Girl's death highlights NT housing crisis

The mother of a five-year-old girl who was allegedly murdered in Alice Springs earlier this year had been living in insecure housing so she could access specialist support for the child, the federal member for the region has told the ABC.

The Warlpiri girl, referred to since her death as Kumanjayi Little Baby for cultural reasons, disappeared from the Old Timers/Ilyperenye town camp in Alice Springs in April.

Her body was found days later about 5 kilometres from the camp, after a large-scale police search operation involving hundreds of volunteers.

Jefferson Lewis, 47, has been arrested and charged with the girl's murder as well as two other offences that cannot be reported for legal reasons.

Speaking to Stateline NT, the federal government's Special Envoy for Remote Communities and Member for Lingiari, Marion Scrymgour, said Kumanjayi's family were from the desert community of Yuendumu, about 300km north-west of Alice Springs.

Ms Scrymgour said the family was in town to get help for the five-year-old, who had special needs, and were visiting the town camp on the night she went missing.

"The mother was forced to come and live in Alice Springs because the specialist services that that little one needed wasn't available in her remote community," she said.

The family's story of having to leave their remote community to access medical help in town — with no guarantee of secure accommodation when they arrived — is a common occurrence in the Northern Territory, where the homelessness rate is 12 times the national average.

Ms Scrymgour helped coordinate a meeting between Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Kumanjayi's family in May.

Mr Albanese told reporters after the meeting that governments needed to do "much better" to improve housing in the NT, citing federal Labor's investment in remote housing as a step forward.

Warning of more urban 'drift' into NT towns

Kumanjayi's death has put living conditions inside Aboriginal town camps in Central Australia in the spotlight.

The Tangentyere Council Aboriginal Corporation delivers programs and housing maintenance to the 16 town camps it oversees in the region.

But it is the NT government that owns and rents the 293 homes in the camps, as well as funding and signing off on all job requests.

Ms Scrymgour said the federal government needed to get "all the service providers to the table" to see any change in town camps.

"People are sick of living in conditions like this," she said.

"That's not how Aboriginal people want to live and people in town camps have been saying for some time that our situation needs to change."

Ms Scrymgour said she had written to the prime minister asking for a Productivity Commission audit of how the NT government and non-government organisations were spending Commonwealth money.

"It's not just [about] services in town camps in Alice Springs, it's also in remote communities," she said.

Ms Scrymgour pointed to the recent spread of diphtheria in the NT as a sign of the "poverty and overcrowding situations" that families are up against.

"It shouldn't be happening," she said.

"We've got the issue of diphtheria which everyone thought had been eradicated, and in the Top End we've got rheumatic heart disease and tuberculosis.

Prevention for vulnerable families

The NT government has responded to Kumanjayi's death by focusing on child protection: introducing new laws into parliament and announcing an independent departmental review that will "look at the processes that were undertaken specific to [her] situation".

It also stood down three child protection workers following media reports that six child protection notifications were made about the girl before she died.

The NT government has not publicly confirmed the reports or provided any further details, and Indigenous leaders have demanded to know how confidential information was leaked to the media.

Ms Scrymgour — a former NT child protection minister — said the NT government was missing an opportunity to look at the system more broadly.

"We've got to not tinker around the edges here and be fair dinkum about resourcing, making sure that we've got the workers at the coalface, but let's stop these little ones [and their families] falling over a cliff," she said.

Ms Scrymgour said successive coronial investigations and recommendations over her 25 years in politics had failed to keep vulnerable families safe in the NT and a serious investment in prevention programs was overdue.

"You look in Aboriginal communities … we don't have the same level of grandmothers and grandfathers that can work with those mums," she said.

"We are seeing younger mums, so what's that support that needs to be put in place to assist those young mums to look after their children … rather than allowing those families and those kids to fall off a cliff."