Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment (2007 Budget Measures) Bill 2007. In doing so, I also rise to support the amendment moved by the member for Jagajaga and seconded by the member for Lingiari. That amendment is in the following terms:

... the House commits to the following goals:

(1)

to eliminate the 17 year gap in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians within a generation, so that every Indigenous child has the same educational and life opportunities as any other child;

(2)

to at least halve the difference in the rate of Indigenous students at years 3, 5 and 7 who fail to meet reading, writing and numeracy benchmarks within ten years;

(3)

to at least halve the mortality rate of Indigenous children aged under five within a decade; and

(4)

to a long-term, bipartisan national commitment to work with Indigenous Australians towards achieving these goals, and overcome generational disadvantage”.

I think it is appropriate for the House to accept this amendment in the week that we are celebrating the 40th anniversary of the 1967 referendum. I think it is appropriate that the House act in a bipartisan way in relation to those aspirations and goals that have been outlined in the amendment. It then becomes for both sides an aspiration that we need to work to. In relation to the bill before the House at the moment, the explanatory memorandum says:

The purpose of the Bill is to amend the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000 to appropriate additional funding to facilitate the provision of improving opportunities for Indigenous students through the expansion of the Indigenous Youth Mobility Programme, the expansion of the Indigenous Youth Leadership Programme, the provision of infrastructure funding for boarding school facilities and where government and non-government providers agree, the conversion of Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP) programme places into ongoing jobs in the education sector.

Looking at the financial impact, the bill will increase appropriations by a net $26.1 million over the 2007-2008 calendar years on additional initial 2005 prices. There is a breakdown of how that figure is achieved.

The second reading speech of the Hon. Julie Bishop, Minister for Education, Science and Training, said:

The proportion of young Indigenous people living in remote areas who reach year 12 is approximately half that of their metropolitan peers, and only one in 10 actually completes year 12. Approximately one in four 15- to 19-year-old Indigenous people lives in a remote area.

Up to 1,610 students will benefit from the expansion of two successful programs, the Indigenous Youth Mobility Program and the Indigenous Youth Leadership Program. The increase in the number of scholarships offered under the Indigenous Youth Leadership Program and the places available under the Indigenous Youth Mobility Program will allow more young Indigenous people to access high-quality education and training to make informed life choices.

They are noble objectives and that is why the bill should be supported, but we should not kid ourselves; we are only scratching the surface in this regard. In the public domain we have evidence that shows how poorly the Indigenous children in remote areas are treated. We have just had a complaint that was lodged on behalf of an Indigenous school in the Northern Territory and it is important to detail aspects of that complaint to the House today to show that we have a long way to go.

My solution is pretty simple. Forty years ago the people of Australia voted in overwhelming numbers—90.77 per cent—to give the Australian parliament responsibility over Indigenous Australians. In my view, that responsibility extends to protecting them from the inadequacies of state and territory governments. It does not involve abrogating our responsibilities to state and territory governments who have a particularly poor history when it comes to Aboriginal people, and the first 67 years of Federation showed that. Today we have mortality rates whereby 24 per cent of Aboriginal men live to the age of 65 and 35 per cent of Aboriginal women live to the age of 65, and we run around this country and say how well-off we are when our fellow citizens cannot get a decent education and their life expectancy is worse than Third World standards.

There is a national responsibility that has been imposed on this parliament and we should act and, in instances where state and territory governments are abrogating their responsibility, we should legislate over the top of them. We have the power to do that under the referendum; there is no doubt about that. I have discussed this with a number of legal friends of mine and it is my considered view that this parliament has that power and we should act.

In the Northern Territory we have the situation where Arnold Bloch Leibler have been engaged on behalf of the community of Wadeye to seek an official apology and compensation for what they say is prolonged underfunding of their children’s education. Wadeye is the largest Indigenous community in the Northern Territory. The claim is that the government has discriminated against the children and denied them access to federal education funds for almost three decades. The head of the firm’s public interest law practice says:

The community is seeking conciliation rather than litigation, but would proceed to the Federal Court if necessary.

The first concern is the vast underfunding of a collection of Northern Territory schools, including Our Lady of the Sacred Heart School at Wadeye, caused by an agreement struck between the Commonwealth and the Northern Territory government in 1979 that has not been updated since. Our Lady of the Sacred Heart School at Wadeye is the only school servicing Wadeye’s population of about 2½ thousand people. This agreement was recently exposed in a report called The opportunity costs of the status quo in the Thamarrurr region by J Taylor and O Stanley.

The National Indigenous Times reveals that, to his credit, the Prime Minister has written to the Territory government asking them to change the status of the school from a mission school. I understand that the funding formula will be looked at in the near future. But there is the question of the remedies for past conduct. Apparently the attendance rate at the school is now around 460. However, because of the Northern Territory government’s formula, the school is only being funded for around 220 students. I understand the Northern Territory government gets funding for the number of students but they only distribute in relation to attendance and the attendance is taken in the fourth week of the school year. For that reason the Northern Territory government is basically pocketing the money. Also in that study it has been discovered that for every dollar that is spent on the education of non-Indigenous students only 47c is being spent on Indigenous students. Table 26 on page 43 of the report sets that out in relation to the current situation in Wadeye. That is a disgrace.

