Senator Scullion talks about the Federal Government’s Indigenous hostels program being in tatters.

PETER PERRIN:
Good morning Nigel.

NIGEL SCULLION:
Good morning, how are you going Pete?

PETER PERRIN:
I’m all right mate. We’re just watching the poll figures being discussed on Sky News, and I think you’ve picked the right side.

NIGEL SCULLION:
Well, I mean it’s very much a changing environment, mate, somebody muttered something to me as I shuffled out very late last night of this place and some ridiculous figure, I just said I don’t believe it and went off to bed, so I haven’t had time to check them this morning, but if you think that I’m on the right side I’ll take your word for it, mate.

PETER PERRIN:
Ha, ha.

DARYL MANZIE;
Mate, and you’ve got, what, six months still to go or whatever. Well, you don’t know, you don’t know …

NIGEL SCULLION:
It’s a life time, yeh, you don’t know.

PETER PERRIN:
Isn’t it.

DARYL MANZIE:
You don’t know. There’s a few rumours coming out of Canberra that maybe Julia’s going to be sneaky and pull a swifty in May, and have you heard those?

NIGEL SCULLION:
Well mate, look, I mean a lot of people in the Territory would know when she, her word is not necessarily her bond. She has made a couple of statements prior to elections beforehand and given people complete confidence that that will be the case and it hasn’t quite turned out that way, so I guess any assurance that the election should be held on September the 14th, should be taken with a grain of salt I suspect.

PETER PERRIN:
Hm.

DARYL MANZIE:
Okay mate, now listen, we’re going to talk about something that’s pretty significant, and that is education. We’ve got the Prime Minister out doing electioneering and reading to school kids, a bit of a Mark Latham sort of thing, I think it failed then, I don’t know if she thinks it’s going to do her any good now, but, and talking about Gonski, where there’s no money to go, and of course, I’ve always got a thing about the Commonwealth not running a school or having a single student under their responsibility, yet they’ve got the money so therefore they tell everyone how to do it ‘cos they
know best. Gonski’s reforms, who’s going to pay for it? What’s it all mean? And now we find that behind the scenes there’s a lot of money wasted. We’ve got boarding schools being shortchanged and we’ve got schools in the bush that were promised which turned out to be a debacle. What’s going on?

NIGEL SCULLION:
Well mate, I mean, in terms of the bush, quite clearly, I was certainly motivated in Government back in 2007, we said that we would build three boarding facilities in the Northern Territory. Labor were in that Me Too program, and good on them, it was a good process, and it was motivated by, there are a lot of people who livein the Northern Territory, mostly Aboriginal people, who don’t have access to a secondary education because there’s no school there,
and so the idea was to create a residential college in some centres, adjacent to a good quality school with good quality outcomes so that they could simply go and stay there during their secondary schooling, as many other people do in Australia that don’t have access to secondary schooling. Sadly, what’s happened, I mean, this was in 2007, so 2008, they’ve said yes, they’re going to build these school hostels, 152 beds in Wadeye, Garrthalala, which is south of Nhulunbuy on the Gulf of Carpentaria, and out in Yuendumu.
So here we are now, we’re 2013, we’ve built on at Wadeye. It’s supposed to have 35 students enrolled, it’s been a bit of a cost blow out, and certainly overrun, it’s ridiculous, supposed to have 35 students. I found out today there’s 21 staying at the hostel, but the great tragedy is, of course, out of those 21, I understand at least 20 live in the township itself. They’re only moving, they’re just sort of, oh, that’ll be really good, mum said, look, oh let’s go and move in here. But the great tragedy is, I’ve actually heard from the community, a couple of people saying, look, my kids are at
Kormilda. Oh that’s great we’ve got a residential college right here, right next door to my house, we’ll just bring them back. And the sad thing about that is, if you compare the, there’s just no comparison between the NAPLAN results and the results of having an education at Kormilda and at Wadeye. Now, I’m not being insulting or, you know, it’s probably not very politically correct for me to say, well it is doing very well at the school, but that’s exactly
what the statistics are telling us. So, sadly, people would come from a good school education in a residential boarding college, now they can come and live right next door to mum and get a much poorer outcome. It just doesn’t make sense.

