THE indigenous people of South Australia’s remote desert country yesterday handed Mal Brough the plum role Kevin Rudd denied him: they will send the architect of the Howard government’s intervention in the Northern Territory to Canberra as their agent.
In a new slap in the face for federal and state Labor, a meeting of more than 100 Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara residents asked Mr Brough to be their agent in dealing with both the federal and state governments.
Mr Brough, speaking to The Australian after the meeting in the township of Umuwa, said he would consider the offer.
The resolution from the general meeting on the lands guarantees the board will offer Mr Brough the role of being the remote communities’ chief consultant and spokesman.
After the Prime Minister denied Mr Brough a place on his bipartisan indigenous "war cabinet", this would put the former indigenous affairs minister back in the main game in Canberra, where he would be dealing with the Rudd Government in general and his successor, Jenny Macklin, in particular.
He would also be dealing directly with the Rann Labor Government in South Australia, which had a strained relationship with him when he spearheaded last year’s intervention into Territory indigenous communities.
Mr Brough demonstrated he would not be taking a step back, as he put federal and state bureaucrats through withering questioning at yesterday’s open-air meeting.
At one point, Mr Brough declared that a combined offer by the two governments of $25million for new housing across the APY lands communities was "not a good deal in my view".
Mr Brough travelled from Brisbane, via Darwin and Alice Springs overnight, to attend the APY meeting, at which indigenous leaders asked him to advise them on how to move their communities forward in the wake of the Mullighan commission of inquiry into child sexual abuse on the lands and their increasingly strained relations with the South Australian Government.
Former Supreme Court judge Ted Mullighan’s report earlier this month found child abuse problems coupled with violence and drug and alcohol abuse had left the 3000 residents of the lands – 1000 of them children – living in dysfunctional communities. It warned that authorities had one year, maybe two, to help them recover before it would be too late.
Mr Brough told The Australian he had a straightforward answer for the APY communities: that integrity within their leadership was paramount.
He said he had told them that all organisations on the lands from the APY board downwards should be fully audited by state and federal authorities so that they could start with "a clean slate — that everyone knows that any money that comes on to the lands is being used for what it was intended".
The appeal to Mr Brough for help in dealing with the Rudd and Rann governments was an abrupt about-face for the APY lands. A year ago, they rejected the man and his intervention into the Northern Territory communities just across the border from the APY lands.
Yesterday’s community meeting at Umuwa revealed the level of distrust over the federal and state Labor governments’ motives behind the $25 million offer for new housing and their requirement that all housing on the lands be leased to government for 50 years in return.
Mr Brough told the meeting his intervention required leases only on new houses.
Indigenous elders and the APY board have accused the governments of frustrating their attempts to improve housing and initiate welfare reform and of seeking to regain control of the lands via the leases.