Martin Ferguson (Batman, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Transport, Roads and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to address what I regard as an important bill. It goes to the fundamental requirement for us as a nation to get serious about Indigenous education and our failings as a nation over many decades on that front. In that context, I also stand in support of the second reading amendment. This amendment, moved by our shadow minister, Jenny Macklin, former deputy leader, goes to something we all have to front up to: how we start getting a bipartisan approach to what is a major national problem. There is a crisis not only in Indigenous education but also in Indigenous health and employment, and we all have to accept that, 40 years on from giving the Indigenous community the right to fully participate in the Australian democratic processes, we have made very little progress on a lot of social indicators.

The Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment (2007 Budget Measures) Bill 2007 is a practical endeavour supported by both sides of the House to get some of the fundamentals right. I think those fundamentals are right because the bill is about amending the current legislation by appropriating an additional $26.1 million over the 2007 and 2008 calendar years to do something about education and training. It is pretty fundamental because it goes to what we do with additional funding—to do something about Indigenous students in schools, vocational education and training, and further investment in the higher education sectors. If you get the education fundamentals right, then you have a greater capacity to do something about what is equally important—that is, the issue of jobs. I want to seriously address some of those employment issues today because I note the mining industry is having its annual meeting in Canberra this week and its mining industry dinner is here in Parliament House tomorrow evening.

Some of the issues I have had responsibility for over the last couple of years range from mining and resources to forestry, tourism and now back to transport, the construction of roads and railways, and the issue of ports. All these sectors represent tremendous employment opportunities, especially in Northern Australia, for our Indigenous community. It also requires partnership and better cooperation between state and territory governments, the Commonwealth government and the private sector to make serious progress on that front. I say that because this bill is about assisting the private sector to start to make that progress. We have to do something about education so we can get the Indigenous community job-ready. It also requires the private sector, as they are now realising, to accept that the Indigenous community represents a wonderful opportunity to supply workers with respect to the issue of labour shortages in Australia at the moment. Migration is not the only solution to the shortages that confront Australia on the skilled labour supply front.

The Indigenous community is a valuable resource that we have neglected. I think it is a disgrace that as a nation we have neglected them as a community for so long. Our Indigenous community, like all indigenous communities in the world, is no exception with respect to the problems that it confronts in Australia. If you go around the world, you find that for the vast majority of people, regardless of their race, ethnicity, religion or age, employment provides a source of income that can facilitate financial security and independence both in the short and long term. For many it is not just a source of personal satisfaction today but a means through which they can define their future. We as a community still define ourselves by our will to work. In electorates, in the suburbs of our capital cities and our regions in rural and remote Australia, you do not have the same sense of pride, the sense of belonging to the community, unless you have a job. To have a job, you have to have the fundamentals which make you job ready, and that is about education.

A lot of research papers clearly suggest there is a strong link between a person’s propensity for employment and other aspects of social wellbeing such as community interaction, the risk of involvement in crime and general health. One flows in to the other. If you have no education, no job, then you tend to get into social difficulties, crime and the associated problems of drugs, alcohol, domestic violence—the lot. We have got a whole jigsaw of difficulties which go back to first base: we need to do something fundamental about housing—how many people live in a house; whether or not there is access to broadband to assist in education; how good the local school is; what the class sizes are; and whether schools are properly resourced with appropriately qualified teachers. If you actually start to do something about that then, in a social sense, you start to make progress in employment. So it is, therefore, a disappointing reflection on all of us that our nation has for so long failed to appropriately engage with and address issues of Indigenous employment, health and social wellbeing.

That is why the member for Jagajaga has appropriately signalled in part (4) of her second reading amendment that we all have to set aside some of the political issues that have come between us over the last couple of decades and decide on a long-term bipartisan approach to a national commitment to actually do something about Indigenous Australians. We need to actually work towards reducing the gap in life expectancy between the Indigenous and the non-Indigenous communities and address the issues of literacy and numeracy, mortality, health and unemployment so that, irrespective of who is in government—and governments come and go because there is a natural life of governments in a modern democracy—these programs will continue. I suppose I mean bipartisan support in the same way in which, in the past, up until the issue of Tampa, there was a fair degree of bipartisan support in the Australian parliament on the issue of migration. We used to go from election to election trying to make sure that it was not a political football. Tampa changed that, and I hope we never go back to the Tampa debate.

On the question of our Indigenous community, we have to get to a point of bipartisan support for programs to be able to debate what the programs are, what they seek to achieve and then make sure that, irrespective of who is in government, those programs are properly financed and resourced. We must also set in place a process of accountability which means that we regularly review our performance and outcomes and seek to improve our performance on the ground.

