Governments are better at tackling natural disasters than longer-term problems in remote Indigenous communities, the head of Mental Health Australia has said.
The Arnhem Land community of Galiwin’ku was devastated by two cyclones just four weeks apart in 2015 and while the Northern Territory government was rebuilding houses it was missing the opportunity to address high levels of disability by putting in wheelchair ramps at the same time, the Garma festival audience was told.
John Quinlan, the chief executive of the mental health services body, said governments could respond to disasters “but seemed much slower in responding to the slow-burning, invisible kind of tragedy that communities live with all the time”.
He said a cyclone was at least an excuse for an injection of investment into the community.
Quinlan also said he had concerns about the use of the “language of markets, the language of individual transactions” in relation to the National Disability Insurance Scheme.
“I don’t think that model makes enough sense,” he said. “There are … a whole range of things that need to be provided on a community level – infrastructure, for example … and interventions that really need to treat the whole family as a support unit and not just treat the individual within that family.”
He said he hoped the scheme might evolve as it was introduced and might take “a bigger social and emotional” view.
The NDIS has not yet been rolled out to the Galiwin’ku community and health workers are currently working on programs to explain the complicated system.
“We want the best for our clients in the community and their family, and we want them to really understand what i happening with the scheme,” Djamalaka Dhamarrandji, the only counsellor on Galiwin’ku, said.
Dhamarrandji said services had to be trauma-informed. People from remote communities had gone through cyclones, domestic violence and relationship issues, and sensitive cultural traditions also had to be navigated.
Quinlan earlier told the audience his experience was that government-run health services “really and too often make no sense at all once you get onto the ground”.
The Miwatj Aboriginal Health organisation, for example, is funded by a “jigsaw puzzle” from eight different sources.
The former federal Aboriginal affairs minister Fred Chaney, in a subsequent panel, said while many NGOs worked in remote communities “no one wants to fund the administration” of the organisations. “They want to fund your projects,” he said.
The panel, in the third instalment of an annual debate at Garma, had explored federal funding distribution of GST payments and whether funds meant for Indigenous services in the NT were correctly distributed by the NT government.
Bob Beadman, a former chairman of the NT Grants Commission and coordinator general of remote services, who for 12 months also served as director of post-cyclone reconstruction, said there was a disconnect between what the NT and federal governments as well as the people of Galiwin’ku wanted – employment and training outcomes.
Beadman said the arrangement made was for 40 houses to be built quickly and a subsequent 40 to be built with local employment, training and materials – including locally produced timber and block making.
The previous federal housing program had created a boom in fly-in, fly-out workers and resulted in too few houses, he said.
Vincent Forrester, an Anangu traditional owner, said that program had hurt the community of Mutitjulu and gave no economic benefit to local people.
Sean Bowden, an NT lawyer, said the long-running debate showed Indigenous people in remote areas were “getting done on the left and getting done on the right, and the government was flying through the middle”, noting government spending money on a Darwin road that would reduce his commute by three minutes.
