John Anderson (Gwydir, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I say at the outset that I want to make three very brief points. The first is that there is no doubt that the problems are very real and that we need to face the reality of this ugliness in our society. The second thing is that we need to address the underlying issues—the point of this MPI—as a society and we need to do it in consultation with Aboriginal communities and, in particular, to respect their traditional structures and the role of the elders. Thirdly, as I have thought about this—and I do not take it lightly at all—I am absolutely convinced that the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs is right to say that we must move first to secure the environment in which Aboriginal people, women and children in particular, have to operate if we are to achieve that very important objective of addressing underlying issues.

I want to outline briefly to the House today two experiences which have really shaken me in recent years in relation to this whole question of violence and abuse and of unsatisfactory outcomes for children in particular in our Indigenous communities. I represent a lot of Indigenous people in my own electorate of Gwydir and, in addition to that, as Deputy PM I had what was really the privilege of overseeing an Indigenous trial in the east Kimberleys. From these experiences there are some things I would like to say today. One of them can be reflected by a truly horrific interview I had in my electorate in the town of Lightning Reach, where two Aboriginal men, leaders in their communities whom I respect greatly, came to see me one day and said, ‘We’re here to talk about the impact of video trash in our communities.’ I thought, ‘This’ll be interesting. Where’s it going?’ One of them, a man I genuinely respect greatly because I have had a lot of dealings with him over some 17 or 18 years, said to me, ‘You have to understand that many of our young people are growing up in an environment where they are not really socialised in any normal way. They do not have a functional home environment in which they can learn either their own traditional values or mainstream Western values.’ I think we sometimes arrogantly assume from our own Western perspective that all Australian kids, regardless of who they are, are growing up in some framework where they can be sensibly socialised, and that is often not the case. That was the point that this leader was making.

He said, ‘You’ve got to understand that a lot of our young men are actually socialised by this highly inappropriate material that sometimes comes into their communities in truckloads.’ I said to him, ‘All right, you’re talking about censorship, and that is a very sensitive issue in Canberra. Where would you start?’ He shocked me with his answer. He said, ‘You can start with every video that contains the term and relates to the concept of’—and it was a filthy word, the first part of which is ‘mother’ and the second part of which relates to sexual activity. I looked at him and said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because some of our kids who have grown up where they have had no socialisation in regard to what is acceptable sexual behaviour think that that is normal, and they learn it from whitey communities. They learn it from your communities!’ I have never felt more ashamed in all my life.

On that front, I was intrigued to note a press release put out by a man I do not know, a fellow by the name of Gondarra, who is the Chairman of the Aboriginal Resource and Development Service Inc. and the political leader of the Golumala clan in the Northern Territory. It makes very interesting reading, because his press release said in part:

No group or people can exist without a system of law to protect its people from abuse. This is especially so for the most vulnerable people, the young and aged, both male and female.

We would all agree with that. We would all uphold that. We would all recognise that no society can survive where its women and children are not safe. It is impossible. Every society worthy of the name society, let alone of the concept of civilisation down through the ages, has ensured the protection of its young and its vulnerable, and Aboriginal communities are no different. That is the point that this man is making. He says:

It is time to get a true understanding of traditional Aboriginal Law.

He goes on to say that their traditional approach is a real law system with parliaments, politicians, constitutions and acts of law. He says that their traditional law is not ‘customary law’ and it obviously seeks to protect the young and the vulnerable. But he goes on:

However, right now there is a sub-culture forming within Aboriginal communities that is violent and abusive. Unfortunately this sub-culture even believes that it is acting within “white fella” law when being abusive. A thinking that began with the systemic undermining of our own law with the colonization of Australia and the atrocities that followed. It is now reinforced by TV, movies, pornography and drugs brought into our community from wider Australia.

So while some incorrectly see our traditional … Law as barbaric and associate it with violence and abuse; the opposite is true, and those who have rejected traditional … Law have now become totally lawless, which they think is the new “white fella” way.

We have to face the fact that we are responsible for a lot of the inappropriate socialisation that is happening in Aboriginal communities today. I believe that very strongly.

We need to recognise that most of us would find abhorrent much of what is portrayed in those communities as being acceptable values in mainstream Western society, yet we need to recognise that it flows into a moral vacuum. I find that very concerning. I draw out of this that we must consult. We have got to draw alongside and spend a long time—or support those who spend the time and make the sacrifices—working alongside Aboriginal people. I do not want to denigrate those who have marched across bridges and what have you. I belong to that camp to some extent myself. I have mouthed a lot of platitudes. I have talked ‘knowingly’ about what ought to be done. But the people who really deserve the support and need our support are those who make the sacrifices to spend the time to build  the long-term relationships on the ground with Aboriginal people. It is patronising to pretend that we can do it all somehow from outside.

This is going to be a real challenge. I think all of us who have thought about it will find it very difficult. How do we engage? How do we really draw alongside these people who, in the end, as I have just portrayed, abhor violence and abuse just as much as we do? Richard Trudgen, who wrote the book Why Warriors Lie Down and Die, seems to be saying that the intellectual leaders of Aboriginal society have never really been engaged by our leaders; thus, Aboriginal leaders feel both patronised and marginalised. We have not been able to mediate across that line, and maybe in some communities we can no longer do it because that intellectual and moral leadership has gone. There is no-one to mediate with. Yet we have to try. This is incredibly important, and Trudgen interestingly says that we have to learn to overcome our language difficulties, our communication difficulties. He makes the very powerful point, ‘The capacity to learn equals the educator’s ability to teach.’

I do not have much time, so I want to come to the second thing that gave me a real shock. As I mentioned, as Deputy PM it was my great privilege to be the patron minister for a community in the east Kimberleys. The eight Indigenous COAG trials were in many ways a very interesting set of communities for us to interact with. When I was Minister for Transport and Regional Services I had the Regional Women’s Advisory Council—a great group of women. They used to meet with me regularly. There were a couple of Indigenous women leaders on it, and one day they said, ‘What we’d like to do is to get some money out of your department and pull together a few women from each of those eight Indigenous COAG trial site communities across Australia and get them into Alice Springs,’ and they did that. They got a reasonable number of women there together, and they reckoned over the three or four days that they were there they had spent a couple of days before any of the Aboriginal women were brave enough to really speak out. They had to establish trust. It was a laborious process.

The stories that they did tell, though, were horrendous. I will never forget those women, who were aghast at what they had heard. One of them—an Aboriginal leader herself—said, ‘If we were applying decent standards of child protection, there are hardly any communities across Australia where you wouldn’t remove the children.’ I know how sensitive that is, but it was an Aboriginal woman who said it to me. That is a tragedy. And that is why I conclude—and I would love to talk much longer on this because I feel very passionately about it—by saying I think the minister is right. From what I learnt from those women and from my experiences across my own electorate, we have to do everything we can now to put in place the legal structures and the policing necessary to secure the safety of those men, those women and those children who are vulnerable so that we can start to effectively engage them on those very underlying issues that the mover of this motion, the member for Lingiari, wanted us to look at. We have to start with the policing. I am surprised to hear myself saying that, but I believe earnestly that it is right and that it is the priority and where we must begin.

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