Barry Wakelin (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As one of the last speakers in this MPI debate I thank everybody for the wisdom they have tried to bring to a very difficult subject. To sum up in the time I have and to offer added solutions is my challenge. Perhaps I can start with lawlessness. Will we overcome that just through tackling poverty and disadvantage? If only it were so simple that we could spend money and overcome it. As the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs advised us, we have spent $3.3 billion per annum. Never has there been more money spent on the issue. The Four Corners program in a very straightforward and comprehensive way showed Australia the challenge that lies before us.

As in the electorates of many of the previous speakers, my electorate has many Indigenous people; it includes the Pitjantjatjara lands, the Maralinga-Tjarutja lands. I have watched with despair and frustration the inability of our government to find appropriate solutions to these longstanding issues. There have been COAG trials and additional police. Indigenous people are 2½ per cent of the population and the 25 per cent of the jail population, figures that we all know about. The member for Kingsford Smith asked: ‘How can a First World country allow people to live in these Third World conditions?’

Yet, on the other side, over the last 12 months as chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs I have seen great improvements brought about by enlightened leadership. Looking at employment, one of our major corporates has been able to achieve in one operation a workforce in which 17 per cent of the workers are Indigenous people. They are quite optimistic that they will move that figure to 35 per cent over the next 10 years. But dealing with the issues of violence, lawlessness and the trashing of houses in order to allow a community to live in a civilised way is just beyond us.

This week in the parliament Gary Johns, a former minister in this place, had the Minister for Education, Science and Training present to us, and launch in the community, a report entitled Aboriginal education: remote schools and the real economy. In his last three paragraphs in the conclusion Gary Johns says:

Governments must decide if they want to sustain some of the pre-conditions which prevent children from succeeding in the education system. If education is an essential gateway to a satisfying life, impediments to achievement must be removed lest education be left carrying the weight of expectations far beyond its capacity to deliver. Policies which continue to treat Aboriginal culture differently, or play the cultural relativism game, will consign another generation of Aboriginal children to failure.

A change in education policy, from one focused on the artificial economy to one based on the real economy will have consequences. Economic incentives focused on parents will hopefully bring about a change in educational achievement. These changes will have an effect on remote communities. Some of these communities will not survive. Governments will need to plan for the inhabitants of those remote communities. The drift of the population, to regional and urban centres, to find new work will create new adjustment challenges for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.

The clear role of educators is to prepare children for the future, not the past. The future is an economic one and not necessarily in a remote community. This change in direction will attract reactionary criticism from those whose careers are based on extracting rents from the current regime. This criticism should be expected as a sign that the new direction is the right direction. The new policy direction must not apply different standards to Aboriginal children. It must fundamentally treat Aboriginal children as children.

So that is the challenge presented to us by Gary Johns, and I thank him for that. I thank the minister for having the courage to address the issue and for the partnership that he is endeavouring to forge with the states and territories. We can offer something within the adversarial roles in this place if we can just learn a little from the past. The member for Gwydir talked about Richard Trudgen and the benefit of understanding, the benefit of establishing trust, the benefit of engaging and the benefit of building relationships. I agree with the member for Gwydir that we are collectively responsible for the inappropriate outcomes that have occurred, particularly over the last 30 years. We must secure the communities.

We know that our federation creates great challenges in how we work with our partners in the states and territories. As the minister was at pains to say, it is not a criticism that will finger point and not give any outcome or result. There is money available for effective expenditure; it is about how we spend it. All the reports—and I am guilty of a few of them myself—are there. So, with an ounce of luck, and with goodwill from the Commonwealth and throughout our states and territories, there are great opportunities for us. There is no reason why we cannot have, in the future, Indigenous communities that are part of the total community in an equal way. But we must seek positive examples. Trudgen, tries to get us to understand—and he is but one person. Warren Mundine, Gary Johns and some in the media have made this their life’s work as well. We have the mechanisms in front of us to solve these problems. In the employment area alone, very positive outcomes are available to us. There is no reason why we cannot have in this country the wit within the police, law enforcement, the courts and the Koori courts to address this issue in a way which will give Indigenous people far better outcomes than they currently have.

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