids are not getting to school. While Senator Scullion may be saying there are no excuses for not getting kids to school, it is like saying there are no excuses for living in overcrowded housing, or no excuses that food security is an issue in so many people’s lives.
With all of the social dysfunction that goes on in these kids’ lives, the quick fix the senator and the federal government are looking for – we are seeing success at the moment, but it is not sustainable. It is not sustainable for teachers in our schools in the Territory who are trying to deal with large volumes of kids who are now being hauled into school. They talk about the investment in early childhood. Yirrkala School, which has had poor attendance, now has children going to school. In the early childhood area, we have one teacher who is trying to run a composite class with three levels. She has Preschool, Transition and Year 1 children all lobbed into the one class.
In the same week the teachers strike was on, there was an article in the paper. The theme of my column a couple of pages over was about the need to adequately resource our schools, and I invited the Education minister to walk a mile in the shoes of one of our teachers from Yirrkala or one of our homeland schools, and understand the challenges they are facing with this huge range of abilities within one classroom. It is not only a range of abilities, but kids with all sorts of complexities in their young lives that is making learning for them difficult, and teaching just about impossible for their teachers.
I mentioned, having met with some Gapuwiyak teachers. I drove to Gapuwiyak last Thursday and stayed the night. I try, when I go to these remote communities, to stay the night there and spend some quality time with people. Teachers were telling me about the challenges they face in the school at Gapuwiyak where they have had quite good attendance for some time, and about the impact on their school with the loss of four positions. They just cannot deliver the programs they want to and, therefore, cannot deliver the outcomes they want to provide for students.
In 2008 that school had eight Year 12 graduates, which is an outstanding result. The minister and the Education department may not think so, but it is. These are families who want their kids to remain on country and remain close by. I know that is quite a different view of the world; the Noel Pearsons of the world from the Cape York Institute have a different view that children need to get out of their communities. We do not have a one-size-fits-all approach to education. It is important to recognise what goes on in the different regions of the Northern Territory and what families are seeking for their kids.
It goes back to this business of consultation about a boarding facility. I am here to advocate for the people of Gapuwiyak, which is not in my electorate; it sits in the member for Arnhem’s electorate but is only two hours away from me. Families there want to see senior secondary education maintained in their school and are horrified at the prospect their children may be sent to a boarding facility around Nhulunbuy. I deliver that message most emphatically to the Minister for Education.
Minister, I appreciate you have a challenging job. I said to the Minister for Parks and Wildlife recently that being around the Cabinet table and standing up for the area of responsibility you are delivering is a fairly competitive process. You appear to be the one minister who has rolled over to find budget savings. It is appalling that Education, which is so important in building the Territory and the capacity of young people in communities around the Northern Territory, is severely impacted by the cuts being inflicted.
We should not be spending less money on education, we should be spending more. I implore you, minister – I am sure your budget Cabinet has probably just about wound up, but we need to see more money in education, more resources, not for the heck of spending, but to deliver the very best outcomes for students around the Northern Territory.
Mr CHANDLER (Education): Madam Speaker, I thank everyone who has contributed to the debate tonight and earlier when the statement was first brought to the House.
A lot of rhetoric has been thrown around again, but there was some interesting information and I pay credit where it is due. I found the member for Nhulunbuy’s approach very constructive. There were some things I did not know about and I have taken some notes and will follow them up. There will always be a difference in opinion on both sides of the House when it comes to how we educate children in the Northern Territory. We heard it clearly from the member for Nhulunbuy who said we must throw more money at it. The member for Sanderson raised the point that in the last five years of the Labor government, there were 790 extra positions in Education, an increase of 46% of the budget and $210m. At the same time we had 790 new employees in the Department of Education, our student enrolments grew by only 173. That is the proof that money is not the answer when it comes to improving educational results. The financial investment increased, but NAPLAN results went backwards.
I will give you a couple of examples: Year 3 numeracy went from 77% at or above the national minimum standard to 70%. Year 5 reading went from 62.5% at or above the national minimum standard to 61%. Even after $210m worth of additional funding, after employing 790 new staff in Education, our education results were going backwards. You do not have to be Einstein to realise that throwing more money, particularly untargeted money, into education was not the answer.
