Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This package of legislation is nearly 50 millimetres thick—or an old-fashioned two inches. It is a response by the government to problems that have arisen in corporate governance involving very substantial amounts of taxpayers’ money over many years. It is typically a bureaucratic response and, unfortunately, that is what governments do. In introducing the Corporations (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) Consequential, Transitional and Other Measures Bill 2006, the minister’s second reading speech drew to our attention that there are over 8,000 Indigenous community organisations registered with the various corporate regulators and about 3,000 are registered under the Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act. The purpose of this legislation is to, in some way, consolidate those arrangements and set down what might be called a body of whitefella law to address the problems that have arisen in the past.

It has long been my opinion, which was supported by others, that the processes by which government, particularly the Australian government, administers Aboriginal financial affairs was always going to fail in a top-down situation. This legislation is an addition to a top-down approach, and it is not surprising because it has been put together by a centralised bureaucracy, assisted in some regard by certain members of the Aboriginal elite—people whose personal fortune today can be measured in millions of dollars and who have done very well out of the concern of the Australian community to assist the Indigenous people of Australia.

The thought that I had, surprisingly, along with others who represent and have had a long-term association with Indigenous people, was to recognise some of the cultural aspects that continue to control their lives very significantly and to find solutions to them. We thought that 300 Aboriginal organisations acting primarily in an authoritative but otherwise advisory capacity would be sufficient and best equipped to address the problems to which the Australian government now delivers about $3 billion a year. The idea was quite simple. Instead of having large numbers of people being given very large sums of money to administer—and I will come back to that in a moment—when culturally that created huge personal problems for those, as honest as they probably were, we suggested having advisory groups. The remuneration of the advisory groups was to be similar to that of people who attend council meetings and things of that nature. It would not have included the provision of vehicles. The groups would have come under the heading of an Aboriginal board of trust. As an Aboriginal board of trust they would have been responsible for the administration of, or advice to government on, the expenditure of funds that were allocated from that $3 billion by the Commonwealth Grants Commission, based on formulas that are well established, in principle at least, for local government funding.

The Australian government places a one-line item in the budget for local government assistance and it relies upon the Grants Commission and a formula to distribute that money. As it happens, in that case alone it is distributed on a state by state basis. The state governments have their own grants commission type body—of which I was once a member in my state—and they make the individual distributions to each local government authority. Naturally, since 1967 and the constitutional amendment, the Australian government would not have had to take that secondary approach. The Grants Commission could have decided on the amounts of money that each community received, taking into account their special needs.

However, that having been done, a board of trust requires a trustee. I and others recommended that, wherever practical, the trustee be the nearest local government authority—a body that is already subject to law as thick as this legislation and that could have been answerable therefore, under present-day law, for the actual administration of the money. The purpose of the board of trust would have been to have considerable power to identify where best that money might be spent.

It was suggested on many occasions that they should deliberately purchase services. For instance, if truancy inspectors were needed to raise the attendance level of Aboriginal children at some schools from 10 per cent then the state education department or the administrator of the school would be asked to provide these truancy officers and they would be funded from the resources. One could give a similar definition for public health nursing. In my state it might have been Silver Chain, which is a stand-alone charitable organisation of long standing that has provided nursing services and things of that nature. It might also have been the state public health department. The idea was that a deal would be struck. Hopefully, in those circumstances, training provisions would have been created as part of that process. In other words, other people would make the employment decisions; the board of trust would make the funding decisions.

That might seem rather strange except that it resolves the biggest problem that, unfortunately, all this legislation cannot. Yes, we are saying that if you want to be part of an Indigenous corporation you will be subject to the rules that apply to other corporate entities. That is right and proper for this place. But what it overlooks is a society that above all has one cultural imperative: ‘What I have, you, brother, also have.’ That is not a criticism. Of course, it was an absolute necessity of life. If the hunting parties in a hunter-gatherer society were to catch a kangaroo, did the spearman and his immediate family eat it all or did all members of their tribal group participate? Of course they did. It is probably very difficult for people in this House to realise how strongly that culture applies and how little Aboriginal blood is required in terms of that imposition.

It might sound a silly example, but when I moved to a town called Carnarvon in 1958 and ran a hotel, amongst other things, we cashed the workers’ cheques because that was the way they were paid in those days. A huge percentage of the Aboriginal population that made up a third of that community had what I would term good jobs. They worked with the main roads department, the council and all sorts of other people. They did not work as labourers; they were competent machine operators. One whom I recollect was third in charge of the main roads, which at that time had the job of building about 500 kilometres of highway north and south of Carnarvon.

