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ALMOST five years after the abolition of ATSIC, the Rudd government has announced details of a new national indigenous representative body, which will receive $30 million in funding.

Members of the new National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples will be subject to unprecedented probity checks to avoid the corruption problems that besieged ATSIC, and will be made up equally of men and women.

Announcing that the government had accepted a blueprint for the body handed to it in August, Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin said yesterday the government was committed to “resetting” its relationship with indigenous people and creating a new partnership based on trust, goodwill and mutual respect.

“Indigenous Australians must have a voice if we are to achieve change,” she said.

“We look forward to working with the new body to close the gap in indigenous life outcomes and opportunities.”

The government will provide an initial $6m for the establishment of the body, and a further $23.2m for its operation from 2011 to 2013.

Plans for the new body were developed by an indigenous steering committee, led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma, after 12 months of consultation.

Mr Calma welcomed the announcement of the body, which will be led by an eight-member national executive, including two full-time co-chairs.

“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been without a representative voice for too long,” he said.

“This is a critical moment in forging a new relationship with the Australian government.”

The executive will be elected by an annual congress of 120 representatives of key Aboriginal bodies and communities, as well as individuals. An ethics council will scrutinise the integrity and ethics of office holders.

The indigenous steering committee will oversee the set-up of the new body.

While accepting the committee’s blueprint, Ms Macklin rejected calls for taxpayer funding for a capital base that would allow the body to become self-sufficient. The committee had said $200m was needed over 10 years from government, corporate and philanthropic sources.

Ms Macklin said funding would be administered as it was for other national peak bodies, respecting the right to put their view while also requiring them to show they were representative and that funding was used responsibly.

Plans for the new body, which was an election promise, have been panned by some Aborigines.

Aboriginal leader Tracker Tilmouth said the new body was “a joke”.

“It’s got no merit because it’s got no power,” he said.

“It’s like going to see your local politician — you get a warm feeling for about five minutes but then you walk away.”

The Territory Government says shires are already receiving funding for dog control in remote Aboriginal communities, but more may be considered.

The recent death of a man attacked by dogs at Maningrida sparked concerns from the Local Government Association that shires had the responsibility, but no financial capacity, to eradicate packs of feral dogs.

The Territory’s Local Government Minister Rob Knight said the shires do receive some funding for services, including animal control.

“Where there’s communities that have been let go for quite some time, there may be a need to give some assistance,” he said.

“Certainly through the intervention there’s been programs which have run for particular communities for animal control and certainly I’m happy to talk to communities where there is a real, quite significant problem.”

The Federal Government announced $76,000 for dog health manuals for remote Territory communities last week.

A far north Queensland MP says he disputes one of the findings of a Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) report into policing in Indigenous communities.

The CMC report found there was no clear evidence that alcohol restrictions and management plans had reduced the rates of violence in the communities.

The member for Cook, Jason O’Brien, says alcohol management plans are not the only solution for reducing violence, but they have helped.

“The most up to date data shows that there has been some significant improvement in some communities in reducing alcohol related violence in places like Aurukun and Kowanyama in particular,” he said.

“So I do dispute that these communities are not better places and less violence places.”

Mr O’Brien says he will continue working with communities.

“I’m happy… to keep reviewing these alcohol management plans and making them more effective and introducing other strategies as well, but we simply cannot go back to the bad old days where communities are simply awash with grog,” he said.

The Federal Government says a new representative body for Indigenous Australians will be up and running by 2011.

The new body will be based on a model recommended by Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma earlier this year.

The National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples will be established as a company, with two full-time co-chairs and six other board members making up a national executive.

Their work will be overseen by an ethics council of senior indigenous Australians and they will be elected by an annual national congress.

An interim executive and ethics council will be in place until the start of 2011.

Two members from the steering committee working with Mr Calma will sit on the interim council and executive.

Mr Calma says an announcement about the membership of the ethics council will be made in the next week.

