Debt, crime, gallery make heavy lifting for Bill Yan

By ERWIN CHLANDA

The debt exceeding $11 billion and growing, costing the taxpayer “a million bucks a day” in interest. The number of people in prison at an all time high. Crime exceeding the courts’ capacity to deal with it. The “national” Aboriginal art gallery still a dog’s breakfast.

Who would want to be a minister of the current Territory Government?

Bill Yan used to manage the Alice Springs prison, home to more than 600 of the town’s 25,000 people. He has walked to the Mount Everest base camp three times. He is now one of two front bench Members from The Centre, representing the Namatjira electorate. He clearly likes a challenge.

And as Treasurer he unsurprisingly links policies to money. This is nowhere more relevant than in law and order, the CLP’s favourite subject.

“We do have to increase some of our frontline services, that being health, police, corrections.

“We have to invest in the courts. This happened in NSW some years ago,” he says in an interview with the Alice Springs News.

“For every dollar you invest in the police you then have to invest a dollar fifty in the justice system.”

Mr Yan says he hasn’t worked out what the ratio has been in the NT but an adjustment in the last 12 months has been ”too little, too late”.

“That hasn’t happened here for many years now. We’ve seen an increase in police but the investment in the justice system hasn’t been there. That’s the heavy lifting we have to do now,” he says.

Courts, legal aid, corrections, prosecutions: “That is a large cost.”

To pay for it he will be “looking for fat in other areas”.

The government is committed to not sacking any public servants but many will face shifts to other duties.

“We’ve made it very clear we’re not getting rid of any public servants. But we’ve got to make sure that we’re using the public sector in the most efficient ways.”

Mr Yan appears resolved to apply this to the dismal saga of the “national” Aboriginal art gallery which has shrunk to half its size while the $150m budget remains the same.

Mr Yan gives the impression he would not lose a great deal of sleep if the project, mishandled from the start, never went ahead.

The exhibition space would be reduced by only 100 square metres in the new gallery lite, he says.

“The initial gallery had cafes, restaurants, meeting rooms and all these other bits and pieces. That’s what private business is for, as part of the CBD. The art gallery is there to display art.”

Given the growing debt “I can’t in good faith go out and say I’ve got to borrow another $150m or $200m for the big, grand plans, the huge grounds, that were part of the original design.

“$150m. That’s it. I have made that quite clear to the department.”

He is also “frustrated” by the art gallery planned next to the Darwin Supreme Court.

“I don’t have anything against the arts at all, but we desperately need aged care beds, we desperately need mental health beds. I wonder where the priorities are.

“Personally, if it was me making the decisions, I would be looking at what we desperately need for the people of the Territory.

“Art galleries are nice to have, they are great, I like them, I’ve got nothing against the arts, but there are services we desperately need.

“We’ve got remote communities struggling with sub-par services and we’re blowing money on all this other stuff. It sometimes makes me wonder.”

Asked why the CLP, when in Opposition, had not found out that the cost for the gallery’s initial concept would be double the announced budget of $150m, as the party now claims, Mr Yan says: “We didn’t have those numbers.”

NEWS: Did not get them or could not get them?

YAN: We were never aware of the cost until we got into government.

NEWS: The plans were public. The Opposition could have obtained cost estimates from dozens of companies around Australia.

YAN: We could get estimates but not exactly what it might have been.

Mr Yan says the NT is seeking increased GST revenue from the government, currently about $4.5 billion of the the $8.2 billion 2023/24 Budget.

NEWS: Per head of population, does the NT get from Canberra five times as much as the rest of the nation?

YAN: Yes. We need to see more. We are trying to work up a deal.

He attributes that to the high cost of providing services to the Territory’s remote regions.

The Grants Commission announced today – after our interview with Mr Yan – that the Northern Territory’s recommended GST relativity will increase in 2024-25. It is estimated to receive $4,257 million in GST payments. Its share of the GST pool is estimated to increase from 4.7% to 4.8%.

The commission said in a statement: “New 2021 Census data showed the Northern Territory’s non-Indigenous population to be relatively more disadvantaged and its population more dispersed than in the 2016 Census.

“These changes increased the Northern Territory’s assessed GST needs, especially for health and housing.”

Minister Yan’s CLP and the Labor Party have at least one thing in common: their ferocious disagreements with environmentalists over fracking and gas production, mostly from the reportedly massive deposits in the Beetaloo Basin, some 900 km north of Alice Springs.

Mr Yan says these are assets underpinning the NT’s borrowings: “As far as our revenue goes, our ability to generate royalties, yes, Beetaloo would be right up there.

“Newmont, the gold mine in the Tanami, is really quite large. The revenue from those guys is very big. Nolans rare earth will be a big one.

“Mereenie gas [west of Alice Springs] has been going for 40 years.”

It is PowerWater’s source of fuel to generate electricity.

NEWS: Would you call the Arid Lands Environment Centre and its 400 members economic vandals as your fellow MP Josh Burgoyne has?

YAN: What I would say is that they are using their funding for activism rather than action. These are my terms. Providing funding for organisations that actively work against the policy and direction of the government [is not something we’re going to do]. We’re taking about economic development.

NEWS: What would you like them to do and what would you not like them to do?

YAN: Doing stuff for the community and the environment. Everyone is talking about buffel. (That is a major ALEC focus – ED.) Assess different areas and come up with plans. All they seem to do, and that’s just me looking in, activism against whatever it is, doesn’t matter whether it is under the CLP Government or Labor.

NEWS: Such as?

YAN: Opposition to gas production in Beetaloo, under the previous government and ours. The water licence at Singleton station. Attacking for the sake of it. If we shut down Beetaloo tomorrow and every piece of gas production in the NT, and cripple what’s left of our economy, they still wouldn’t be happy. They’d still want more.

PHOTOS: The Newmont gold mine in the Tanami. Mining royalties are a key collateral for the NT’s massive borrowings.