That is squarely of major importance to all Australians because none of us like an Australia in which there are second-class citizens. We pride ourselves as a nation on the sense of mateship—what is right and wrong; we think ‘I actually like to try to give people a leg-up who are doing it a bit tough from time to time.’ That is why we have always held our heads up high as a nation: we like to do something to assist those in our own families, streets, suburbs and nation at large who are doing it a bit tough or a bit rough.

So investing in education is about trying to come to terms with the fact that, unfortunately, there are difficulties in terms of employment in Australia for our Indigenous communities. This is reflected in the relatively low labour force participation rates for Indigenous people, coupled with a rate of unemployment that was two to three times higher than that for non-Indigenous people in 2001. Further, government employment programs account for a significant proportion of Indigenous employment, with this proportion generally higher in very remote areas—the old CDEP program. The combination of these factors, however, means that the relatively poor employment outcomes among Indigenous people are generally regarded as a major factor contributing to their disadvantaged status in society. I do not think anyone can question that suggestion.

In Queensland, where there is a large Aboriginal community, as the member for Herbert appreciates, particularly in Far North Queensland, recent figures showed the unemployment rate for Indigenous males was 13 per cent higher than the rate for non-Indigenous males. Similar patterns were evident for Indigenous and non-Indigenous females, although the gap between the two groups was only 10.3 per cent. Unfortunately, however, in a national trend, unemployment rates were highest among young people. Joblessness among Indigenous males and females in the 15 to 24 age group in Queensland was roughly twice that of their non-Indigenous counterparts. These rates provide a guide to the level of underutilised labour in the Indigenous population in Queensland and are reflected nationally. However, evidence suggests that these figures may not reflect the true level of underutilised labour. Some Indigenous people are likely to be out of the labour force because they believe there is no work available or they cannot get a job—they do not have the skills required to actually get a good job so they give up.

The irony of this is disappointing because over one-quarter of unemployed Indigenous people in Queensland were classified as labourers or related workers compared with only 10.9 per cent of non-Indigenous workers. I say that it is an irony because so many sectors are crying out for workers as a result of the national skills shortage: from regional areas that need fruit-pickers, farmhands and harvesters, to the forestry industry that needs assistance on its plantations, to tourism businesses that desperately need staff of every kind.

I know through my work as the shadow minister for tourism and my constant consultation with the industry that there are no chefs—they are in short supply—and hotels and motels cannot find people to make the beds, look after the gardens and grounds, attend to reception, clean the rooms and maintain the facilities. There are jobs out there but we do not have people job ready because we have not educated them and given them the confidence to pursue an employment opportunity. It also says to Australian business that they have to invest more themselves, in partnership with the government, in trying to train people to overcome some of the skills gaps that prevent them from gaining proper employment.

On that note I refer to a search of the Australian government’s Job Search website today which revealed that in Northern Queensland there were 872 food, hospitality and tourism jobs available. In the Northern Territory there were 649 jobs in this field, while in regional Western Australia, outside Perth, there were 739 job vacancies. Just think about those job vacancies and the high level of Indigenous unemployment.

Yet, despite the clear need for workers in a range of fields, Indigenous employment remains low. It has become, unfortunately, a vicious cycle that is hard to break, not just in terms of identifying a framework for a viable solution but also on the ground, for the people who live with this lower quality of life. Every day these people must negotiate a way through an existence that is fraught with politics. We must not forget that they yearn for things that we in other sections of Australian society take for granted—to be able to enjoy our children’s and our grandchildren’s laughter, to share the company of others, to be satisfied with our achievements, to go home to a home, to be able to educate our own children and to have food on the table. For a lot of these people that is unknown to them. They struggle from day to day because they have not got a job, because they did not have the educational capacity in years gone by to get the skills required to be gainfully employed and hold down a job over time. The issues I raise today are the normal aspirations of any human being and, in a country as prosperous as Australia, they are aspirations that deserve to be attained by every Australian—Indigenous and non-Indigenous.

All too often the human face of Australia’s Indigenous issues is either forgotten or painted by the brush of history to present our Indigenous people as a community immobile in time. Some groups that claim to act in their interests seemingly forget that these communities cannot stay static, bound in time by political correctness. Let us also break down the debate on political correctness and work on practical solutions to major problems. Indigenous communities need and want to become self-sustaining and embrace and engage in all aspects of the Australian way of life, including our national businesses and industries.

Last year, when I held the portfolio of resources, I was pleased with the developments made in the mining sector. There was a dramatic commitment and a change in attitude to increasing the Indigenous workforce. Research undertaken by the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University shows that in Northern Australia, particularly in regions such as the Pilbara, East Arnhem Land, east Kimberley and Cape York where there is significant mining activity, the Indigenous population is growing at a rate of between two and four per cent per year and is conservatively projected to increase by some 100,000 people, or 39 per cent, by 2016.

