Brendan Nelson (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate very much the opportunity to bring on this matter of public importance, particularly on a day when the parliament has apologised to those Aboriginal generations that were forcibly removed from their parents. But I do find it extraordinary that not all of the parliament, unfortunately, was able to support a matter of public importance debate on the intervention in the Northern Territory, which is literally about saving and rescuing the lives of Aboriginal children.

The situation in Aboriginal Australia has been well documented in terms of health and life expectancy. Generally speaking, life expectancy is 17 years less for an Indigenous Australian than it is for a non-Indigenous Australian. That equates to countries such as Haiti, Ghana, India and Papua New Guinea. Kidney disease is 10 times more prevalent. Diabetes is three times more prevalent. One in five Aboriginal children at the age of 15 are not in school. One in four currently cannot pass a very basic year 3 reading benchmark. One in three cannot pass the year 5 benchmark. Unemployment is currently running at around 13 per cent for Indigenous Australians, but fortunately it is down from 30 per cent in 1994. More than half of Indigenous Australia is currently in receipt of some sort of welfare support. Hospitalisation rates are 17 times higher for Indigenous Australians. Women are 44 per cent more likely to be hospitalised for assault than non-Indigenous Australians. Imprisonment rates are 13 times higher, and juvenile Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are 23 times more likely to find themselves in detention.

Last year, the report entitled Little children are sacred was released, having been commissioned by the Northern Territory government. That report was the straw that literally broke the camel’s back. The inquiry was headed by Rex Wild QC and Pat Anderson. The Little children are sacred report states that children are described as sacred in Aboriginal Australia because they carry the two spring wells of water from their country with them. The inquiry visited 45 communities in the Northern Territory and found evidence of sexual abuse of children in every single one of them. For the benefit of the House I will just repeat that: 45 Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory were visited, and in every one of them there was found to be evidence of sexual abuse of children.

If that were the situation in any other part of Australia, particularly suburban and regional Australia, there would understandably be a very strong, immediate reaction and dare I say a radical one. In 2007 the previous government described this as a state of emergency, and that is very much the view on our side of the House. In fact, the report concluded, amongst other things, that Aboriginal child abuse in the Northern Territory should ‘be designated as an issue of urgent national significance by both the Australian and Northern Territory governments’. It also reported a submission that in part said:

In cases of sexual abuse, the child is often removed from the community (to be taken to a place of safety or to be interviewed). This can lead to the child believing they have done something wrong, and make families reluctant to report as it is the child who is removed rather than the alleged perpetrator.

In other words, even when people were trying to act, the view was that the children themselves thought that in some way they were at fault and that, and many other things, was leading to inaction on something which violates everything that surely our country stands for.

So the government in 2007 made the decision that some radical reforms needed to be undertaken. The intervention had three principal elements. The first was to stabilise the situation. The second was to try to normalise the services that are provided to Indigenous people in the Northern Territory, including in infrastructure. The third was to provide longer term support. So that intervention included a number of things. It followed on in part from the recommendations of that Little children are sacred report, which focused on education. For example, why do we have truancy rates approaching 65 per cent in areas of Arnhem Land? It made recommendations about the devastating impact of alcohol and the unfettered access to it by many people in these remote communities, and the relationship between the Department of Family and Community Services, welfare payments and policing. A lack of policing that would be intolerable in any other community in Australia was simply considered to be the norm in Aboriginal Australia, as it still is in many remote Aboriginal communities.

On the subject of housing, in some cases you had more than 50 people living in a three-bedroom house. We asked ourselves on this side, and we still do: why is it that, as of late last year, there were 271 fewer houses in the Northern Territory in remote Aboriginal communities than there were five years earlier, despite the fact that an additional $1 billion had been spent on housing for Aboriginal people in remote parts of Australia?

The report also focused on gambling. Much of the money that arrives in remote communities goes into gambling, alcohol, tobacco and other things, the end result of which is that children are not fed and clothed. The report also addressed the dreadful and devastating impact of pornography in these remote communities.

The intervention, which was put in place by the previous government and supported by the then opposition, had a number of elements. The first was to get fair dinkum policing into these communities and to no longer accept the intolerable. The intervention used police from not only the Northern Territory but also the Federal Police and police from other parts of Australia and other jurisdictions. It also meant getting the Army in there to make sure that security was guaranteed—in particular, the NORFORCE forces in Northern Australia with which Aboriginal people are familiar.

The intervention also meant community management: appointing managers to actually manage government businesses. A lot of the problems relate to very poor levels of professional administration in many of these communities and also, in many other cases, downright corruption. It also demanded health checks of every child under the age of 16, many of whom had rarely had any examination of their health, and welfare reforms to stop that money going to gambling, alcohol, drugs, pornography and other things—to quarantine in the order of half of the money going to individuals under certain circumstances to make damn sure that it actually gets to the children who most need it and for whom it is intended.

