Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee, , 4:20:39 to 4:24:46
Minister McCarthy explains the breakdown in negotiations between the Northern Territory government and a private provider, which led to the closure of the 400-bed Yissa housing facility despite a Commonwealth offer to purchase it.
Topics: First Nations, Social services
Speakers: Hon Malarndirri McCarthy, Senator Barbara Pocock, Senator Karen Grogan, Senator Lidia Thorpe
>> Total
>> Senator Po, and just for everyone's awareness, um we will break at 1:30 for lunch and come back at 2:30 with the same outcome.
>> Thank you. and I wanted to pursue a housing matter also. Uh minister, I wanted to ask about the recent closure of the Yissa facility in Darwin. Uh you've said that the Comwalth government offered to cover the full cost of transferring ownership of the facility to uh local echo yilly riong. I don't know if I pronounced that properly. Uh but the Northern Territory government refused that. Did you meet with the minister and the chief minister about the Commonwealth's offer and when did you do that if you if you did?
>> Sure. Look, I'm I'm certainly happy to provide a timeline. Um, Senator PCO, I I think I'll just speak more broadly now if I can and then give you um the actual dates and figures um post uh here post now. uh when uh the minister made the announcement uh in July uh that it was going to close in October uh the reasons provided by the Northern Territory Minister uh came down to costs and that they didn't want to renew the lease uh from Oscow uh who owned the demountables and were leased um leasing the property uh in terms of the land. So that it's crown land and so their lease on the land was coming up in October and for whatever reasons between the Northern Territory government and Oscow uh there was no agreement met and so the minister made the announcement to remove uh to close it down and and move everyone out which is when I reached out to the Northern Territory government to say uh can we have a look at what's going on here because we're talking about um a 400 bed facility >> and it's been incredibly important to have that facility for those hundreds of families uh over the years and especially more recently with the wet season earlier this year when so many more were displaced. uh we did engage over probably you know a month or so uh to try and look at uh what was possible and uh in those um times I made the offer. Obviously we reached out to Osco as well because I felt the breakdown had been between Oscow and the Northern Territory government. So I wanted to understand from OSCO well what what was the issue? Um my understanding was that the they OSCO wanted 6.5 million for the next n days that would the offer would be on the table to actually purchase the demountables and then after that that figure would increase. So we virtually had 90 days to try and reach some kind of agreement. Um and that was where we looked at uh the offer of 6.5 million provided an aberiginal organization ran the facility and that organization is Yuli Riang. uh they have been running it for a number of years >> and have been very capable to do so and we wanted to see the ownership belong to them >> but we would still need to lease the land uh from the Northern Territory government given it's crown land. Uh that offer was not accepted. uh realizing that they wanted to own the assets or at least have some stake in it, we lowered the offer to 3.5 on top of their 3 million which they already had. Um still with the proviso that Yilly Rang uh were at the table to to
>> and so the closure has proceeded. >> It's happened. Um, was it a breach of obligations under the closing the gap