I know the budget has been bandied around as a reason for making savings in different areas. I put to you that even if this government was cashed up, even if the previous government left the Country Liberals government with money in the bank and no debt, I would still have responsibility over a department with perhaps the second biggest budget in the Northern Territory. I would be looking at the budget and how it is spent very closely, because it is public money and must be spent wisely.
Education is important, but so is spending public money wisely. Right across the Northern Territory there is a lack of evidence that money has been spent to benefit children in the classrooms, which is where we must focus. Every decision we make in education must focus on how it will improve results in the classroom. Over the last few years, I have seen, probably over the last decade, where money could have been spent better. I have seen some amazing gymnasiums. There might be some people who say it is great to have sporting equipment in these schools, but I have seen some gymnasiums so well-equipped they would not look out of place at any major club on the North Shore of Sydney. The sad thing is that in some of these schools, these gymnasiums are locked up, so all of this money is being expended on gymnasium equipment which is locked up for most people.
A 46% increase in education investment and falling results is a sad indictment of the previous government, because it lost focus. It continued to add what we call ‘bolt-ons’, one after the other. It was a scattergun approach to education, trying to find the silver bullet. It was well intentioned. It does not matter what side of politics you come from, you want the best outcomes for education. You try to achieve good outcomes, but Labor had five years where it put on 790 more staff when student numbers went up by about 173.
That does not make sense, particularly when you see the results went backwards. I still get frustrated with the rhetoric coming from the other side. Yes, there are 35 fewer teachers in the system today than this time last year, but if you look at five years ago, when there were 790 employees less than we have today, how bad was the system then? It was under the Labor government. We have taken away 35 teachers, but five years ago, there were 790 fewer positions in education. Yes, 35 teachers have the potential to make a difference, but five years ago, the department was 790 shy of where it is today. There was a massive increase in resources into education, particularly over the last five to seven years.
Much of what has come through in the debates has been rhetoric. I put it to the opposition that they have run, in conjunction with the unions, a very successful campaign in destroying the image of education in the Northern Territory. Parents came to speak to me over the Christmas period, and have come to me again since schools have gone back. The sky did not fall in; schools are open, teachers are in front of classrooms and the start of the year was very similar to every other year in the last 10 or 12 years. There was about a 1.4% rate right across the Territory where we were in the recruiting phase. That is quite a normal thing when you have a beast the size of Education, when you have parents up to the last week and even up to the day school starts, coming in to enrol their children.
In an organisation the size of the Department of Education you will always have tweaks and balances made right up to the last day, and even into the first few weeks of school. Sometimes families are moving into the area, and some families have left and not notified schools. There are always adjustments. The same thing happens every year, but you would expect from the rhetoric the other side was throwing out constantly late last year, and again earlier this year, that the sky had fallen in. You would think we had destroyed Education, we were closing schools, there would not be teachers in classrooms, we would have 35 or 40 children in each of the classrooms, and that is just not true. What it did do was send a really bad image to the general public about what I would still say is a pretty damn good education system. Are there areas we need to improve? Damn right we need to improve, absolutely right we need to improve, but it is not being destroyed, as you would think from the rhetoric on the other side.
There were about 35 media releases from about April last year. Every one of them has mistruths in it, and I have them all here. I could go through them one by one, but I do not want to take up all the time tonight just pinpointing where the information in those media releases is incorrect. What is more disappointing is that sometimes when information had been corrected by the department, the member for Nightcliff, in particular, would go on with the same rhetoric.
Were there schools that had some issues because of the size of education and issues at the school level? Absolutely, and that happens every year, but a responsive department gets on and works with principals and the school council and, wherever possible, tries to resolve those issues. That is the beauty of the formula we have today in staffing schools, and that is where we will see attendance go up, where we will see enrolments improve and see an increase in resources. Conversely, in schools where we see attendance rates dropping, we must, at some stage, take the appropriate level of resources from those schools and put them into schools where we see growth.
