Refused Service: ‘Closing’ Kimberley Aboriginal Communities

In November 2014 Premier Colin Barnett announced the imminent closure of up to 150 of Western Australia’s 274 remote Aboriginal communities. Most remote Aboriginal communities are in the Kimberley. This seminar will look at the history of these communities, how they got to be where they are, and what government promises were made that must now be broken in order to force Aboriginal residents to abandon them. The seminar first takes issue with the terminology of ‘closure’. Aboriginal remote homelands are not government facilities, they are communally-owned private property. They cannot simply be closed, but they can be denied service. They will be denied service as a result of cost shifting by the Federal government to WA, breaching a thirty-year compact. This seminar discusses the state and federal programmes and agreements that established most Aboriginal communities in the Kimberley about thirty years ago in order to redress colonial dispossession. The WA government’s intention to deny services to many remote communities will be traced back to the Federal government’s changes to its agreement with the states following the abolition of ATSIC in 2005, and the failure of the WA government to adjust to this. The seminar concludes by placing the servicing of remote communities in the broader national context of equitably servicing the entirety of remote and rural Australia, particularly through the funding of local government