The Government is providing $29 million over four years for the body.

It says it will respect the right of the body to put its view, but that it will be required to show that it is representative and using the funding responsibly.

Mr Calma says the new body will work with Government to make sure services are properly tailored for Indigenous Australians.

“To make sure the policies that are developed, the ways that programs and services are being delivered are really going to be conducive to the way Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people need them to be put in place.”

He says it is being structured differently from the ATSIC model.

“This body will not deliver programs and services,” he said. “It’ll be a policy and an advocacy body.

“It’s just representing the voices of existing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and that was one of the key differences.”

Indigenous leader Mick Dodson says a plan to re-instate the racial discrimination act in the Northern Territory is at odds with the intervention in Indigenous communities.

The Federal Government will introduce legislation next week to reinstate the act, but it will not be voted on until next year.

The former government suspended the act to allow the Northern Territory intervention to take place.

Professor Dodson says the intervention itself is discriminatory and will have to be changed dramatically if the laws are reintroduced.

“What the Government needs to bear in mind is that discrimination is not the way to go when you are trying to pursue public policy,” he said.

“In the end, these sorts of interventions will fail because they don’t belong to the people, they have no ownership of them.

“Obviously [the Federal Government are] having enormous difficulties - and this is the problem when you resort to racial discrimination to pursue public policy objectives.

“Why in 2009 - we’re almost in 2010 - do we say it’s OK for the Government to be racially discriminatory against a bunch of people - Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory - who happen to discriminated against because of where they live and the fact that they’re all Aboriginal?”

He says compulsory management of welfare income in the Territory will have to be abandoned if the Act is re-instated.

“If the RDA’s properly reinstalled, anybody can complain if it still remains a blanket approach,” he said.

Professor Dodson says not only will it be difficult for the Act to pass the Senate, the Government will have to work to gain community support for the Act.

“One of the key factors is the Senate. I don’t know what the Senate will do with this; they don’t control the Senate,” he said.

“So far as the intervention is concerned, if it’s a proper reinstatement of the Racial Discrimination Act, they’re going to have to work a bit harder to get community support for the intervention measures.

“If they’re relying on special measures, they will need to comply with the key elements of special measures, one of which is that, you know, they’re imposed or put in place - is probably a better phrase - put in place with the consent of the people who are affected by those measures - that hasn’t been the case in the Northern Territory intervention.

“Reinstating the RDA would give people the feeling that they’re being discriminated against a means of redress, but if it’s a special measure, which are sometimes called affirmative action, things like that, one of the features is that they should only be in place for as long as the disadvantage remains.”

A company that has been able to build a house in a remote Indigenous community in Queensland, at a third of the usual cost, says it has been inundated with calls - including from the Northern Territory Government.

Remote Housing Australia showed off its first house a week ago which was built in north Queensland in 15 days using mostly local Indigenous workers.

The Territory Government has been under immense pressure over its $672 million remote Indigenous housing program, which had a budget blowout and is yet to deliver a house.

But Remote Housing Australia’s Bob Stephens says he is thrilled that people are showing interest.

“We’re very keen to ensure that the maximum amount of labour is engaged on projects within communities and are drawn from those communities,” he said.

“That way the skills are retained in the community and those people can go on to continue building homes in their own communities or others.”

He says there is no reason it could not be done in the Northern Territory too.

Mr Stephens says his company is able to build much more cheaply because it spent 12 years developing a building material that combines bamboo and concrete.

He says the materials are made to fit together, which means local labor can be used to build the houses.

“The Territory has large needs for what we’re doing,” he said.

“We’re producing a house at a third of the cost that they’re being produced at the moment and we’re able to deliver a four-bedroom home with unskilled people under our supervision in under a month.”

“Our product was tested by the CSIRO. They in fact rang us after the tests to say they could not understand how the termites hadn’t touched our board - it’d been tested for six or eight months up in the Northern Territory.”

