Alison Barrett writes:
The Federal and Northern Territory Governments announced this week significant investments in education and housing – key social determinants of health.
Commenting on the announcements, Dr John Boffa, Chief Medical Officer Public Health at Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, said “addressing these major social determinants of health will really help close the gap”.
The joint investments include $4 billion for housing across ten years in remote NT communities, and just over $1 billion for public schools.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made the housing announcement during a visit to Binjari community, near Katherine, in the same week as the first Federal Cabinet meeting in Darwin, on Larrakia Country, in over ten years.
Aboriginal Housing NT – the peak body for Aboriginal housing in the Territory – said the housing investment is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to properly address housing shortages in remote communities, as well as making much-needed upgrades to homelands.
AHNT CEO Skye Thompson said the duration and size of the investment means its potential impact goes well beyond housing, with plans of building homes that are a “much better fit for climate and for culture”, as well as involving and empowering Aboriginal people in the entire process.
“Our aim is for the whole life cycle of Aboriginal housing to be Aboriginal-led,” she said. “As Aboriginal people we know that sustained effort is required to achieve transformational change.”
While the funding is good news for NT, it will be interesting to see if longstanding calls to address remote housing in Queensland and other jurisdictions will also soon be answered.
On education
A joint statement by Federal and NT Governments said the agreement on education is set to increase funding for all public schools in the NT to 100 percent of the Schooling Resource Standard, recommended in the 2011 Gonski review, by 2029.
According to Federal Minister for Education Jason Clare, NT public schools now receive less than 80 percent of the funding that the Gonski Review said they should.
“This agreement means the most underfunded schools in Australia will now be fully funded,” Clare said.
However, the education deal has been criticised by Greens Senator Penny Allman-Payne as being “too little, too late”.
According to Allman-Payne, the Schooling Resource Standard calculation – on which funding is based – is the “bare minimum of funding a school needs to get 80 percent of students above the minimum NAPLAN standard”.
Similar criticisms were made last month by the national convenor of Save our Schools Australia, Trevor Cobbold, when the WA and Federal Governments announced new public school funding agreements in WA.
Targeting youth
Meanwhile, in a widely condemned step, the New South Wales Labor Government this week announced it will introduce legislation to amend the Bail Act 2013, making it harder for young people between 14 and 18 to get bail.
The move, widely criticised by human rights and Aboriginal advocates, echoes “tough on crime” politics in the lead up to the upcoming election in lutruwita/Tasmania.
It is likely to have detrimental impacts on young people in NSW as well as undermining progress on key Closing the Gap targets.
The CEO of the Aboriginal Legal Service (ALS) in NSW/ACT, Karly Warner, said the bail laws “will fail to reduce crime and end in disaster for youth engagement in regional communities”.
The ALS is urging the NSW Government not to be “driven by fear” and to fast track “the community-based services and supports they promised under Closing the Gap”.
Echoing comments made by Adrienne Picone in lutruwita/Tasmania last week, justice reform initiative Jailing is Failing said the punitive measures are not evidence-based or “about what actually works to support community safety and prevent reoffending”.
From X/Twitter
From the Northern Territory…
Read media release
…to NSW
Meanwhile in Victoria…
See Croakey’s extensive archive of articles on social determinants of health
