![Kalgoorlie mayor John Bowler: ‘We clearly have too many people coming in from the [Ngaanyatjarra] lands, with nowhere to go once they get here.’](http://media.guim.co.uk/7d18ed07f14eef6e0ff8be24a8ade09410dd4c99/278_32_1648_989/1000.jpg)
John Bowler, a controversial former Western Australian government mining minister who was elected mayor of Kalgoorlie in last weekend’s local government elections, has begun his tenure by singling out Aboriginal people coming into the town of 30,000 from desert homelands.
In an interview with the ABC Goldfields breakfast program on Monday, Bowler said he would make a “captain’s call” to deal with antisocial behaviour in the town, which he attributed to the number of people coming in from Ngaanyatjarra lands.
“Living on our streets is no good for them, no good for their children and no good for us,” he told breakfast host John Wibberley.
Ngaanyatjarra is a western desert language group whose traditional country stretches from the Great Victoria desert to the Gibson desert and the Little Sandy desert. The shire of Ngaanyatjarra covers 10 communities and centres around the Aboriginal community of Warburton, 900km north-east of Kalgoorlie and 1,500km from Perth.
Bowler blamed the federal Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, for the number of Ngaanyatjarra in Kalgoorlie, saying federal policy “makes it almost impossible for those people to live out there [on their traditional lands].”
“We clearly have too many people coming in from the [Ngaanyatjarra] lands, with nowhere to go once they get here,” he said. “It’s easier for them to come here and live in Kalgoorlie, and that needs to change.”
Damian McLean, president of the shire of Ngaanyatjarra, told Guardian Australia that Bowler was correct, although he said his language was not ideal.
“Kalgoorlie has a pretty horrific reputation for racism in the past, which is pretty well earned, but John Bowler is ... not one to put one group over another or try to marginalise groups, he is made of stronger stuff than that,” McLean said.
McLean said remote Ngaanyatjarra communities were struggling under changes to welfare rules, which he described as “ideologically driven reform ideas which don’t have any foundation in reality”.
He said 30% of the Aboriginal people on Ngaanyatjarra lands aren’t getting their welfare payments because they can’t meet the reporting requirements, which can include having to do five hours work a day for five days a week – a difficult task in tiny, isolated communities with little support from government services. He estimated that at any given time, 10% of the 1,600 people living on the desert homelands were in Kalgoorlie.
“It is very easy to be on welfare in Kalgoorlie and it’s very difficult out here,” McLean said. “And it’s a fact of life that antisocial behaviour if fairly predictable in people who are outside of their normal social and cultural context ... ,They are away from their homes and extremely vulnerable.”
ABC Goldfields was also, incidentally, the radio station former prime minister Tony Abbott was talking to when he made his now infamous comment that it was not for the federal government to fund the “lifestyle choices” of Aboriginal people who live in homeland communities.
That comment was in response to a suggestion by the Western Australian premier, Colin Barnett, that up to 150 remote Aboriginal communities in WA faced “closure” because of a change in the funding model and sparked international protests under the banner of SOS Blak Australia.
The WA government has since revised its position, saying it is embarking on a process of reform for the state’s 274 remote communities and, while it won’t guarantee continued funding, it has no plans to forcibly close communities.
Kalgoorlie is a mining town about 600km east of Perth, and bills itself as Australia’s largest outback city. It was founded in the gold rush and is now boasts the “super pit”, a 3.6km by 1.2km open-cut gold mine founded by the controversial late WA businessman Alan Bond, as a tourist attraction.
Bowler was born in Kalgoorlie and served in the WA parliament for the Labor party from 2001 to late 2006, when he became an independent after then premier, Alan Carpenter, called for his resignation over allegations from the state’s corruption watchdog that he had leaked confidential information about WA mining company Fortescue Metals Group to lobbyists, including former WA Labor premier Brian Burke.
Burke was himself a disgraced figure who was jailed for seven months in 1994 in connection to the WA Inc scandal.
Bowler left parliament in 2013 and was elected mayor on Saturday.
