Welfare quarantining and NT town camps

February 4, 2009
Issue 

In December 2008, Green Left Weekly's Emma Murphy and Peter Robson spoke to William Tilmouth about mandatory welfare quarantining — a feature of the federal government's Northern Territory intervention — and its impacts on the Aboriginal town camps in Alice Springs. Tilmouth is the executive director of Tangentyere Council, the umbrella service delivery agency for the town camp Aboriginal housing associations.

Can you tell us about the policy of income management and how Tangentyere Council has responded?

There has been a [voluntary income management] system in Tangentyere Council for the last 20 years. It was the food voucher system ... a system that was designed by the people themselves, they realised that it was a feast and famine cycle that they were living in: the week you got your pension was the week you got your food and within that week, because of cultural and family obligations and inability to store [food], the food was eaten literally in the time you bought it.

They decided to design a system where they could put aside money and pick it up in their off-week as a food voucher through the Tangentyere Council.

This was a system that was working quite well and it was designed by the people and they had ownership of that system. The amount of money that was there set aside for families was good. But with the new store cards [imposed as part of the intervention], the government said "we will quarantine 50% of your income, 100% of your royalties and 100% of any other payment" like the baby bonus or [PM Kevin] Rudd's $1000 pension bonus.

They quarantined all this money, which has helped people spend more on food or clothing but doesn't work in cases where people have enough food, but now can't make car loan repayments or pay for transport [to get to town] so that they can use the cards.

My excecutive asked Centrelink: if they must quarantine income, they should issue cab charges as part of it, so that people could use that so they don't have to walk to the shops. By the time people had walked to the shops and back, their butter had melted, their meat had gone green and their food wasn't even worth eating. But the government would not permit cab charges to be part of the quarantine system and this problem remains.

It did lead to people spending more on food, but there were lots of people who didn't collect their store cards, believing their payments had simply been halved. They thought the government had just cut their money and were accepting that.

Overcrowding is a major issue in Aboriginal communities. Has the NT intervention affected it?

There was always overcrowding in the town camps. The town has never catered for Indigenous mobility. They've always catered for non-Indigenous mobility — the town is geared for the tourist trade. That's why there are motels, short-term accommodation, trailer parks, the whole works and jerks.

They've never catered for Indigenous mobility. We did a mobility study two years ago and it's estimated that at any given time, there's 500 remote [Indigenous] people coming in and 500 remote people going out. Our population, we work on 1600 people, the actual population is 2500 and the service population, including visitors, is around 3500 people.

There is an historical undercount in the [Australian Bureau of Statistics] statistics of Aboriginal people, due to the mobility of Aboriginal people. The ABS has never got it right and they will never get it right as long as they expect you to have a door to knock on. If you're homeless and living under a tree, you never get counted. If you're mobile at the time of the census, you never get counted.

The whole issue around Aboriginal mobility, we tried to measure [it] and we found a range of reasons why people come to town. Firstly, Alice Springs is the service centre of Central Australia, it's where people can access services such as health and education. So people come here to access renal dialysis machines. There are no dialysis machines in remote areas, except for those few people (one to date) [who] can sell their art and buy their own machines.

The government doesn't want to decentralise services to remote communities, as a result they create the condition [of overcrowding] that is in town. This is because they do not want to spend money to provide services in remote communities, they do not want to create jobs nor cater for the needs of remote people and so people have to come to Alice Springs.

The other thing is that the [income management] card, when it was first introduced, was only able to be used at Coles, Woolworths and other chain stores. You don't have them [chain stores] in remote communities. So in order to get the food and clothing you needed, you came into town, and if the only vehicle you have is defective, then your transport system is gone.

There is no public transport to remote communities and so people get stuck in town and become residents of Alice Springs and also become alcoholics in the process. You're always doubling up and compounding the problem as you go. The lack of foresight, the lack of resources provided by the Commonwealth and territory government contribute greatly to social ills of this town.

What do you think about the future of the NT intervention?

"Sorry" was a word that was mentioned by the government but it's starting to sound more and more hollow. With the actions of the government, they might as well not have said sorry.

I can see the intervention broadening, I can see it moving into Western Australia. I don't see it moving to other Australian people, because non-Indigenous Australians affected by it would vote against it. But in regards to Indigenous people, they can get away with it, because we do not have the voice that we would like to have — and did have when ATSIC [Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission] was still around.

However, there's enough goodwill in Australia to bring about that change. The pendulum has swung completely to the right and, with the help of some good-willed Australians, it may swing back. We have to take into account the goodwill that Australians had when they marched across the [Sydney Harbour] bridges and when they supported the referendum in '67. [These are times] when goodwill was shown and it needs to be shown again.

Aboriginal people, like everyone else, have the right to determine how they live and how their children grow up. We don't want to be denigrated and put down for forever and a day. We want to feel good about ourselves and only the government can do that, through a more consultative approach when drafting up legislation that affects us.

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