As I said, I have copies of 35 media releases here, most of them from the member for Nightcliff, some from the Leader of the Opposition and some from the member for Fannie Bay, Michael Gunner. Most of those from the member for Fannie Bay are not too bad; they are a lot better than what has come from the member for Nightcliff and the Leader of the Opposition. Perhaps that is why some of his colleagues favour him as the new leader, because at least he does not try to spin the wheel as much as some of the rhetoric that goes on in here. They tell untruths, time and time again. Why? Because they have heard something or someone has told them something, and they have not bothered to check it before going to print or fronting the media.
One embarrassment for the member for Nightcliff must have been when she stood outside the Malak Re-engagement Centre last year, and pulled out the media – I think it was a Friday, around 4.30 pm – to sprout that we were closing the Malak Re-engagement Centre, all because I had visited it. In fact, what I saw there impressed me. What I wanted to see was more students engaging. I wanted to see that invested resources were being better used. I have given the department CEO, Ken Davies, an instruction that we must find ways to better use that facility and better engage with students, so we have 30 or 40 children going there every day, instead of six or eight children. It is a wonderful resource, but to stand out the front with union mates and say we were about to close the Malak Re-engagement Centre must have been a huge embarrassment because, again, she got it wrong. This has happened time and time again. As I said, there are 35 media releases here, all with mistakes. In fact, the first one even has the wrong date.
I will go back to the member for Nightcliff’s statement that she made, or her reply to this statement. On page one, she says:
… I challenge the minister to go to any Territory school and tell the students, face-to-face, that they are the ‘bottom of the pile’. It is offensive and misleading. The government is wrong to say education in the Territory is going backwards.
- … 2008 and 2010, made by Indigenous students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in reading, spelling, grammar and punctuation ...
You can cherry pick the figures all you like to make a story, just as I can. I could cherry pick some of the figures from our NAPLAN results and show you there are excellent areas within our education system. As I said, the system is not broken. We have some fantastic teachers in the Northern Territory in some of the most challenging conditions in this country, and some of the results are fantastic. But we still have a sea of red compared to the rest of the nation. That is something we should stand proudly together on to work at ways to improve it.
Further down she said, a throwaway line, that it does not make sense to slash and burn. I hardly think 35 teachers is a slash and burn program.
Again, you have catastrophised education to the point where there was, I believe – and there is evidence there was – a small movement of people from the public to the private system over the Christmas period, on the back of the scare campaign run by the opposition and the unions. I had parent after parent coming to me afterwards to tell me they were bringing their children back into the public system or were disappointed because they figured the schools were closing down, we would not have classes open and we would have teachers in front of 40 kids. That did not eventuate, and they had fallen hook, line and sinker for the rhetoric the unions and the Labor opposition would have you believe last year. It did not happen. No schools have closed, teachers are teaching and we have wonderful kids in our classrooms.
Does that mean we can take our eye off the ball? No, we have to find ways to improve education. That is why we are looking at middle years, it is why we are reviewing Education and it is why we are investing in new schools. It was fantastic being in Palmerston this morning with the candidate for Blain, Nathan Barrett. The reality is that $1.3m to duplicate the Rosebery preschool is evidence we are investing in new infrastructure. In Palmerston east, Zuccoli will continue to grow, and it will demand a new primary school in the very near future.
We know we have special needs requirements, both in Palmerston and the greater Darwin area, closer to Darwin with the new Henbury School. These are all things that are proposed forward works for education over the next five to 10 years. One of the things I did on coming into government and being made the Minister for Education was to commission a review into what infrastructure we would need for the next decade. John Glasby has done a fantastic job in identifying where the growth will be across the Northern Territory. There are a number of hot spots in the city centre. We can see the unit growths, and the demand will be on government to provide additional educational facilities in the city.
The rural area will continue to grow. I know the members for Goyder and Nelson and those other rural folk may not like that, but eventually the rural area will grow in certain areas, with people living outside what you might call the district centres. There are still more and more people moving to the rural area, which will demand infrastructure. Look at Taminmin College today. It is a very big school, and there will come a time soon where we will have to look at whether it is a new middle school that is needed there or a new high school and primary school.