There is also another element of the complaint to do with the underfunding of 12 profoundly disabled children at the school, each of whom receives little or no funding of the kind that others get in similar circumstances at mainstream schools. It seems to me that Indigenous children are getting less assistance than others. Where an argument could be made for a positive discrimination—and the racial discrimination convention allows for positive discrimination to bring people up to the level of equality that others enjoy—what we are getting is the reverse. We are basically getting a situation where if the complaint is properly made, schools are shown to be underfunded or operating on formulas that are questionable. This is where there needs to be some cooperation, both at a federal and at a state level, in relation to these situations.

In the National Indigenous Times of 3 May there was a narrative on the Wadeye situation. One thing that should be pointed out, and the paper did so, is that the average life expectancy of a Wadeye male is 47 years—30 years less than the national average for a white Australian male. I have to say that I do not take kindly to the current minister’s lecturing and hectoring attitude Indigenous affairs when you have a situation where, on a proper examination, it is clear that it is basically the Territory and federal governments which are at fault in relation to some of these situations where children have not attended school.

It is no good saying that everyone should learn English if you are not going to make adequate provision to house children. The newspaper points out that, in 2003, 420 students enrolled in Wadeye in the first week of the school year. In 2004, the number grew to 467. But in 2005 it exploded to 582—a 25 per cent increase—after a strong push by Wadeye residents to ensure that as many children as possible attended school. And last year the figure climbed to 628. This year, again, the school began with 600-odd students. So the Wadeye community was trying to do the right thing. They were part of a pilot program that the federal government announced under former ministers. But, as the paper points out, in 2007, whilst 600 students are enrolled at Wadeye, the school is built to house just over 300 people. So, on any given day, half the enrolled students do not have access to a classroom. If that is the situation, is it any wonder that kids do not show up in subsequent weeks? And that then impacts on the funding the school gets.

So, on any given day, half the school population does not have access to a classroom, and 60 per cent of them do not have access to a teacher. Whose fault is that? It is not the fault of the Indigenous community; it is the fault of the Commonwealth and Territory governments for not providing adequate resources and adequate teachers.

This is a situation that is allowed to continue. Everyone turns a blind eye. It only gets exposed when there is a bit of a kerfuffle and a report is done. The thing that worries me is that people get concerned about it for a little while, while it is in the news, and then the report gathers dust and nothing is done about it.

It is no wonder that the community has taken the drastic action of launching a class action to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, alleging that for three decades the Northern Territory and federal governments have deliberately underfunded their education. So the claim certainly spans generations. I am told by my colleague the member for Lingiari that, under the former CLP government, prior to 2001, 56c in the dollar was being pocketed by the then Territory government in terms of Commonwealth funding.

It seems to me that the Commonwealth should be a bit more discerning in the way they fund state and territory governments when it comes to Indigenous people. I think the Prime Minister said that he is not really into setting targets. I can remember, from when I was on the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation—when from 1996 to 2000 I was the shadow minister for Aboriginal affairs—the former minister, Senator Herron, talking about benchmarking. We should be benchmarking state and territory governments in terms of the funding that they get, and we should be holding them accountable.

I am a fan, in areas such as this, of giving tied funding, conditional funding, to the states and territories. The justification and basis for that is our special responsibility under the Constitution, as a result of the 1967 referendum, to protect and nurture our Indigenous population. This is not just going to happen by mere rhetoric. It is not going to happen because we all feel good about it. No-one believes that we need to do that when we give special funding to the remote communities and the farming communities when there is drought or whatever, because it is regarded as assistance that is necessary to help those communities through their suffering. But, in relation to the Indigenous community, we, as a federal parliament, should not only increase our performance but should make no apologies for standing up to states and territories when it comes to education and a whole range of other matters for which we give them money to improve the lot of our Indigenous brothers and sisters.

This is not a situation where one side is guiltier than the other. Both sides are guilty, because it does not exercise our minds on a daily basis. For most of us in the cities it is out of sight and out of mind. But we would not cop this sort of situation, that of the funding of Wadeye, if it were in our schools—in Double Bay, Killara, Wollstonecraft or any of our electorates in the city. We would not cop a formula that says, ‘We’ll give you the money according to the number of students but you only have to distribute it on the basis of attendance in the fourth week of term.’ This is red hot. And when you have reports from professional people like Mr Taylor and Mr Stanley from the ANU that are now on the government’s desk, it behoves the government to act.

I do commend the Prime Minister for writing a letter to the Northern Territory minister and saying, ‘I want to see an end to this mission situation in relation to Wadeye.’ It was good that the Prime Minister visited Wadeye to see it for himself. But what we want to see are results, down the track, that show improvements. That is our obligation under the Constitution now, as a result of the referendum. We cannot palm it off onto the states or the territories. Aboriginal people are our responsibility. We should not continue to abandon them. We should start looking after them for a change.

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