However, when they came to cash their cheques, it was imperative that they walked out with a significant number of dollar bills because outside the hotel—and these people had their own homes; some owned their own trucks—there was an obligation to gift certain family members from their largesse: the wages from the job they had. They could get away with giving a dollar—they were responsible people who had a family at home, a house and probably a mortgage or rent to pay—but if a $20 bill was the smallest denomination note given, there was an equal obligation to give that.

That is not a criticism; that was ingrained in their lifestyle. But, if we suddenly say to some of those people, ‘Here is the administration of $1 million, $10 million, and here are the rules,’ it will not work. Okay, we are getting smart and we are going to appoint people to the board who are probably not Aboriginal—or Indigenous, according to the second reading speech. But I am not sure, as the directors of the AWB have recently discovered, that that will be enough. I mentioned the town of Carnarvon. I have long departed from it but I am aware that some of those people who used to have employment of a productive nature now work within the Aboriginal industry, as it is known, and they thought they needed an interpretive centre in Carnarvon.

The last I heard it was under construction. It is a very significant building. I understand that some $4 million of taxpayers’ money has been expended to date, but it is not open. No-one can decide which family gets the reward of operating it, so it stays closed. It is not going to open because they cannot resolve that matter. They cannot say that a person of family A gets one job and a person of family B gets another. The dominant family gets the lot. Is that corrupt? It is not, in my mind, because that is their culture. We have such a focus in Australia on the things that are not their culture: a flag, an Akubra hat—which I have seen worn in the Great Hall of this place; I think it is glued on. But we have ignored in the administration of Aboriginal funding who has the best ideas compared to those.

Typically the stolen generation have had enough education to become the Aboriginal elite, and it has to be addressed. This is an attempt to impose further power from the top and to make it better than what was there before. But the reality is that the outcomes will not be sufficient. There will be a continuance, through the various land councils and all the others that we seek to regulate, of a very well-paid elite—a typical salary in a regional office is $150,000 plus car et cetera. That will not work, because those people will still feel obliged to create jobs and things for their families and their immediate associates. It is quite a difficult calculation. There are some relatives whom they are not obliged to look after and others whom they cannot avoid looking after.

Why are we not looking at those principles? The argument we brought forward with bottom-up funding was to not cream the funding off to all the people who will have to be running around doing the regulating. Why do we not have all the money turn up, with just 300 organisations—which happens to equate to the number of language areas throughout Australia—utilising local government and the laws that govern their management of public funds to be both assistant and trustee? They would not make all the decisions on expenditure but would certainly see that the moneys were administered in a manner satisfactory to this parliament.

I wish that were the solution. I have never been able to get past the higher echelons of our party to understand these fundamental principles, so I come along to support their solution simply because it is better than what was there before. But it is not appropriate to try and throw people in jail because we asked them to do a job that, in many cases, is beyond their cultural responsibility. These are the issues that we must understand. We have huge amounts of money being spent and far too much of it to no good purpose. We have people who have done extremely well.

With respect to the issue of land rights, I see that the Native Title Act is one of the issues that get attention in the amendments and changes. It is an act that gives people, according to the High Court, not an estate in land but a right of access: a right of access to conduct ceremonies and a right of access to hunt and gather—notwithstanding that most hunting and gathering today is done in the corridors of a supermarket. But the act gives those rights. The act that was introduced in this parliament—ostensibly to give some administrative arrangements associated with that decision of the High Court—went as far as to say that we recognise that native title may not be proven under this act but anybody who believes that they have a claim but has not proved it should be able to negotiate with some other party who is applying to develop or use that land in some way.

That in itself was not unreasonable, except that it required the person applying to use the land to negotiate with self-identified parties in good faith and then particularly excluded the Aboriginal people from that good faith requirement. You do not have to prove anything; you just refuse to negotiate or forget to turn up and the application goes on and on and it is eventually decided that a payment of some magnitude will be made to get negotiations going. They are quite quickly concluded thereafter. Okay, these people give of their time to go and point out that that is sacred and you should use it this way and walk softly or whatever. I guess that our community has decided that that is appropriate.

But nobody ever tells us where those payments go. Are they carefully distributed for the good of all people who are recognised culturally within a certain land claim? No, they are not. You just have to be in the right family and the right place and be identified thereafter and you are able to go around and claim fees. I do not find that appropriate. But unless there is a bottom up funding/administrative arrangement put in place that minimises the draw down of the bureaucracy—and this legislation does not do that—then we have a problem. Anyway, I am prepared to give anything a try. The place is full of lawyers, and most of them have had little or no contact with Aboriginal people, and I guess that they will go on in this fashion.

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