Macklin's intervention avoids wreck

IF anyone needed further evidence of the Northern Territory government's ongoing failure in indigenous policy, here it is.

Almost $50 million has already been spent, consultants have been well paid and Aborigines who are receiving a free house to live in have been given the comfort of choosing the colour of their loungeroom walls.

Now the federal government has begun the process of shifting the dead weight that was slowly crippling the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program.

Behind its opaque and bureaucratic language, the report from Department of Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin confirms in no uncertain terms that the concerns raised by The Australian were valid.

The report makes clear that the program would not have delivered what had been promised had things continued as they were.

The federal government received the damning report days ago and had plenty of time to doctor it if it wished.

Maybe it has done just that, but Macklin has chosen to spare the NT government little pain in making the report's damning findings public.

Bureaucrats rarely deliver the unpalatable truth to their minister, and Amanda Cattermole set out with a clear brief: the federal government was determined to wrest control of the program from the Territory.

Had it not done so, a train wreck was certain.

Notably absent from yesterday's report was any mention of the devastating assessment of former program director Jim Davidson that only 300 houses would ultimately be delivered by the program. But in presenting a tough line on the program's future, Ms Macklin has downplayed a crucial element of yesterday's report that proves a budgetary blowout far beyond what the federal and NT governments will admit to was on foot.

The infrastructure component of the program has been totally excised from the program, with the federal government reaching sideways to grab hundreds of millions out of the $5.5 billion National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing.

Conveniently, details of the 10-year funding strategy have not been finalised, with a national audit of remote housing due to take place in the next two years.

How much the new program will be affected by the wastage that has already taken place under the old one is yet to be seen.