Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Cook for his contribution. This is a subject area in which there should be stronger bipartisan support. On this piece of legislation, the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment (2007 Budget Measures) Bill 2007, we do have bipartisan support for the proposals which are inherent in it, although I have to say I do not think they go far enough and they are too late, in a sense. They are things which should have been done a long time ago. Sadly, and this bears observation, when the Howard government came to government in 1996 it axed a whole range of programs which were then operating in the area of Aboriginal education. What we are seeing today is in a sense a reinvention of some of those programs, particularly in the case of providing the opportunities for young people to go away to boarding school.

But I am not going to be churlish about this. I think it is very important that the initiatives which are in this legislation are given support. As we acknowledge, in terms of educational opportunity there are many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians who have missed out and are indeed missing out as we speak. It is that group that we need to pay particular attention to. I also want to commend the contribution of the member for Jagajaga and endorse her remarks. I particularly commend to the chamber the amendment which she moved and I have seconded. I hope the government can see merit in what those propositions say.

The objectives are, firstly, to eliminate within a generation the 17-year gap in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, so that every Indigenous child has the same education and life opportunities as any other child; secondly, to at least halve the difference in the rate of Indigenous students years 3, 5 and 7 who fail to meet reading, writing and numeracy benchmarks within 10 years; thirdly, to at least halve the mortality rate of Indigenous children aged under five within a decade; and, fourthly, a long-term bipartisan national commitment to work with Indigenous Australians towards achieving these goals and overcoming generational disadvantage.

I submit that those proposals are eminently supportable. I would hope that the government, in this week of reconciliation, see it within their hearts to be able to come to the dispatch box one by one—sorry, there is only one other speaker from the government in this debate. I hope that the minister, in her concluding remarks, might say to this chamber that the government will support the opposition’s proposed amendments. That would be a first, I have to say, but nevertheless it would be a most welcome thing for her to do.

There is an opportunity here for the government to show that we in this place, as an example to the Australian community, as leaders in this country and as people who debate legislation across the chamber, should be saying to the Australian community that we have it in our hearts to work together on these issues—that we are prepared to put our hands across the table and say that we will support, in this case, the government’s proposals, which we are glad to support, or, in the case of the amendments which we have put today, for the government to say to us, ‘We’re happy to support them as well,’ so we pass not only the legislation which the government has proposed but pass it with the amendments included. That would be a first, but nevertheless we live in hope.

It is true that National Reconciliation Week is a time for us to renew our commitment to reconciliation and to think about how we can help turn around the continuing disadvantage experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. I think this disadvantage is no clearer than with regard to the state of Indigenous education, a subject about which I have spoken on many different occasions in this chamber. I have mentioned previously—most recently in March this year—that, in my own electorate of Lingiari, in my estimation, between 3,000 and 5,000 young Territorians have no access to any sort of mainstream high school educational opportunities or vocational education and training opportunities. These are students who typically have completed their schooling in years 6 and 7.

Unfortunately, until 2001 in the Northern Territory, as a result of deliberate government policy—in this case by the conservative administration of the Country Liberal Party, who governed the Northern Territory from 1978 to 2001—not one high school was built in any Aboriginal community across the Northern Territory. So the capacity for young Aboriginal Territorians who live in remote communities to access mainstream education services was almost nonexistent. The only opportunity they had to do that was by going away to school, and a number of them did and still do. Since the election of the Labor government in the Northern Territory in 2001, there has been a concerted effort to establish secondary school facilities in Aboriginal communities. Four years ago, in 2003—102 years after Federation—for the first time, three Indigenous students got their year 12 certificates in a bush school in the Northern Territory. That of course is shameful. It is a blight on all of us that this should happen. We in this place have an opportunity to make changes to ensure that that sort of situation is remedied effectively and completely.

We know that there is a backlog. As a result of deliberate policy decisions taken by previous governments there is at least one generation of Aboriginal Territorians, possibly two, who have had no access to educational opportunities beyond primary school. What position does that put them in? We hear much from people—ill-informed and ignorant observers—who say that Aboriginal people are welfare dependent. It is true that welfare dependency is something which Aboriginal Australians by and large want to be rid of. But it is also true that, if you do not equip people with the basic foundation skills to be able to acquire a job or access training opportunities, they are going to end up beholden to the taxpayer for transfers from Treasury. That is what will happen. It is inevitable. It would happen if that situation existed in Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra. If you do not provide young Australians with educational opportunities, if we do not give them a chance to be literate and numerate, if we do not give them the opportunity to complete their high school education—to complete years 10, 11 and 12—then their capacity to enter the workforce in a meaningful way is all but nonexistent.

We in this place have an obligation to make things change. We have to do something special in these communities. I could be critical of many of the initiatives that have been introduced by this government over a period of years, but again it would be churlish of me. Any change which makes a difference to people’s lives, which provides them with an opportunity—regardless of how misguided that opportunity might be—is important. Giving kids an opportunity to get an education, as proposed in this legislation—as meagre as the proposals are—is absolutely important. We welcome the proposals in this legislation to increase the expansion of the Indigenous Youth Mobility Program this year by $2.6 million, to provide $14.1 million for infrastructure funding to enable boarding schools catering for significant cohorts of Indigenous students to repair and replace aged and deteriorating facilities, and to provide $5.3 million to convert Community Development Employment Project places into ongoing jobs in the education sector. But these measures go nowhere near far enough. If we do an audit of the facilities that exist in many remote communities in my own electorate, we will see that they are entirely deficient. If we look at the staffing in those schools, where they exist, we would say that we need to provide more, because that is how we will make a difference.

