Norfolk Island Chief Minister Lisle Snell has applauded Jon Stanhope's intervention to back self-government on the island, hitting out at Canberra Labor MP Gai Brodtmann as ill-informed and her treatment of islanders as unfair.
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The ACT Labor Party is split between the position of Ms Brodtmann, who was part of a federal inquiry that recommended self-government be abolished, and Mr Stanhope, who is fighting a grassroots action to force Labor to back the islanders.
Mr Stanhope succeeded in having a motion supporting self-government passed overwhelmingly by his sub-branch early in February, but it failed to make the agenda when the party's branch council met last week. Party secretary Matt Byrne said the omission was an administrative mistake, and it was now down for debate in May.
But Mr Stanhope is concerned that might be too late. The issue was time critical, with islanders worried the Commonwealth could move as early as March, he said.
"There's 2000 of them, 2000 Australians that nobody gives a stuff about. I do," he said. "… We have in the three occupied external territories around 6000 Australians who are forgotten and whose needs are ignored. Nobody stands up for them."
Mr Stanhope has strongly criticised Labor colleagues Ms Brodtmann and Senator Kate Lundy for their role, saying it was remarkable that the pair – and Senator Zed Seselja – were not standing up for the island, given they were its default representatives.
But Ms Brodtmann says self-government is not viable, stable, economically responsible, democratic, nor in the best interests of the island. She quotes former island administrator Neil Pope that self-government is "ludicrous and ill-conceived".
The Norfolk inquiry quoted extensively from Mr Pope, who was administrator until June last year and whose assessment was damning. He described the current parliament as moribund, and many residents and some politicians as gullible and prone to "hair brained" schemes to solve their problems.
The biggest problem was lack of trust, fed by vested interests, with some of the wealthier islanders resisting the introduction of a tax system for their own "selfish" reasons, he said.
While the island needed access for cruise ships, the project would fail if it was delivered by the Norfolk government which didn't have the capability.
He urged the dissolution of the government, with a "team of professionals" brought in instead to reform the island. Only after the reforms were in place would you "allow an election for a local government-type body".
The inquiry recommended a regional council, responsible for the likes of roads, waste, and planning. Federal and state laws (either NSW or Queensland) would replace Norfolk's laws, and Norfolk would be brought into the Australian tax, welfare, health and education systems.
Mr Snell said islanders had been "aghast" at Mr Pope's quite inflammatory and very unfair evidence, which had come at the end of the inquiry with no chance for the islanders to rebut his views. The inquiry was set up to report on tourism and niche industries and its recommendation to abolish self-government had come as a surprise, he said. It was "uncalled for" and had not been substantiated.
It would return the island to colonial-type rule, under the control of an administrator dictated to by bureaucrats.
Islanders were at a loss to know what the Commonwealth might do or when it would act and were worried legislation would be passed in Canberra without consultation.
Norfolk had agreed to join the Australian tax and welfare, health, education and policing, and to operate as a territory-type government, but little had happened in the nearly five years since, he said.
It had on numerous times tried to introduce new industries, but had been frustrated at every turn, he said, pointing to an attempt to licence the growing of medicinal cannabis, "overturned by a flick of the fingers by the Commonwealth".
"We're very fortunate to have a champion like Jon Stanhope," Mr Snell said. "Jon Stanhope has been a resident of Norfolk Island, he's been exposed to bureaucratic incompetence in Indian Ocean territories, and he recognises the dangers of that incompetence to the situation here on Norfolk Island."
A spokesman for the responsible federal minister, Jamie Briggs, would not say whether or when the government would legislate to abolish self-government, saying only that it would respond to the committee's report "in early 2015".