The new preschool at Durack, the new childcare centres that are being constructed and the ones we are taking over from Palmerston council all point to the fact that we are a government that is listening to the community and putting in infrastructure where it is required. The beauty of the system and the way we resource schools today is that if a school grows, so will its resources. That might sound like common sense, but you must have a better understanding of attendance and enrolments, and better ways to track students. These are all things we are working on at the moment.
To summarise some of things we have done in government:
we have developed the Centre for School Leadership which provides improved professional development for our teachers
we refocused on the key aspects of reading, writing and mathematics to develop contemporaries to these essential areas
we have established the behaviour management task force to drive policy change so we can tackle behavioural issues that have a negative impact on education outcomes
we have established a task force to develop an international education and training hub so we can build a prosperous relationship with our international neighbours and develop northern Australia
we have doubled the Back to School payment from $75 to $150 to help parents with the cost of going back to school
we have made NTCET results publicly available on the Education department’s website, something Labor wanted to hide
we developed strong education links with Asia and teaching Asian languages in schools
we have agreements in place with schools in Vietnam, Japan and Timor-Leste about principal, teacher and student exchanges, and there will be more on that later this year.
Mr ELFERINK: A point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker! Pursuant to Standing Order 77, I move the minister be granted an extension of time.
Motion agreed to.
Mr CHANDLER: I thank the member for Port Darwin, who is exceptionally interested in education. I put to you he was deeply disappointed when he no longer had the Education portfolio. He got a kick out of it. To continue:
we have provided further grants to childcare and early learning centres worth $150 000 annually
we are building five child and family care centres, four of which are co-located with local primary schools to promote the importance of education from an early age
we have developed a teacher performance and development framework to monitor the ability of teachers and provide professional development as needed
we have provided further incentives to retain remote teachers through training and HECS offsets
we have continued our commitment to independent Indigenous schools through financial assistance to Kormilda College for its expansion
we are partnering with Transport to deliver safer roads
we are delivering professional learning to school staff
we have undertaken the most comprehensive review of Indigenous education in 15 years to fix the mess left by Labor, of which they are proud
we have developed a greater Darwin school infrastructure plan, which I have spoken about, from John Glasby, so we can prioritise our investment to deliver exactly what the community needs
we are building a $50m state-of-the-art NTOEC at Darwin High School to service the entire Northern Territory and beyond, which really excites me
we have refocused school staffing on the early years with an additional 63 teachers in Transition to Year 2 this school year; and
we are also reviewing the Education Act, which is 35 years old and not suitable to support a modern education system.
The member for Nelson raised the issue of feedback and providing ample time for feedback into the Education Act. I somewhat agree with the member for Nelson on this, except in my experience, when you provide a finite amount of time there will inevitably be extensions made because people will contact you in the last few days. If you do not put a tight date in, these things can tend to blow out six months, 12 months, 18 months and you are still waiting for a decision. If, however, people put information in late, of course it will be accepted. I want as many people as possible to provide information back into this system, because the more information we have, the better it is. My experience is even when you give an extension, people are still rushing for the last few days. If you look at the dates on most things that turn up in submissions, they are usually dated the day submissions close, sometimes the day after and sometimes the day before. Usually people leave it until the last moment to put their heads together, but I welcome that feedback.
This piece of work is so important. It is probably the most important legislation I will have the privilege to deal with in this House. It is something I want to get right. The opportunities it could create for so many young students for the next 30 to 35 years are too much to get wrong, so we must listen to as many people as possible and ensure we get this right. It needs to be contemporary and have the robustness to take us through the next decade and beyond.
I will sum up, this is a government that is really focused on improving education. However, we will not fall for the trap of just being measured on the amount of money spent on education. It must be targeted spending. As I said before, I have visited schools. I was at a school the other week and was concerned there was a number of treadmills just behind desks and not in an exercise area. It could have been over years, but they had spent money on treadmills for staff. Do not get me wrong, being physically fit is extremely important. However, I still did not understand. This equipment would be expensive, and there was not one treadmill in this section of the school, there were three. It made me think of the resources our schools get. It was no different to a couple of weeks ago when I was travelling to Kintore, Docker River, Mutitjulu, Finke and the great school at Yulara. I went into one of the storerooms and saw the resources the schools have available. They are second to none. One teacher who was originally from the Territory, had gone to Queensland and come back said, ‘It is second to none. The resources our schools have compared to some of the schools in Queensland would blow you away.’