DARYL MANZIE:
But why would we spend the money in providing hostel accommodation for someone who lives 100 metres away?

NIGEL SCULLION:
Well that’s exactly right. Well the motivation was, of course, they, you know, it was supposed to go outside of Wadeye, right up near, you know, Garma, or somewhere like that. There’s a big ridge up there that I, we sort of discussed it being built on there, so that it provided security for parents, ‘cos it wasn’t near a town, people couldn’t jump the fence one way or the other, and also, you know, it provides for, um, to try to get away from some of the challenges of a community like that, and people can come in from all the outstations, there’s people driving it, all you have to do is get to the residence, there’s a bus to and from the school every day, and you know, there’s certainly a residential college on the Tiwi Islands that works very well. There actually is a school and a boarding school there, and we know that the outcomes from a boarding school, wherever you are, are far better than attending some of the secondary schools in some of these remote communities. But it’s just silly, we’ve had Shorten turn up. He stands up, grins nicely for a few happy snaps, and at the same time he’s completely unaware, stands in front of Kormilda College, and the same Government has just cut $650 000 a year , and they tell me they’re going to have to close one of their residential colleges, cut 80 places for Indigenous students. This is completely dysfunction
government, you know, one hand isn’t talking to the other, and when it comes to things like Gonski, I mean, Shorten isn’t standing up there in his speech and saying, oh, by the way, Kormilda College will lose $473 000 a year according to the Gonski model. Everyone’s got this bag badge and saying, go Gonski, well you wouldn’t be wearing one of those if you actually understood the program and you actually understood what the impacts are going to
be on the different institutions. Now, Kormilda’s been doing nothing less than an unbelievable job …

DARYL MANZIE:
Absolutely.

NIGEL SCULLION:
… of, and it’s an icon. Send your kids to Kormilda. No matter where you are, and I say how’s the ids going? Oh, they’re at Kormilda, they’ll tell me, whether out in Galiwinku or wherever they are.

DARYL MANZIE:
And, well, it’s not just out in the bush either, I mean, it’s a good school and it’s utilised by people that live in Darwin, and …

NIGEL SCULLION:
That’s right.

DARYL MANZIE:
Well Peter’s daughter actually did her Baccalaureate in Kormilda, you know.

NIGEL SCULLION:
Well, one of my young fellas went to Kormilda for a while.

DARYL MANZIE:
Yeh.

NIGEL SCULLION:
But it’s a fantastic school, and here we got, we’ve got cuts to that, and we see what a complete waste in other places. But talking about the school hostels, I mean, Wadeye’s only one of three. The other two, well, they’ve spent $650 000 at Garrthalala, and as I understand it, they’ve, you know, there might be a couple of pegs in the ground, but that’s not going to keep the rain off your head or educate anyone. And even if they’d built this, you know, fantastic facility, there’s no school there. There’s no school there, so …

DARYL MANZIE:
I mean, the research was that these hostels should be where there’s good schools, wasn’t it?

NIGEL SCULLION:
Well, that, the whole idea is having a hostel, that’s not to so, everybody, I mean, there’s got to be a motivation for building a hostel. They’re in a hostel because they can’t have a school where they live, so you build a hostel adjacent to a good quality school. Now, there is, you know, whilst there’s a good, small school, with some efforts there, then they may now have moved to full time teaching, but they didn’t have for a very long time at Garrthalala.
I’m not criticising the school there, but it’s nowhere near the sort of school that people are going to travel from all over Arnhem Land to
go and attend …

DARYL MANZIE:
I guess what it does though Nigel, it highlights an organisation, which is the Federal Government’s Education Department, which doesn’t, as I said, doesn’t teach a single kid, doesn’t run a single school, trying to sort of do what they think is fantastic from the confines of Canberra, and without having any idea about how things work on the ground and what’s happening, and we’re seeing more and more of this. I think Jenny Macklin’s in the Territory at
the moment with some other plan of something or other, which is, I think, doubling up on something that was done 20 years ago, or 30 years ago, it didn’t work, won’t talk to people about the sorts of things that they believe will make things work, and I just worry, I mean, I hope that the Coalition’s not going to continue with that sort of approach because it just doesn’t work and wastes money.

