Mal Brough (Longman, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

If they could do it now and it was so simple, why hasn’t the Labor Party, through both the Territory government and the member for Lingiari helped that occur for the last 20 years? The reality is that the member for Lingiari does not want to see change because change will bring down some of those people who have controlled these towns with an iron fist and have prevented people from getting ahead.

Today, unfortunately, we have far too much child abuse. There should be zero child abuse. We still have drugs in these towns and we have school attendance as low as 20 per cent. Up in Queensland, on Mornington Island, the Labor government set a target of just 75 per cent school attendance. Can you imagine any other part of the country saying that if one in four kids do not go to school we don’t care? This is the sort of rubbish that the Indigenous Australians, our First Australians, have had to put up with for so long. It is time the Labor Party listened to the Noel Pearsons and to their party president, Warren Mundine. It is time they listened when Indigenous people say, ‘We made a mistake in the past. What we delivered in the past did not deliver for our people. We need a brighter future.’

The coalition government, under the leadership of John Howard, has said to the First Australians, ‘You can now enjoy the same rights as every other Australian. We are sorry we did not do it sooner. We want you to have the chance so that your kids can see a purpose in getting a job and so that they can make a way for themselves without having to worry about passive welfare with all of the spin-offs and negatives that come from it.’ This legislation allows that to occur. This legislation will allow people who want to make a choice for themselves to do so and do so without the encumbrance of knowing that they are going to be dependent upon others to determine their future. This is why this legislation is a positive step for all Australians.

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