Bob McMullan (Fraser, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Federal/State Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I support the amendment moved by the shadow minister and the position which she outlined in her remarks. I have some serious concerns about the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Welfare Payment Reform) Bill 2007 and cognate legislation, notwithstanding the proper and necessary decision that we, as an opposition, have made to support it—hopefully with some amendments. But in the realistic knowledge that the government will never accept amendments we reluctantly support the bill as it is.

Why do I have these concerns? First and foremost it is not that I am concerned that the government is endeavouring to act on the issue of child abuse but that the manner of the action means that it is likely to fail. That is my primary concern. There is a lot of detail and I will come to it. My first concern is that the flawed conception at the genesis of this legislation has created a process—let us give the government the benefit of the doubt that it is a well-intentioned process—that is doomed to fail.

My second concern—and it is closely related to that first concern—is that this is legislation which contains no long-term plan for the future. Some of the initiatives that have been taken are useful and I support them. Indigenous communities have been chronically short of good medical services and support from the police. To the extent that this initiative is generating more medical services and more police for those communities that is welcome. If, as a consequence of this legislation and the associated appropriations, we get more money for housing, health and education in these communities, that is overdue but welcome, but there is nothing in this legislation that creates the framework for a long-term solution.

My third concern is that the initiative of which this legislation is part was triggered by the Wild-Anderson report but the legislation and the program do not implement the strengths of that report; they go in quite a different direction—a direction that the Wild-Anderson report recommended we did not go in. My fourth concern is that after report after report—for 10 years—we now have this rushed, flawed job on the eve of the election.

My fifth concern is that this legislative package goes beyond child abuse related issues to implement an extreme ideological agenda, particularly as it relates to land and the permit system. My sixth concern is that this legislation undermines the integrity of the Racial Discrimination Act.

So, with all of those concerns, why am I supporting this legislation? Because our first responsibility is to assist children facing abuse, women facing violence and old people in danger—and there is no alternative package. If we are successful in amending this package it will do the job better, but more will still need to be done. Under this government we know there will be no alternative package; if we do not support this legislation there will be no legislation. If we do not support this package there will be no package. So we cannot ignore steps that will help to deal with the problem of child abuse so starkly illustrated by so many reports over the years, even if it might be uncomfortable for many of us to be supporting some aspects of this legislation.

Why is this legislation before us now? That is a very interesting question, because for the last 30 years—not just the last 10 years, to be fair to the government—there have been many reports on Indigenous communities and their health. They have made similar recommendations to the recommendations that came out of the Wild-Anderson report. For example, at COAG on 13 April this year, child abuse in Indigenous communities was on the agenda. It did not come as a shock to the Prime Minister as a result of the report that there was a problem; COAG had been talking about it in April. And COAG, in its communique, referred back to what seems to have been forgotten. It is as if people have come across this stunning revelation that there is terrible violence in Indigenous communities.

There was an intergovernmental summit on violence and child abuse in Indigenous communities on 26 June 2006, talking about the National Indigenous Violence and Child Abuse Intelligence Task Force, joint strike teams and the accelerated rollout of Indigenous child health checks, and agreeing that the levels of violence and child abuse in Indigenous communities warranted a comprehensive national response. The summit communique said:

• everyone has a right to be safe from family violence and abuse;
• preventing family violence and child abuse in Indigenous families is best achieved by families, communities, community organisations and different levels of government working together as partners;

It emphasised the need to address underlying causes.

That analysis has been around for a long time. It is not a case against acting now but it might make one cynical about why the government has just discovered this problem and announced it with fanfare on the eve of the election, when it has had had report after report after report. I said before and I say again: as profound as this government’s shortcomings have been in this area in the last decade, not just regarding Indigenous child abuse but Indigenous affairs generally, where all the data shows that internationally we are at world’s worst practice where in other areas of policy we aspire to world’s best practice, previous governments have failed as well—governments of my political party and previous coalition governments. It is not a unique thing; none of us has done enough. That something needs to be done is clear, and this step to do something deserves our support—because Indigenous children continue to be overrepresented in substantial cases of child abuse and neglect.

But a number of people have been urging the government to do something for a long time, and the government has studiously ignored that advice until the eve of the election. Tom Calma, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, said in December 2006 that he had published a book entitled Ending family violence in Indigenous communities, which talked about the ‘complex policy responses necessary to address family violence and sexual abuse in communities’, and he listed 10 challenges for addressing family violence and sexual abuse in Indigenous communities. I wish the government had taken up his report or the Anderson-Wild report rather than taking the course of action that it has taken. I will refer to Tom Calma’s first two challenges, as I do not have time to go through them all. They were, firstly:

What we need is concerted, long term action—

from governments. And, secondly:

This action must be based on genuine partnership with Indigenous peoples and with our—

Tom Calma says as an Indigenous person—

full participation ...

None of that is reflected in this package. There were very good recommendations from Mr Calma and others, but they are not reflected in this legislation.

So why am I concerned that this package will fail? There is no long-term plan and it does not address fundamental causes. It is okay to react to symptoms, but the symptoms will recur unless you deal with the causes—and this package does nothing to deal with the causes. After the short-term response and the welcome addition of medical and police services into communities, what happens? There is nothing that goes to the fundamentals of the problems, and the shadow minister for Indigenous affairs outlined that before.

I will now turn my attention to the area in which I have said the bill goes too far and implements an ideological agenda that is not related to the issue of child abuse. I want to particularly focus on the permit system. It was extraordinary to hear the member for Kalgoorlie saying that somehow or other the continuation of the permit system, particularly in the manner that we wish to amend it, would prevent the people whose job it is to implement this program from going into communities. He either knows that is not true and said it or should know it is not true and should not have said it. It is clearly and demonstrably untrue. The current permit system specifically allows almost all the categories of people who might be called on to implement the program to go into the communities—probably all, but let us for the moment say ‘almost all’. The system reflected in the amendments proposed by the opposition would allow everybody who is in the business of implementing this program and other people as well, including the media, to go into these communities and implement this program. What the member for Kalgoorlie said is demonstrably untrue.

