More trouble for Rudd in bid to tackle racial inequality

CANBERRA - Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's struggling campaign to lift indigenous Australia out of grinding poverty appears to be headed for another crisis.

Rudd's policy of closing the gap between Aborigines and the rest of the nation has already run up against a series of hurdles and criticism of his decision to continue the Northern Territory intervention launched by the former Coalition Government.

The intervention required the suspension of racial discrimination laws to enable a range of drastic and discriminatory measures designed to end endemic child abuse, violence and other social evils afflicting indigenous communities.

But Canberra faces a new legal challenge to one of its key measures, continuing Aboriginal and human rights criticism, and allegations of huge waste in a housing programme designed to ease overcrowding, homelessness and a range of health issues.

The A$670 million ($843 million) housing scheme has been hit with allegations that as much as 70 per cent will be spent on red tape and administration, although officials have since claimed that the real figure is closer to 12 per cent.

However, the fate of the Northern Territory's Labor Government - Canberra's partner in the programme - hangs in the balance after the Cabinet tried this week to persuade its Indigenous Affairs Minister, Alison Anderson, not to quit.

Supported by another minister, Anderson last week threatened to quit Labor because of the allegations of vast waste.

Labor at present holds 11 of the 25 seats in the Territory Parliament.

More trouble is brewing in Alice Springs, where anger at federal plans to compulsorily acquire 16 Aboriginal camps surrounding the central Australian city has been further fuelled by new council bylaws.

The city plans to ban begging, further tighten controls on drinking in public, give council officers the power to move people on, and confiscate the blankets of homeless people sleeping rough in the dry bed of the city's Todd River.

People stash their blankets near the river after nights that can fall to zero degrees and the new bylaws would allow rangers to collect and destroy them.

Now Canberra's plans to take over and renovate the impoverished town camps are at risk.

The camps have become symbols of the squalid lives of many Aborigines, marked by poverty, unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, and violence.

The latest federal indicators of indigenous disadvantage, released this month, show that many Aboriginal communities struggle to reach the most basic levels of environmental health enjoyed by the rest of Australia.

Hospitalisation and death rates for diseases associated with poor environmental health - including scabies, pneumonia, asthma, and infectious intestinal and bacterial diseases - remain much higher for Aborigines.

Many communities do not have adequate sewerage or electricity systems, Aborigines are hospitalised by spousal violence at a rate 34 times higher than for other Australians, and substantiated notifications of child abuse or neglect have more than doubled in the past eight years.

Most of these conditions are endemic in the Alice Springs town camps, which federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin intends compulsorily acquiring after describing conditions as appalling.

Canberra and the Northern Territory Government wanted to spend A$125 million on housing, infrastructure and services in return for a 40-year lease over the camps administered by the indigenous Tangentyere Council.

Macklin warned Canberra would take over the camps after negotiations broke down, but has since been forced to defer a final decision until August 4.

One of the camp residents, supported by a team of distinguished lawyers offering their services free of charge, has applied for a federal court injunction claiming that the Government had not properly consulted them.

"People do want new homes, people do want their old homes fixed, but why should we have to give up our home or our land for the basic right to live in a house," Mt Nancy town camp resident Barbara Shaw told ABC radio.