00:00An alleged murder in Alloa last month, one of the worst recent incidents in the NT's
00:08public housing. The government is now promising to get tough on many more.
00:13Loud music, anti-social behaviour, fighting, drinking, keeping neighbours up all hours
00:20of the night.
00:22It's going after $39 million in unpaid rent, fast-tracking evictions and giving public
00:29housing officers new powers, including to ban tenants from drinking.
00:34The days of taking a soft approach to dealing with these tenants, those days are over.
00:40Labor made similar promises, including to give public housing officers paper spray.
00:47It now thinks the government's plan is racist.
00:49We've seen today that the CLP government again is all about punitive approaches.
00:56The Aboriginal housing sector agrees.
00:59These reforms are going to target disproportionately Aboriginal tenants.
01:03And it says big remote public housing rent increases will unavoidably lead to more arrears.
01:10So households who can least afford it are now paying higher rents for public housing.
01:15We don't target Aboriginal people. These policies affect everybody.
01:20Homelessness organisations think the NT's chronic public housing shortage, caused by
01:26successive governments replacing properties with mixed private developments, is a much
01:32more urgent problem. And anti-social tenants should be provided more support programs.
01:38They are adequately funded to intervene early before it gets to that crisis point.
01:44In Parliament, the government also faced accusations its promise of free school swimming lessons
01:50disadvantages Indigenous kids.
01:53The opposition is questioning how the $150 allocated to schools for each child is fair,
01:59when city schools are all near pools, but many remote students would have to travel
02:04hundreds of expensive kilometres.
02:06The government's apparently now backtracking from its original plan that some remote students
02:12would have to travel as far as Queensland to learn to swim.
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