The other thing, which should not be considered innovative but nonetheless had to be done, was to link welfare payments to school attendance. You cannot educate any child until you actually get them to school. Community safety meant getting people in the communities supported by the intervention to be involved in clean-ups, Work for the Dole and other programs. It also aimed to develop market based solutions to housing. Many people in these communities had no hope of ever owning a house or ever being part of the economic mainstream and having the reasonable expectation of owning a house.

We also desperately needed bans and restrictions on alcohol. Anyone in this place who is familiar with any of these communities—whether they be in the Kimberley, whether they be in the Northern Territory, whether they be in the northern parts of the cape or whether they be in northern parts of South Australia—knows that you only have to spend a very short time there to appreciate the devastating impact of alcohol on Aboriginal Australia. Enough is enough. Compounding all this was pornography, so decisions were made to ban the possession of pornography and also to audit computers.

The other element to this was the permit system. In question time the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs said that the permit system had not being enacted. It had been legislated, but it had not yet taken effect because the legislation needed assent. The permits were removed from common areas—from roads, barge landings and airstrips—but 99.98 per cent of land in the Northern Territory would still require permits. The key element of the permit system was to open these remote communities to the rest of Australia—to open up these communities so that the rest of Australia could actually start to engage with these communities and they with them. It was completely unacceptable, and remains completely unacceptable, that in these communities you have lives of existential despair and the most appalling things being done to children in terms of neglect, sexual abuse and other things, including malnutrition in the 21st century in a developed country like Australia. One reason that that has continued is that the permit system has not allowed engagement with the outside world and calibration of what is unacceptable in these communities with what, by any other standard in any other part of the country, is evidence of a caring, developed and sophisticated society.

We were very concerned when we saw some changes coming to this intervention with the election of the new government. One of the most remarkable Australians is Sue Gordon, the Perth Children’s Court magistrate. She has been chairing the former government’s intervention committee. On 15 January this year she was reported as saying that she would be asking the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, who is at the table, to meet the entire Indigenous intervention team, which I understand she has done. She wanted to know what direction the government is taking, and already we have seen changes to the permit system. Sue Gordon said:

Everyone wants to know what is happening following the health checks; what is the next phase? That is what the Government will have to be looking at. There’s not much point doing health checks and then no followup.

Australians, and these Aboriginal Australians in particular, need to know precisely the answer to that and many other questions about what is being followed up.

I also point out in relation to the permit system, which we now know the government has been backtracking on, that on the front page of the Australian newspaper on 18 January this year Nicholas Rothwell put it very well. He said that rolling back the changes from the intervention, which is what the government is doing, takes us back to the future:

… back to an apartheid world, where visitors to the 73 main towns and communities of the Territory’s remote north and centre can go nowhere without the stamped approval of a Land Council commissar.

He went on to say:

The primary effect of permits has long been to cut off remote Aboriginal societies from the outside world: to hinder economic activity, to kill tourist curiosity, to protect the incompetent administrators and local leaders presiding over their dysfunctional little kingdoms. Permits acted as a coded signal to outsiders, saying: ‘Leave your usual assumptions behind on entry, because things are different in remote Aboriginal Australia, educational standards are lower, social capital is lower, housing is worse, food is poorer—but that’s all OK, because it’s another kind of society.’

It was also, I might add, another way of Aboriginal people basically saying, ‘We are too fragile to face calibration or measurement against the outside world.’ I have spent about 15 years of my life involved in one way or another in doing what I can to give advocacy for Aboriginal people and the enormous disadvantage that they face, notwithstanding the good intentions of successive governments over a long period of time. But I confess to being guilty, to being, at one stage, one of those people who was not prepared to bring to the national gaze the circumstances that really exist in these communities. I think that in the false name of cultural sensitivity we reached the conclusion that in some way it would diminish the self-esteem of remote Aboriginal Australians if their circumstances went into the lounge rooms of everyday Australia. We were wrong, and on this day and every day I say, ‘I am sorry and I apologise for being a part of that.’

We need to open up remote Aboriginal Australia to the rest of the country so that, as non-Indigenous Australians, we can fully appreciate just how dreadful these circumstances are and just how important that intervention in the Northern Territory is, not only to those Northern Territory Indigenous people. We need to extend such an intervention, or one very much like it, into the cape and other parts of Australia. It is time that we made sure the money intended for Aboriginal children and the laws designed to protect and support them were made available to them and that no more apologies be offered for what has happened in the last 30 years. (Time expired)

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