When I was speaking to those teachers I raised the Education Act with every one of them, and the importance of, at their levels, providing feedback into the system. We have well-resourced schools across the Territory. You can argue all you like that a few dollars taken out of Education here and there – the opposition will say we are selling out education and destroying education.
However, I can tell you of a culture that existed under the Labor Party where there just did not seem to be any care about how public money was spent. You can find evidence wherever you go of the expenditure on waste, and it is not money wasted that might be seen as just thrown away, but it was how it was spent. We really must think every time we are about to spend money, particularly on education: how will it benefit the child in the classroom? How will the outcome for that child be improved through spending that money? As I said, I have seen evidence over the last five or 10 years where I would argue that some of the money that has gone into Education has not benefited students and improved outcomes. There are always ways you can make savings.
There are many recipes to make a chocolate cake. We just do not subscribe to the recipe the Labor Party has used for the last decade or more in the Northern Territory. There will be changes, and some of the changes will be quite challenging. We will have to meet those challenges, the rhetoric thrown up by the Labor Party and, from time to time, by the unions. However, I have the courage to stand up and do it because I care about education.
I care about the future of our students and I will not give up on this fight to improve educational outcomes, whether you are a student in the northern suburbs, in Docker River, Mutitjulu, Kalkarindji, or any other place across the Northern Territory. They deserve a government that will stand up for them to improve their results and provide them an opportunity for the future, which means jobs and, perhaps, seeing the wider world. That opportunity can only come through a decent education, and that is something this government is working really hard to do. Yes, it will be a different approach to that of the former government, but I have put up the statistics before: 790 employees, $210m extra in the budget and our outcomes were not improving. That is not good enough, and this government will not rest until we see results improve for our students across the Northern Territory.
Motion agreed to; statement noted.
TABLED PAPERS
Travel Reports from the Members for Arnhem and Casuarina
Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I table seven travel reports, six from the member for Arnhem and one from the member for Casuarina, under clause 4.1 of the determination.
ADJOURNMENT
Mr ELFERINK (Leader of Government Business): Mr Deputy Speaker, I move that the Assembly do now adjourn.
Ms PURICK (Goyder): Mr Deputy Speaker, I will speak briefly on the Friends of the Taminmin Library Inc, which is based at Taminmin College. I recently attended its AGM, on a Saturday, and members elected their new committee and office bearers for 2014. Congratulations to the following committee people, some of whom have been on the committee for some time in the past, and some are new people.
The chairman is Sandra Parker, the vice chairman is Jon Ottway, the secretary is Angela Wallace, the treasurer is Shelley Grobler, and the public officer is Sandra Parker. The committee members are: Anna Durbridge; Lyn Gerdes; Pat Jones; Robin Hempel and Pauline Fitzmaurice. There are many more people associated with the Friends of Taminmin Library. I am a member, and I also note the member for Nelson is a member of this group. It is a very active group. Some people may be of the view these days that libraries are not so much what they used to be, but the library at Taminmin is definitely not in that category. It is the hub of the rural community, many activities are held there and many people go to that library for a variety of reasons, not the least to borrow books, read books and engage with other people with a similar hobby.
It also provides library services for Taminmin College. At the AGM, apart from the usual business of the AGM, the library manager, Iris Beale, provided some information and a bit of a snap shot and summary of what has been going on in the library over the last year. It was very interesting to see some of the statistics she provided. I tried to do a bit of research on how Taminmin Library compared with other libraries in the Top End, such as the City of Darwin library, Nightcliff, Casuarina and Karama libraries, and I also tried to get some information from Palmerston library. They are clearly servicing a far greater population than we have in the rural area. From the comparison I have done, I believe Taminmin Library is probably punching a bit above its weight and has not done a very bad job at all, given it is a small rural library, tucked away inside a large local secondary school, or composite school, as I think it is now called.
