On 4 July 2019 the Senate agreed to the establishment of
the Select Committee on the effectiveness of the Australian Government’s
Northern Australia agenda.
The committee is due to report on the last sitting day of
2020.
Information relating to the Select Committee including membership,
the terms of reference and copies of submissions are available on the Committee’s
web page.
A link to Committee home page can be found here
The Terms of Reference state:
That a select committee, to be
known as the Select Committee on the effectiveness of the Australian
Government’s Northern Australia agenda, be established to inquire into and
report on the effectiveness of the objectives, design, implementation and
evaluation of the Australian Government’s Northern Australia agenda, with
particular reference to:
facilitation of public and
private investment in infrastructure and economic development;
economic and social benefit
arising from that investment for Northern Australians, in particular First
Nations people;
funding models and policy
measures that capture the full value of existing and emerging industries;
measures taken to develop an
appropriately skilled workforce;
emerging national and
international trends and their impact on the Northern Australia agenda; and
any related matters.
Submissions of particular relevance to Indigenous issues (link
here) include:
#13 by Jon Altman and Francis
Markham,
#58 by the Cape York
Aboriginal Land Council,
#62 by the North Australia Indigenous
Land and Sea Management Alliance (NAILSMA), and
#67 by Michael Dillon (the
author of this blog).
Submission #80 by the Western Australian Government is also worth reading, not least for the information
it includes relating to the Indigenous Reference Group on Northern Australia
(IRG) (see section (b) of the WA submission) where the WA government notes that
the Commonwealth and relevant state and territory jurisdictions are developing
a ‘Northern Australia Indigenous Development Accord’ aimed at capturing the
extensive and collaborative work of the IRG’ and providing ‘a framework for
Forum Government’s to align efforts to advance Indigenous economic development
in northern Australia’. As far as I am aware, neither Minister Canavan nor
Minister Ken Wyatt, nor their departments, have announced or discussed the proposed
Accord. Certainly neither Minister’s departmental website provide any
information on these proposals.
The key issue from my perspective will be to assess the
extent to which the proposed Accord includes substantive policy initiatives,
particularly in relation to land reform and native title, funding of PBCs, social
and community housing in remote communities, and of course, access to public
and private sector development finance for economic activities in remote
communities. These are all issues I have argued for in previous blog posts. The
WA submission goes on to advocate adjustments to the Investment Mandate of the
NAIF to better support Indigenous economic (and hopefully social) investments
in northern development. This is an issue that I have argued for over the past
year or so in this blog and elsewhere.
To sum up, the Select Committee has the potential to both
re-set the agenda in terms of Indigenous social and economic development in
northern Australia, and to re-energise the Government’s current policy
framework, which to my mind is big on rhetoric, but very short on substantive initiatives.
No comments:
Post a Comment