Education before mortgages for Australia 's poorest

The Central Land Council said today that the most impoverished sector of the Australia society - Central Australia 's remote communities - simply cannot afford home ownership.

CLC Director David Ross says that while the CLC is not opposed to private home ownership, the issue is currently being hailed as the end of disadvantage for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory . He says to continue with a simplistic debate along these lines will only cause chaos to communities already severely handicapped by barriers to economic development.

"The first assumption that is being made is that land rights are a cause of poverty and an impediment to individual home ownership. This is patently not the case as is graphically and tragically illustrated in the Northern Territory .

"While nearly half of the NT is Aboriginal land, the other half is not. Aboriginal communities on non Aboriginal land suffer just as extreme cases of disadvantage and poverty as those on Aboriginal land," Mr Ross said.

"Second, inalienable Aboriginal freehold title does not exclude private home ownership. Like Canberra - where people are on long leases rather than freehold title - people can obtain leases on land that is owned by Land Trusts. There are many cases of these leases negotiated by the CLC for commercial interests.

"Third , the reality is that many Aboriginal people in our region are simply not in a position to consider a mortgage. The average income of Aboriginal people living in the central remote region is $9,133, or 25 per cent of the average annual income of a non-Indigenous person in the region," he said.

"The way out of poverty is education and health, not crippling debt. As the case of Wadeye shows, for every dollar spent on a kid's education in Darwin , only 26 cents (26 per cent ) gets spent on a kid in Wadeye. There is a direct correlation between how much is spent on a child's education and their subsequent adult income levels.

"Not surprisingly, the issue of individual home ownership is not raised as an aspiration of traditional land owners living on Aboriginal land. Perhaps if living standards and income levels were to rise it may become an aspiration for future generations.

"Solutions to the systematic exclusion of Aboriginal people from the social, political and economic mainstream are multi-layered and complex, but it is ludicrous and simplistic to lay the blame on land tenure," Mr Ross said.

The real and crippling barriers to economic development include poor education, poor health, a lack of housing, roads and communications infrastructure and extreme remoteness.

The CLC s has proposed reforms to the Land Rights Act which include simplifying leasing arrangements, improving access to public housing on Aboriginal land through housing leases, and further expediting mining procedures and governance issues.

The CLC is strongly of the view that the key to increasing economic development does not lie in abolishing the customary tenure system; it lies in adapting this system to resolve any specific and genuine problems, with the consent of title-holders.

"It would seem that the original rationale for land rights; the recognition of Aboriginal peoples' perpetual spiritual ties to their land and restitution for past injustices, have been deliberately swept under the carpet. Suddenly, land rights are blamed for entrenched poverty, alienation from the 'real' economy and extreme social dysfunction in most Aboriginal communities," David Ross said.

5 April 2005