Over the past year the library had approximately 4800 patrons, 1400 from Taminmin College and 3400 from the community. It answered about 7540 inquiries and trained 96 people on computers. I know many of the people they help with computers are seniors or people who have retired. They are the type of people who have grown up without much computer knowledge, but they realise it is the way of our future, particularly with Facebook when they are conversing with their grandchildren. I have helped a few people come to grips with modern technology.
About 118 000 people visited the library, which included college students, the public and teachers. The ratio of college to public visits is about 2 to 1. Over the year, they issued 38 000 loans and their weekly programs included children’s programs, seniors programs and tax help special events. They held 247 separate events, which had about 7000 people attending, and that is extraordinary. They put 100 new items into the Litchfield local history collection. People would perhaps not be aware of that, but they have a really good history collection at that library of everything to do with the greater rural area of Darwin, whether it be people, events, what has happened, what has not happened, how the area has grown, the good, the bad, the ugly and everything in between. That includes newpapers, local newspapers, maps, posters, photographs, as well as, of course, books.
Over the year they added 1571 new items to the collection, which includes approximately 400 e-books. It does not include library books bought by the college, nor does it include books gifted to the library through a variety of people and ways. Interestingly, the library manager, Iris Beale, said there is more and more demand for e-books. It will become a balancing act of how much money you expend on purchasing e-books versus how much money you spend on purchasing normal books we are used to, which are the paper and hardbacks.
Some of the innovative ventures the library does – and they are very enjoyable – include the Library Expo, which was held on the Humpty Doo Village Green in the Dry Season school holidays. They are going to repeat this again this year. They did it at that time last year because the school grounds and access to the library was all a bit mucked up because of construction works, but it turned out to be a really good idea out in the open, and many community groups also participated.
The Funky Chicken production, a dramatised book about a cheeky chicken that ended up in Humpty Doo, was also held at the library and 300 local children participated. The production was a huge hit. If you can imagine 300 little children in that library, it was definitely a sight to be seen.
The library gets involved – and the Friends of Taminmin Library also take part – in a function called Darwin to the Doo, which is where you see a lot of vintage and veteran cars leave the historical air hangar in Parap to travel to the library where they go on show. There is music, a band, food, refreshments, lots of other cars, tractors and even the few ubiquitous ‘beaut utes’. It is a good day. It is held sometime in July.
They get involved in the Biggest Morning Tea for cancer fundraising, and in the National Simultaneous Storytime, which I have been to, and I know the member for Nelson has been to a few times. That is also a fun event. The flagship is the Seniors Poetry Lunch and seniors poetry day, which is held in August. Then sometime after that they launch the poetry anthology for the year, which is usually attended by anything between 30 and 80 people. Refreshments are provided and it is a really good day where people read either the poems they have written or poems they have chosen out of a book. There have been other activities. There have been people who have sang, and we have even had junior poets for that day. I think that has been going on for 10 years now. There are some people who have been there from the very beginning. Congratulations to Sandra Parker, who was one of the driving forces of the Seniors Poetry Lunch and day.
I put on the record the good and fine work the Friends of Taminmin Library do, and I know they will continue to do it because they are passionate about libraries, reading books, the written word and all that is associated with it. They will have many more enjoyable functions in the future, and I encourage anyone who is going for a drive down the track to call in to Taminmin Library and say hello to them all in there.
Mr STYLES (Sanderson): Mr Deputy Speaker, I have some great news about a great event I recently attended, the Music NT program launch for the 2014 program. The Northern Territory government is committed to developing a confident culture across the Territory by encouraging young people to get more involved with music. It is one of the numerous plans the Country Liberals have to make the Territory a better place to live, work and create music in.
Music NT has been the peak body for contemporary music since 1996 and has helped numerous local performers go from the local scene to national recognition. Gurrumul Yunupingu and Sietta are two success stories of Music NT. It does great work with local artists, and is an outstanding supporter not only of local music, but Aboriginal music as well.
