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Indigenous housing money sitting in bank: Palm Island CEO


The World Today - Tuesday, 5 September , 2006  12:36:58

Reporter: Conor Duffy

ELEANOR HALL: The CEO of one of Australia's biggest Aboriginal communities says he can understand the Federal Minister's frustration.

Barry Moyle from Palm Island says millions of dollars of funding earmarked for housing for Aboriginal communities has been sitting unspent in bank accounts.

Mr Moyle says that despite the housing shortage on Palm Island the council has almost $3 million worth of unspent funding.

He's been speaking to Conor Duffy.

BARRY MOYLE: It's certainly been a carry-over from previous years, and the beginning of this financial year was something like $2.9 million for Palm Island Council.

Palm Island Council recently adopted a housing improvement plan. We've been doing a lot of work with the ATSI (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) housing people to get that happening.

And we would hope that by the end of this calendar year, not financial year, but the calendar year, that we will have most of that expended other than about $100,000. So, certainly has been a problem in the past.

CONOR DUFFY: What have been some of the problems with getting the money from the Federal Government to the state government and then to Indigenous communities?

BARRY MOYLE: I'm not sure if there's a problem getting it from the feds to the state, and getting it from the state to the actual delivering on the ground. There's probably been, perhaps a bit of clear directions from the council, a lack of that, there also needs to be a lot better and a lot closer relationship between the ATSI housing and the council, and we are getting that under control now. So I'm thinking, that that's part of it.

But also, as I mentioned before, just getting the people to come to the island and actually do the work, it's really difficult to get that happening.

So, there's been lots of challenges in the past, but I suspect that what the Federal Minister is saying is true, and probably very frustrating to them, they have committed lots of money to ATSI housing.

One of the big issues is housing in Indigenous communities, and everybody knows that - how do we deliver it, how do we make it happen. And those are the challenges that these communities have to face.

CONOR DUFFY: How bad are the housing challenges on Palm Island?

BARRY MOYLE: We have something like about, we estimate, 3,500 people on the Island, and we have something like about 320 houses. So that would be a ratio of about 10 to one.

There are some houses that are underutilised. So you might have only one or two people in a three-bedroom house, and we are looking at how we can address those issues. But then that means the next house is going to have 20 in them.

So there's lots of houses that have got more than 10 people in them, and that's just a fact of life, it's been here for a long time, and those are the issues that we need to address as well.

ELEANOR HALL: Barry Moyle from the Palm Island Council speaking to Conor Duffy.

Editor's note: This transcript has been edited to correct a factual error. In the introduction to the story, the phrase "biggest housing estates" has been substituted with "biggest Aboriginal communities".