Remote Community Access to Infrastructure Planning: an imagination deficit

The processes for access to normal government planning processes for infrastructure in remote Indigenous communities are akin to Oliver Twist’s subordinated status in the Poor House, leaving the only options available for Indigenous interests to be plaintive supplication.

Infrastructure Australia (IA) released an updated version of the Australian Infrastructure Plan on 17 February 2016 which includes an Infrastructure Priority List  of over 90 projects either nominated by states and territories or identified by an audit undertaken by IA in 2015. IA released a number of Fact Sheets including a Fact Sheet on Remote and Indigenous Communities.

IA is an independent statutory body with a mandate to prioritise and progress nationally significant infrastructure.

Infrastructure Australia was established in July 2008 to provide advice to the Australian Government under the Infrastructure Australia Act 2008.

In 2014, the Infrastructure Australia Act 2008 was amended to give Infrastructure Australia new powers, and to create an independent board with the right to appoint its own Chief Executive Officer. The amended Act came into effect on 1 September 2014.

Under the Act, Infrastructure Australia has responsibility to strategically audit Australia's nationally significant infrastructure, and develop 15 year rolling Infrastructure Plans that specify national and state level priorities.

The Act also states that the Minister must not give directions about the content of any audit, list, evaluation, plan or advice provided by Infrastructure Australia.

In May 2015, Infrastructure Australia released two audits: the Northern Australia Audit and the Australian Infrastructure Audit.

The Northern Australia Audit is focussed entirely on economic and commercial projects and ignored the infrastructure needs of remote Indigenous communities on the basis that they were out of scope of the parameters determined for the audit. In the words of the Audit itself:

However the population centre size threshold of 3,000 removed the focus of the study away from the many northern Indigenous communities, which range from tiny outstations with up to 20 people to communities with 1,000 persons or more. The infrastructure needs of these smaller communities are being considered in the parallel Northern Territory Regional Infrastructure Study and a National Remote and Regional Transport Infrastructure Strategy, being led by the Northern Territory Government.

The inclusion of projects in the Infrastructure Priority List is not a guarantee of investment, but provides governments and private investors with a base level of assurance that there is a justified demand for the asset, and thus appears to be an important step towards investment. Most of the projects on the List are transport related and are either listed as requiring ‘option assessment’ or ‘business case development’.

It is clear that the Plan and Priority List include billions of dollars of potential investment, and given the current budget constraints, the likelihood of most projects being funded by the public sector within the next five years would appear to be quite low.

In contrast to the Northern Australia Audit’s silence on Indigenous related infrastructure needs, IA appear to have become more sensitive to the necessity to address Indigenous infrastructure issues in this month’s publications. The fact sheet on remote and Indigenous communities includes a set of suggested actions for Governments. Two are worth noting because they are of specific relevance to Indigenous communities:

·         States and territories should tender the provision of economic infrastructure services and pool investments across communities to establish scale and attract more private sector innovation.

·         All governments should consider investments that support the recent COAG investigation into land administration and use and the White Paper on Developing Northern Australia actions on land, which aim to increase the economic independence of remote Indigenous communities.

In addition, it is a positive development to see two or three projects included in the Priority List which are explicitly directed towards remote Indigenous community infrastructure. In WA, the 2015 audit (and not the WA Government) identified ‘Improved Road access to remote communities’ as a project worth assessing.

In the NT, the NT Government nominated a project to provide ‘Enabling Infrastructure and essential services to remote NT communities’. This project is currently undergoing business case development. The detailed information on the proposal refers to three communities: Wadeye, Tiwi Islands, and Jabiru, but without much detail.

The NT Government also nominated the upgrade of the Tanami Highway as a project, and IA’s assessment proposed that the road be sealed from the Stuart Highway to the Granites mine in the Tanami.

While both Wadeye and the Tiwi Islands are largely indigenous, and Jabiru has a substantial Indigenous population, the Tiwi Islands are the location of a major port development related to the forestry industry and Jabiru is the hub for Kakadu’s tourism industry. Communities in both Wadeye and Tiwi were provided with substantial infrastructure investment by the Commonwealth through the National Partnership on Remote Indigenous Housing as the pre-existing infrastructure levels were unable to support the new dwellings constructed under that program.

My sense is that supporting and underwriting existing economic activity is the primary driver of these nominations rather than the significant needs of remote Indigenous citizens, who are amongst the most socially and economically disadvantaged Australians. While each of these projects would, if implemented, benefit some indigenous communities and citizens, this is more in the nature of a coincidental and collateral benefit.

The unfortunate reality is that large commercial and economic interests are much more influential than disaggregated community interests. Yet, if one was to develop an aggregated proposal to address the housing shortage across some 40 remote communities in the NT, there would be a five billion dollar project to be undertaken. Similarly, essential services such as power, water and sewerage might be aggregated into a substantial infrastructure project. Again the cost would be in the billions.

Yet for reasons I don’t fully comprehend, there appears to be an imagination deficit amongst infrastructure planners. IA have failed to take on board the recommendation they made to state and territory governments in their Fact Sheet quoted above to pool potential investments across communities. They adopted what are essentially arbitrary thresholds on the minimum population size of communities which are in scope, and consequently manage to assume away the aggregated infrastructure deficit in remote communities as not their problem. Similarly, the WA and NT Governments appear seriously disinterested in addressing the infrastructure deficits, implicitly leaving it to the Commonwealth Government. The NT Government’s apparently disingenuous references to Indigenous benefits from its nominations are further evidence of this structural disinterest.

Thus on the same day as the Chief Minister welcomed the release of the Infrastructure Plan, he also issued a media release announcing the allocation of $28m for two remote communities in Central Australia. The media release states in part:

New housing, better roads and more water supplies will be rolled out in the Utopia region as a result of a $28.3 million Northern Territory Government funding injection aimed at improving living conditions in the remote communities.

 “The funding we are announcing today will see new houses built, existing houses upgraded, roads improved, sewerage upgraded and additional water supplies secured,” he said.

“The investment will substantially improve the lives of Aboriginal people living in Arlparra as well as those living in the surrounding outstations of the Utopia region.

 “My Government strongly believes that the integral link between economic and cultural success is through local Aboriginal people gaining access to and participating in a local economy. This is why we are investing more than $1.3 billion in infrastructure in remote communities across the NT.”

Of course, investments such as these are welcome, and will undoubtedly make a substantial positive impact on the communities involved. But my point is that there are similar needs across some 40 communities, and there appears to be no systemic process for documenting the need, and more importantly, for transparently outlining the steps being taken to address that need. The mention of $1.3bn in infrastructure funding is not for Indigenous communities, but for roads bridges and other commercial related infrastructure. These are important investments, but continue the structural blindness to Indigenous needs.

Policymakers in Canberra, Darwin, Perth and other relevant capitals have succumbed to a mindset where they accept the existence of the Poor House, where they cannot imagine that aggregated projects addressing the needs of some 100 remote communities across remote Australia might be of equal or greater significance than upgrading a road, a port or building a dam.

And to be even more pointed, where are the Indigenous policy departments when Infrastructure Plans and their related components such as the one announced yesterday are submitted to Cabinet?

“Please Sir, can I have some more".