The program for 2014, which I had the pleasure of launching, is an ambitious one. It will reach every corner of the Northern Territory and will focus on providing services that will benefit the whole of the Territory’s music scene. The regional areas music program has previously been very successful in taking support beyond Darwin and reaching out to all parts of the Territory.
Some of these programs include NT Song of the Year, whose winners have subsequently gone on to greater things; the National Indigenous Music Awards, which will continue to grow and are fast becoming recognised as the Indigenous equivalent of the ARIA awards in stature and significance; the Sista Sounds and Desert Divas initiative, which focuses on aspiring female Aboriginal musicians and singer songwriters as well.
Music NT will also be conducting the intune music conference, which will bring music reps to the Territory to check out our talent and pass on advice and education. A highlight of the program will be the Bush Bands Bash, which will allow a large number of performers to hone their skills and performances, gain industry knowledge and put it all into practice at an impressive concert.
The program has resulted in a number of great outcomes for Indigenous music, such as identifying and supporting young band managers and creating opportunities for bands to tour nationally. Organisations such as Music NT need drivers to achieve goals. In this case, those drivers are members of its board. Without these board members and their direction, enthusiasm and commitment, Music NT may not have gone as far as it has. Cain Gilmour is Chair, Simon Pedder is vice-Chair, Lesley Faehse is treasurer, Jess Black is secretary and other members are Scott Large and Justin Quinter. Programs under the direction of the board are a great asset to the Territory and the music industry.
When we move to the operational side of Music NT, I must congratulate Mark Smith, a wonderful young man who has been with this organisation for seven years and is the innovator and driving force who gives inspiration to the other parts of the fantastic team who make up Music NT. Those people are: operations manager, Anjea Travers; Milyika Scales, the Central Australia manager; Phillip Eaton, the artistic development officer; Lisa Buchanan, the admin officer; Amy Hetherington, comms and marketing officer; Jessica Laruffa, Desert Divas coordinator; Jaspa Wood, Bush Bands coordinator; and Fiona Carter, with the most important job of finance officer, as she has the money. Without those things and without the team, we would not have some of the great things happening in Music NT.
I will mention a few of the things they do. The Bush Bands Bash and the Bush Bands Business are fantastic exercises. There is a Hot Shots photography competition within Music NT. There is Music NT’s workshop series, where they have people working with young people to give them the confidence and ability to work with their bands, manage their bands and make sure everything happens as it should.
The Northern Territory Song of the Year is another great initiative of Music NT, along with the Regional Areas Music program. That is taken far and wide through the Territory.
Music NT takes the Desert Divas and Sista Sounds programs to remote areas of the Northern Territory, where you have people with talent. We have all seen the talent shows on TV; we have seen people who come from the back of beyond, from nowhere. They come from a kitchen or a bathroom where they sing, from little houses, caravans and a range of accommodation, and we see them come to the fore simply by people facilitating that to happen. We have great talents in the Territory. Our great talent is Jessica Mauboy. I remember, as a school-based constable, borrowing sound equipment for the school so she could run a school concert when she was just a young girl of seven or eight. These things bring these people to the fore.
Yuliana Pascoe is another great product of the Territory, a young lady with a fantastic voice who writes music and performs it. In fact, she was in the hall of Parliament House last year at a Christmas function, out of the kindness of her heart, entertaining people with some beautiful songs from other writers and performing some of her own stuff.
We have the talent here, and Music NT teases that talent out and gives people the confidence to have a go. We should encourage anything that helps young people gain that confidence so they have the capability and self-confidence to have a go. It is those people who, when we get them up, realise they can do it and go on to do fantastic things and become role models. We need more role models for more of our young people.
I will keep talking about the things Music NT does. The intune music conference is another great initiative to get people together. The National Indigenous Music Awards is a fantastic recognition of people from all over the Territory who have that talent and can put it on show at these music awards.
We go to the Original Recipe Music Festival, which is another great, fun thing to do. I met some new people there. I know members of that organisation, but I met quite a few new people and they are great. They love having a good time and they facilitate other people to have a fun, relaxing time while enjoying some really terrific music.