I am not unhappy about a review of the permit system and some changes to it, and I welcome the changes reflected in the amendments that the shadow minister has given notice of, but I do not think we should abolish the permit system. We run the serious risk of making child sexual abuse worse. There are some other potential problems too, but I will talk about that risk first, because this is supposed to be a package of measures to deal with the issue of child abuse. Let me talk about the Amoonguna community in the Northern Territory, which recently won a local government award for good governance. The health centre manager there, David Evans, said recently that the community had taken a strong stand on sexual abuse and had recently banned a convicted paedophile from entering. How were they able to do that? They were able to do that because of the permit system. What are they going to do now? They will lose the capacity to protect themselves in that way—and that is a serious mistake. That is reflected in the views of the Northern Territory Police Association, who said that the permits help them in the bush with their efforts to keep alcohol and drugs out of communities that are supposed to be dry. Vince Kelly, President of the Northern Territory Police Association, said:

The Federal Government, in my view, has not yet made it clear what the connection is between the Aboriginal land permit system and the sexual abuse of women and children in these communities.

Mr Kelly went on to say:

The police officer at Maningrida expressed a view that they’re battling a drug problem out there ... and clearly they have some control at the moment—

because of the permit system. I am slightly paraphrasing for the sake of time. Anyone who wants to can read the transcript on the ABC website. He went on to say:

... to simply remove the permit system would mean that people … there’d be no requirement for anyone, any monitoring of what goes on, so it’d be open slather, so to speak.

So the police are concerned. The evidence is clearly there. The Deputy Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, the member for Nhulunbuy, Syd Stirling, talked about the possibility that the better Indigenous communities could be swept up and treated like child abusers as well as the worst communities. Where is the incentive for better performance? He was talking at the Yilpara community. He also said:

I know that there are dysfunctional communities, but Yilpara is not one of them. The kids here are looked after by their families and taken to school every day. It is safe for children and all of us to develop as a community.

It is important that we do not threaten that.

I have just received a copy of a media release made today by NAVA, the National Association for the Visual Arts. It expresses their concern that Aboriginal art may be further under threat as a result of the proposal in the legislation that is currently going through federal parliament to remove the permit system. The executive director of NAVA, Tamara Winikoff, said: ‘We are very worried that the removal of the permit system will increase the ability of unscrupulous art dealers or art purchasers to gain access to Indigenous communities and their artists for the purpose of exploitative practices.’ That is a very real and serious concern and it is right for NAVA to raise it. It would be tragic if the government were to ignore it. If they had not been in such a rush and had developed this properly and with a bit of consultation, organisations like NAVA could have come forward and put their propositions to the government. Some modification of the permit system could have been developed that kept its strengths and dealt with its weaknesses. But that is not what has happened.

These proposals are not implementing the Wild-Anderson report and this is one of the things that leads to my concern that the program may fail. I will now deal with the recommendations of that report. The report says:

In the first recommendation, we have specifically referred to the critical importance of governments committing to genuine consultation with Aboriginal people in designing initiatives for Aboriginal communities, whether these be in remote, regional or urban settings.

The report then quotes the following statement by Fred Chaney:

... one of the things I think we should have learned by now is that you can’t solve these things by centralised bureaucratic direction.

…            …            …

... you can have programs that run out into communities that aren’t owned by those communities, that aren’t locally controlled and managed, and I think surely that is a thing we should know doesn’t work.

In a subsequent recommendation on page 26, the report recommends:

That the Northern Territory Government work with the Australian Government in consultation with Aboriginal communities to:

(a)

develop a comprehensive long-term strategy to build a strong and equitable core service platform in Aboriginal communities, to address the underlying risk factors for child sexual abuse and to develop functional communities in which children are safe.

In an open letter to Mal Brough signed by my friend Mick Dodson and a lot of other distinguished Australians, including former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and leaders of the Indigenous community, the letter’s authors support a commitment to tackle violence and abuse and they support the fact that urgent action is required. But they said that it needs to be a longer term plan and that in their present form these proposals miss the mark and are unlikely to be effective. These are not people who are criticising the government for taking action. They are saying, ‘What you are doing will not work.’ That is exactly one of my serious concerns about this package.

There is goodwill for a national response and it is appropriate to give priority to assisting victims of abuse. The great pity with this package of legislation is the way in which the government has chosen to act. It has been unnecessarily divisive and it has been disappointingly short term. It has set up a process with much too high a risk of failure. For now it is all there is and, given the government’s majority in both houses, this legislation will pass. It will pass when the government wishes and it will pass in the form the government wishes. Therefore, the best we can do is seek to amend it and to improve it and to point out to the government the risk of failure and the risk of counterproductive consequences. People like Jackie Huggins, Mick Dodson, Patricia Anderson, Rex Wild and Syd Stirling and organisations like NAVA, the Northern Territory Police Association and the community from Amoonguna have been saying that there is a risk of counterproductive consequences from this initiative, which we will give the benefit of the doubt to as being well intentioned.

All that we as an opposition can do is say that if there is no alternative way of getting assistance to the victims of abuse we will support this package. We will try to outline an alternative long-term view, and the shadow minister has done that. We will try to amend the legislation to make it better. That will come forward in the committee stage. But we know that this government does not listen to anybody. All we can say is: let us hope that this package and these initiatives do some good for some of the people in need, and we hope that we can do better in future.

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