The Sydney-based Public Interest Advocacy Centre is calling on the Federal and Territory Governments to do more to prevent a second generation of “stolen” Aboriginal children.

The centre says governments are presiding over a wave of Indigenous children being taken from dysfunctional Indigenous families and being placed with white foster parents and in institutions.

The Centre’s executive director Robin Banks says the governments must do more to support Indigenous families to properly care for and keep their children.

“One is to try to encourage more of the families who are functioning and who have healthy lifestyles to be available to foster,” she said.

“But the other thing is to put more emphasis on preventative mechanisms with community services, family services and the various departments around the country to be working much more closely both with individual families and communities to improve parenting skills.

“One of the great harms done by the removal of children was the loss of parenting skills for the next generation… so we don’t have the need to remove children into care in the future.”

The Centre is campaigning for a tribunal to be set up to record Stolen Generation stories and pay them compensation.

The Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) has called for the establishment of a new police command dedicated to Indigenous issues in Queensland.

The Queensland Government ordered a review of policing in Indigenous communities in January 2007.

It came after Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley was charged but later acquitted of the 2004 death in custody of Palm Island man Cameron Doomadgee.

The CMC’s 400-page report was tabled in State Parliament this morning.

Among its six recommendations is the establishment of the new police indigenous command.

It also suggests greater control be given to locals, and scrapping fly-in fly-out bureaucrats.

CMC chairman Robert Needham says a more sophisticated approach is needed to Indigenous policing.

The Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) says a report about the police handling of a north Queensland death in custody is likely to be finished by the end of the year.

Cameron Doomadgee died from a ruptured liver and broken ribs in the Palm Island watch-house off Townsville in 2004.

The death sparked riots on the island.

The CMC report was ordered in 2006 after criticism of the police investigation into the death.

A CMC spokeswoman says it is likely the report will be sent to Queensland Police next month.

She says the police service will then have an opportunity to respond, as will any individual officers mentioned in the report.

A second coronial inquest into Mr Doomadgee’s death is due to start in February.

The Federal Government will not reinstate the Racial Discrimination Act in the Northern Territory this year.

The former government suspended the laws as part of the Northern Territory intervention.

Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin plans to introduce legislation next week to reinstate the Racial Discrimination Act - but it will not be voted on until next year.

Ben Schokman from the Human Rights Law Resource Centre says that is disappointing.

He says Aboriginal people will continue to suffer.

“People on the ground in the Northern Territory are continuing to be adversely affected by these discriminatory measures,” he said.

“The Minister’s been prevaricating for nearly 12 months now.”

Greens Senator Rachel Siewert says Ms Macklin led people to believe the laws would be changed this year.

“I think that’s a failure of their promise,” she said.

“The Government is introducing this bill when they do next week in full knowledge of the fact that it won’t pass the Senate in this sitting.”

Former Northern Territory Administrator Ted Egan says the Racial Discrimination Act needs to be re-instated as soon as possible.

“We’re supposed to be a civilised country that doesn’t have laws based on race,” he said.

“So the sooner they get things back to normal and apply all these very necessary social safeguards across the board, rather than just apply them to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the better.”

The Indigenous Affairs Minister, Jenny Macklin, says the Government is not breaking a promise by not reinstating the Act this year.

She says ‘complexity’ has led to delays.

“We expect the Parliament to give it very serious consideration,” she said.

“It’s a very detailed piece of work that’s being completed.

“Very important for the Northern Territory of course and we expect that the Parliament will look at it very closely in the new year.”

The Labor Member for Lingiari, Warren Snowdon, says he is disappointed his Government will not be able to reinstate the Act this year.

“It’s disappointing that we won’t be able to get it out this year probably but nevertheless it’s very important that the announcement is made,” he said.

“When it is made, it’ll be made early next week.

“It’s very important that we achieve one objective and that is to make sure that we do reinstate the RDA and … there’ll be a package of other proposals alongside it.”