We then have the Green Room and a space for answers, another great initiative. We see so many people getting together in this environment, and it might be timely to talk about programs like the NT Song of the Year, where winners have gone on to perform at national festivals and record albums. The National Indigenous Music Awards last year attracted more than 3000 people. Sista Sounds and the music conference bring Australian music industry representatives to the Territory to meet local performers. We have a wealth of talent here.
I was surprised because I had not heard this figure before, but when I was chatting with Mark Smith and had the opportunity to thank him for his hard work – a few people had a chat to me before we opened and said it would be really nice if I could thank Mark. I intended to do that, and I thanked him for his many years of service to Music NT, which is a non-profit organisation he manages, and he looks after over 3000 members. I was stunned that this organisation has over 3000 members across the Territory. It is with great pleasure that I thank him for inviting me to open the 2014 program. I thank the board, the crew and, in particular, I thank Amy Hetherington and a young lady by the name of Melissa Honey, who accompanied me as a result of an invitation to the International Women’s Day breakfast. I congratulate you all, a great bunch of people and keep having a great time. Thank you.
Mr VOWLES (Johnston): Mr Deputy Speaker, I will speak about a very positive organisation within the Johnston electorate at the Rapid Creek Business Village. I would like to focus the Chamber’s attention on a project which is very close to my heart and is run out of Rapid Creek village by Down Syndrome NT. It is Project 21.
Project 21 can be described as a bridge to adult life and success for those with Down’s syndrome. Project 21 builds skills in this group of young people at a crucial time in their lives: in their late teens and early 20s. That has proven to be a time when many students with Down’s syndrome are really ready to learn.
We know access to such learning is impossible to obtain. Tertiary pathways do not exist for students involved in Project 21, so it is crucial in addressing this paucity of services. Students gain skills with Project 21; they undertake Certificate I in Education and Skills Development, while others have just begun to learn barista skills and are serving great coffee to the businesses and shoppers who come to the centre at Rapid Creek.
These skills are further honed in Social 21, a space for students who hang out, perhaps rustle up a snack and practice social skills. A real favourite at the project is Dance 21, and as I speak students are busy rehearsing for their fascinating show 21: The Journey, which is on for the second time at Darwin Entertainment Centre on Friday 21 March. If you missed it the first time, like I did, make sure you go and show support for these talented young adults. I will be there, I know the member for Wanguri will be there and I encourage everyone to go along and support Project 21’s show at the Darwin Entertainment Centre tomorrow night.
This show includes yet another skill taught by the amazing staff and helpers: sign language. This helps students who struggle with communication to express feelings and emotions. In the show on Friday, you will see a signing choir, which will both amaze and move you. Project 21 is an invaluable resource and support for those with Down’s syndrome, and yet the founder, Rachel Kroes, is going through another round of applications for funding, with eight due before the end of April, all taking up priceless time that would be better spent with students, engaging in many facets of their learning.
The coffee served is another fantastic Project 21 initiative. There is a shop known as Walking in My Shoes, where shoes, jewellery and accessories are recycled and where students learn how to greet customers, handle money and look after stock. Students gain a real sense of pride in who they are and what they can do, as well as learn life skills to assist them to find employment and fully participate in adult life.
They are taught about cyber safety and how to spot scams and potential threats online through Media 21. Digital cameras are skilfully used by participants in Media 21 to photograph other students’ achievements. They are taught how to make an access podcast, manage software, live streaming and all this in the dynamic and supportive environment that Project 21 delivers.
Arts abound in Graphics 21, encouraging self-expression exploration, as well as marketable artworks as a result.
Students learn how to effectively participate in conversation and modulate speech through Music 21 and how to breathe deeply, retain posture and recognise lyrics in Sing 21.
We need support for this initiative to continue. My colleague, the member for Wanguri, held a morning tea there, and there were many calls for Labor and this government to support these initiatives that Project 21 and Down Syndrome NT provide for their clients. We need to ensure we secure ongoing funding and recognise it for what it really is. It is a shining light in the lives of its participants and a genuine beacon among youth services.
Motion agreed to; the Assembly adjourned.
Last updated: 04 Aug 2016