In his letter, Weston said one in nine Indigenous families were unable to access social housing, forcing them into “unsafe private rentals that place children at higher risk of lead exposure”.
Since 2015, taxpayers have spent more than $13 million managing the lead issue in Broken Hill, the letter said.
But Weston said the current program was making housing insecurity worse because tenants often copped rent hikes and evictions following taxpayer-funded remediation work on their homes.
Renee Morrison, who co-ordinates Maari Ma’s lead health program, said one client with seven children was recently evicted after remediation work because the landlord decided to sell.
“The whole outside has been painted, inside’s been painted, the yard’s been done,” she said. “They’ve done so much work [on] it, now they [the landlord] has put it on the market, and she’s got to find [somewhere] else to live.”
Maari Ma Health Aboriginal Corporation chief executive Richard Weston has written to Premier Chris Minns.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Darcy Pearce is more fortunate – she rents a home that her partner’s mother purchased to give her grandchildren (three-year-old Nova and 18-month-old Atlas) a secure place to grow up.
Pearce, a Barkindji woman, said she knew nothing about the health risks of lead until her daughter’s first blood test returned a high positive reading.
The family was temporarily relocated to a caravan park while the first of two remediation works took place. The carpets have been replaced with hard floors, which are easier to clean, lead paint has been removed from the walls and a sandpit has been installed for the children to play in as an alternative to the red desert soil.
“We’ve been going to [visit family in] Wilcannia, to get away from the lead,” Pearce said. “It sucks that they have to be around it.”
The 22-year-old said she had friends who had been evicted from rentals, including one who moved to Mildura because the waitlist for social housing in Broken Hill was too long.
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In a briefing document sent to Minns in June 2023, government officials said the current approach to remediation, which only occurs when children have recorded high blood levels, was “ad hoc” and would probably be replaced with a more data-driven, preventive strategy “to proactively reduce exposure”.
The briefing, which was made public in a call for papers by Greens upper house MP Cate Faehrmann earlier this year, also said an expert panel would seriously consider reviewing mining licence conditions, funding town “greening” measures, and reducing the blood lead level threshold from 5 to 3.5 μg/dL.
“It’s totally unacceptable that they haven’t done that [lowered the threshold], particularly when this same panel agrees that there is no safe level of lead,” Faehrmann said.
This masthead put a series of questions to Minns about the lead report, housing and the briefing’s recommendations. A government spokesperson said the Premier’s Department was still co-ordinating and funding the lead response in Broken Hill.
They said the Aboriginal Housing Office delivered 11 new homes in Broken Hill last year, and three more were in the pipeline.
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