NIGEL SCULLION:
Well, we’ll certainly be working, I think, a lot closer to the Northern Territory Government, of what flavor, over whatever years, I mean, I think the thing is is that we have, you know, when you’re dealing programs with programs remotely, as we do in Indigenous Affairs, I mean, the Commonwealth have fingerprints financially over a lot of Indigenous Affairs, and I’ve identified, as you’d be aware, an awful lot of waste and an awful lot of mismanagement, that needs to be fixed. We don’t have the funds, you know. The Labor Party’s managed to send this country into an incredible of debt and we just
don’t have the funds, and we don’t have the fat to be wasteful any more, we never did, we never should have done that. But, you know, it just seems completely nonsensical that we don’t have a better working relationship, it always seems to be a relationship of tension. Now, I know politically, from a Territorian’s perspective, that one of the best fun days you can have is to beat the Commonwealth up because everybody thinks you’re a pretty cool
guy if you beat the Commonwealth up, that’s sort of, that’s tradition. But, you know, it’s – and we …

DARYL MANZIE:
It’s based on logical fact, guys.

NIGEL SCULLION:
Indeed, mate, no, that’s great, but what I’m saying is, behind all that theatre we should be getting on with the business of ensuring that we’re delivering the same sort of services somebody in New South Wales expects.

DARYL MANZIE:
Absolutely.

NIGEL SCULLION;
That that’s the bottom line, and I have to say, people are talking about the polling and it’s all going to go very well, but I tell you what, I lie awake at night sometimes, you know, thinking you’ve got to be careful what you wish for. There is an incredible mess, if in Government that we will inherit, an incredible mess. We are only just seeing pieces of it because of a lack of transparency, but there’s so much work that needs to be done. This money that’s been allocated, it is an enormous amount of money that’s been allocated to this, and it’s really got no real outcomes, none of the outcomes that we were motivated by in the first place, and the dysfunctionality about, you know, we’re wasting money on building hostels and providing beds where people actually live just down the road and they’ve got a school there anyway, and we’re cutting 80 places for Indigenous school students at Kormilda, and then
Shorten doesn’t even know about it. This is just completely ridiculous.

PETER PERRIN:
Nigel, thank you for your time this morning, it’s always great to talk to you. Just a quick question, if I can? You say, you know, you lie awake at night thinking about things. Do people take the polls, do your mob over there take the polls as seriously as perhaps the media wants them to?

NIGEL SCULLION:
Well, I’m probably the only person in the room that says this, but it’s the truth. Of course we do, mate, you know, invariably the polls have turned out to be right, you know. But the thing is, that this is the poll on the day, and that they do go up and down, which is reflection, I think, of the behaviour sometimes of Parliament itself, sometimes the behaviour of Government, sometimes the behaviour of Opposition, but look, we do have a long way to go, but yes, I do believe the polls. I think they are an indicator of how it’s going politically and, but whilst we’ve got a long way to go, I have seen
the polls turn dramatically …

PETER PERRIN:
Oh yes.

NIGEL SCULLION:
… and just because we’re ahead in the polls today, I mean, we can have absolutely no confidence at the moment that this is somehow going to be a reflection of the outcome of the Election, sure if it was held tomorrow that may well be the case, but it’s not being held tomorrow. We need to maintain our discipline, we need to be focused, not on ourselves like the Labor Party, but we need to ensure that we are focused on our constituents and we are thinking about policies that will ensure that they get, in the Territory sense, better bang for the buck, and ensure that we have the same sort of access to services that they get everywhere else, and they take for granted everywhere else in Australia..

PETER PERRIN:
Good on you, Nigel, thanks for your time.

NIGEL SCULLION:
Great to talk to you.