I note that the member for Jagajaga referred to the issue of a reciprocal partnership and to the issue of respect. If we have respect for one another, if we respect the right of all Australians to an educational opportunity—no matter who they are and wherever they might live—and if we say also that we believe there should be a reciprocal partnership, then that partnership implies proper reciprocity. When we are evaluating what the reciprocity might be, governments have an obligation to make sure that the people they are providing services for are able to be involved in that reciprocity on an equal basis, not in a position of weakness. The problem we have at the moment is that it is a one-way street. Governments have historically—and I go back to what I said about the CLP government in the Northern Territory—failed to provide the infrastructure or the services. Now we have it on our conscience to provide that infrastructure and those services. Then we can talk about reciprocity, because we can say to those people that the Australian community is, with them, going to develop opportunities for their children, in their communities or elsewhere, to make sure they have proper opportunities in life. Then we can talk about reciprocity, equality and respect. Unfortunately, I do not think we are there yet.

We have heard a lot in this place, from time to time, about educational standards. We have heard that many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students—and the member for Jagajaga highlighted this point—are not achieving the minimum literacy that they need to progress through school, let alone to thrive. This is a fact made patently obvious in the benchmarking figures put out annually in the National Report on Schooling in Australia. Benchmarking began in 1998 as a part of the National Literacy and Numeracy Plan. Whilst I am loath to overwhelm the House with endless statistics, I believe the following statistics are telling. These are figures for Indigenous students achieving benchmarks in the Northern Territory. In 2005, 40.1 per cent of Indigenous students in year 3 achieved the reading benchmark, 40.3 per cent achieved the writing benchmark and 68 per cent achieved the numeracy benchmark. As we go to years 5 and 7, we find the position deteriorating. In year 5, 40.7 per cent achieved the reading benchmark, slightly above that of year 3; 36.1 per cent achieved the writing benchmark, substantially less than that of year 3; and 35.1 per cent achieved the numeracy benchmark, significantly less—half the amount and half the percentage performance—than that of year 3. In year 7 we find the situation deteriorating even further: 36.8 per cent for the reading benchmark, 34.6 per cent for the writing benchmark and 24.9 per cent for the numeracy benchmark.

Clearly, there are concerns about this data. I would certainly question some of it. I think the figures do overstate in many respects the level of achievement. But on the face of these figures, we can see that the longer Indigenous kids stay at school, the worse their achievements become—when measured against those of non-Indigenous students.

Looking at the results for Indigenous children as a whole, it is clear that far fewer Indigenous children are achieving the benchmarks and that the difference is particularly marked in year 5. Out of every 10 Indigenous students in year 5, more than seven in Western Australia, six in South Australia and four in the Northern Territory achieve the literacy benchmark. Of course, the situation in remote communities is worse still. Data from the Northern Territory Department of Employment, Education and Training’s 2004-05 annual report shows that only two out of 10 children in remote Territory communities passed the years 3 or 5 literacy benchmarks. In 2005, on the Anangu-Pitjantjatjara lands in South Australia, three in 10 children achieved the literacy benchmark in year 3, more did so in year 5 and four in 10 did so in year 7.

We have to do a great deal more, and programs to do so do exist in schools. Many schools and many dedicated professional teachers are carrying out their tasks in a proper way—consulting with communities, talking to communities  and making sure that the service they provide is A1. But problematically a significant proportion of kids come to school with severe otitis media—70 or 80 per cent of school age kids in many of these bush communities have severe hearing loss—and undernourished. They come from homes which are overcrowded. They might come from a community such as Wadeye, for example, which has the highest rate of rheumatic heart disease in the world. You have to say to yourself: how can we get better outcomes?

I think the way has been marked, in part at least, by the initiatives which were announced by the Leader of the Australian Labor Party, Mr Rudd, on Sunday. The most significant of those initiatives go to the question of providing real opportunity to every child by addressing the fundamental issues of disadvantage concerning young Australian children—in particular, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. Those proposals should be supported. I say to government members: find it within your hearts not to look across this chamber and say, ‘It’s come from the opposition and therefore we’re going to oppose it,’ but to look across this chamber and say what you should be saying: ‘This is a bloody good idea. It’s a really good idea. We can see how it would benefit Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across Australia and would also be of substantial benefit to this nation.’

If they were to go away and do that, we would find that bipartisan support is not just a rhetorical flourish. They would say, ‘With that we can achieve something meaningful in this place.’ I believe it is something we can meaningfully achieve if we are prepared to work together. As I have said in this place before—and I know the member for Banks has said it before and the member for Jagajaga, who is the shadow minister, has said it before—we are prepared to walk across the line and talk to the government about how together we can meaningfully make a significant change to the appalling conditions in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people find themselves in this country. We must do it together, and this week, the week of reconciliation, provides us with a supreme opportunity to do that.

It is not about blackguarding one another. It is not about taking cheap political points. It is about saying that we as a nation have an obligation to the whole community and also a principal obligation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians to make a meaningful difference to their lives and the way they currently experience government policy. We can do that by working together; we can make meaningful change. But we will not make meaningful change unless we accept as an absolute priority that we have got to give these young Australian kids, these Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids, real life opportunities. We will do that not only by passing the proposed act which has been put forward by the government but by supporting the amendment which has been put by the opposition. Then we will be showing to one another not only that we can come to this place and often argue in conflict but also that we can come to this place and demonstrate to the Australian community that we can walk out hand in hand together and say, ‘Together we have concluded an agreement to make life better for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.’

See this speech in context