$50m To Convert Alice Camps Into Suburbs
The Age
Wednesday March 14, 2007
THE violent and poverty-stricken town camps of Alice Springs will be turned into mainstream suburbs with $50 million of Federal Government funding to upgrade houses, roads, sewerage and other services.
The $50 million - which comes on top of $20 million committed last year - will go towards upgrading existing homes and building new ones, encouraging private home ownership and fixing infrastructure such as roads and water.It will also cover the cost of building two short-term accommodation centres to house people who are visiting Alice Springs for medical treatment or other reasons, many of whom currently sleep rough on the banks of the Todd River or in the camps. The centres, for which demountable buildings have been prepared, will house a minimum of 300 people who will pay commercial rates for a space.Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough said the funding would be used to make the town camps like normal suburbs with improvements to existing housing, new homes built and infrastructure such as roads and plumbing updated.The temporary accommodation centres - which will operate under strict rules and be alcohol-free - would also reduce the high rates of violence and crime in Alice Springs by giving people a safe place to stay while they were in the city, Mr Brough said. They would allow local police to enforce vagrancy laws and move people along from the river bed, where violence is common, because there would be somewhere for them to go. But to get access to the funds, clans that occupy the town camps - of which there are about 19 - will have to relinquish the perpetual leases that some of them have been granted over Crown land. Mr Brough said the lease-holders would not be compensated, aside from having their camp upgraded to the same standards as a mainstream suburb. This was because they did not own the land in the same sense that traditional owners did, but had been granted a lease over Crown land after living on it for a time. It will be up to the clans whether or not they sign up to the program. Mr Brough said the work had to be done with "enormous urgency" because people were living in "hellholes". In one town camp, there were "about two taps, a broken toilet and a couple of humpies. There's no actual infrastructure, but about 30 or 40 people live there." Work will begin on the temporary accommodation centres within three months. The Northern Territory Government approved the plans this week. There is some opposition to the centres. Independent Northern Territory MLA Loraine Braham said the two facilities would "change the social fabric of Alice Springs in a detrimental way".Ms Braham said the Government should be "concentrating on communities, so they don't always have to come into town."Aboriginal people have wanted their land for a long time, they've got their land, but now these (younger) generations don't seem to want to stay on it."
© 2007 The Age