In fact, late last year, the 500,000th member of the Indigenous population was born, which for the first time took the Indigenous Australian population back to the level they were at when the First Fleet sailed into Australian waters 219 years ago. It is a pleasing trend that means that, by 2016, people in their prime working years, those aged between 15 and 45 years old, will comprise 50 per cent of some Indigenous populations. Some of the communities in the Northern Territory such as Wadeye will be bigger than longstanding towns such as Tennant Creek. If you compared the services available in Tennant Creek with those in Wadeye, you would shake your head. There is no equality of opportunity in towns—especially with formalisation and shires being created in the very near future in the Northern Territory—between that which you see in the Aboriginal shires dominated by Indigenous people and that which you see in council areas such as those in the Tennant Creek area. We have a lot to do.

It also means that companies have to work better with us. In the mid-1990s, less than half of one per cent of Rio Tinto’s Australian workforce was Indigenous, despite the fact that their mining sites are more often than not located in close proximity to local Indigenous communities. Now—and it is terrific to see—approximately seven per cent of the company’s employees, around 850 people, are Indigenous. The retention rate for new Indigenous employees beyond 26 weeks exceeds 80 per cent. What a terrific achievement. In some mines the retention rate is actually higher than that for the non-Indigenous workforce, who usually cannot sustain the fly-in, fly-out lifestyle of many of these positions.

At the Rio Tinto Argyle Diamonds mine in Western Australia, the pink diamonds unearthed from the ground may be exceptionally rare, but, in going against a historical trend, Indigenous employment is not. In fact, the diamond mine plans to increase its Indigenous workforce to 40 per cent by 2010. This target is seen to be achievable thanks to a change in the company’s human resource practices at the remote Kimberley mine. This operational change has lifted the ratio of Indigenous employees from 4.5 per cent of the workforce to 25 per cent in the first three years of the program.

Rio Tinto, which admittedly is the largest mining company in the world, is just one of a growing number of resource companies to adopt this model of greater integration with the local communities that inhabit the area in which they mine. It is a model that provides more equitable distribution of the wealth generated through mining while delivering sustainable economic benefits, such as enhanced local community capacity through education and training. It is a trend that goes some way towards correcting the disparity of much of Australia’s economic wealth being produced in areas populated by its most disadvantaged. While many of us enjoy the benefits of record progress, profits and employment, Indigenous economic and business development languishes sadly.

But the resource sector is just one example. Equally positive examples can be seen within the tourism industry, although, as with the mining sector, there is still a long way to go. The tourism industry has suffered from a significant growth constraint in recent years, primarily due to a skills and labour shortage. The traditional core workforce—that is, young people working in the resorts, hotels and tourism businesses—are tempted by the high-paying jobs offered in the mining sector. Unable to match these wages, the tourism business owners and operators themselves are forced to carry out the necessary day-to-day jobs in the absence of workers. But progress is being made. The industry is also learning about the importance of the Indigenous community. More than ever they are trying to work out culturally and socially how to crash through the stereotypes and overcome the long-defined difficulties of employing Indigenous people in the tourism industry.

By way of example, I want to refer to the Accor Asia Pacific group, which has developed innovative thinking and a commitment to this challenge. This company, as a result of its decisions, has lifted Indigenous employment in the tourism industry. Tourism is a foreign concept in some Indigenous communities because often many of them have never travelled as tourists and they do not appreciate the importance of the industry. That is why, through its Indigenous employment program, the hotel runs a variety of familiarity programs, including inviting Indigenous families to become a tourist for a day. The initiative sees families stay in the hotel for a night, eat in the restaurant, swim in the pools and play golf and tennis—just like other typical tourists.

It is an interesting program which, more importantly, is reaping results. Accor Asia Pacific last year employed about 150 Indigenous people—a huge improvement on five years ago when it commenced its program and only about 10 Indigenous people were employed. They are getting a return on their investment. It is not only smart from a business point of view because it means they are lifting the size of their workforce but also terrific for Australia because Accor and companies such as Rio, BHP and Xstrata are now doing something in partnership with government to overcome the fundamental social problems of Indigenous unemployment and lack of education. As a community we ought to talk up these examples. We ought to give credit where it is due. Many companies in Australia have actually realised the errors of their ways in days gone by.

I say on behalf of the opposition that we welcome the additional funding. It is about trying to do something positive in a very difficult area to improve educational performance in our Indigenous communities and therefore do the right thing by the Australian community at large to help to correct an unjust imbalance and bring about true equality in Australia. But it goes back to the fundamentals: do not dwell on the past and the mistakes but think about positive programs, think about education, literacy and numeracy; get the fundamentals right and take the politics out of it. As the member for Jagajaga stated in part (4) of her second reading amendment—(Time expired)

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