Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Families, Community Services, Indigenous Affairs and the Voluntary Sector) Share this | Hansard source

This morning we focused on the injustices of the past, and this afternoon we should focus on the injustices of the present. This morning we apologised for the wrongs of earlier generations, and this afternoon we should face up to the wrongs done by this generation—wrongs that are likely to be repeated lest we recommit ourselves to good policy, as epitomised by the Northern Territory intervention.

In 2006, an extraordinarily courageous Alice Springs crown prosecutor, Nanette Rogers, chronicled the most horrific crimes being perpetrated against Aboriginal children, including one case where a four-year-old was drowned while being raped by a petrol sniffer. These crimes did not take place a generation ago, and these crimes were not perpetrated by white men against black, yet they did take place in part because of a culture of idleness and indulgences that successive contemporary governments—I stress contemporary governments—have fostered and permitted.

Let us not make the mistake of thinking that this is the first fault-free generation in history. Let us not think that we are morally superior to our predecessors. Let us not think that everything that happened before 1970 was wrong and everything since has been right. Yes, policy up until that time was tainted by assumptions about the inferiority of Aboriginal people and cultures, for which we should rightly, properly and abjectly apologise, but in terms of practical damage to Aboriginal people’s lives welfarism has been just as destructive as paternalism.

I want to congratulate the Leader of the Opposition for a truly magnificent address to this House this morning. He properly acknowledged the pain and the hurt of Aboriginal people, he properly pointed out that life was tougher for everyone in previous generations and he properly accepted the good intentions of the vast majority of past policy makers and administrators. Let me say that our overwhelming responsibility here in this place now is for present times, not past times. Future generations will not think well of us if we apologise for others’ misdeeds while perpetrating and perpetuating misdeeds of our own.

In response to the horrors chronicled by Nanette Rogers and further detailed by the Little children are sacred report, the former government undertook a massive and radical intervention in remote Northern Territory townships. It involved more than 70 separate communities. It involved more than $1 billion worth of new Commonwealth government spending and it promised to restore civic life in these very troubled places. In particular, it involved resident police in all significant townships, strict controls on alcohol, the quarantining of welfare payments, rigorous insistence on school attendance and the opportunity for homeownership.

I congratulate the then opposition, now the government, for supporting the Northern Territory intervention at that time despite ferocious attacks on it from people such as the member for Lingiari, who is now a minister in the new government, and from people such as Marion Scrymgour, who is now the Deputy Chief Minister of the Northern Territory. But there is some evidence that the new government is inclined to water down key aspects of the intervention, and I do not say this in a partisan spirit. I commend the goodwill and the decency that the new minister brings to her job—and I have to say that, in speaking to people involved with the intervention, they have said that they have appreciated her willingness to talk and the spirit that she has brought to those discussions—but the permit system is being restored and the health intervention is faltering. I am pleased that the Minister for Health and Ageing is here in the House to talk, presumably, about this aspect.

Let me cite—because the minister did not get to this in question time—the attitude of the Labor Party’s former national president, Warren Mundine, to the permit system. I quote him from last month:

The permit system didn’t stop crime. In fact, if you look at all of the reports that have come out in the last few years, crime has flourished under the permit system, so it’s a fallacy to say that it helps law-and-order problems. It really embedded these problems because some powerful people were able to get away with things without being watched.

Warren Mundine said this after the new government announced that the permit system would stay. The new minister really needs to explain why she is right and why Warren Mundine—the most senior Aboriginal person in the Labor Party—is wrong on this topic.

Alison Anderson, the extremely experienced Aboriginal member of parliament for the central Northern Territory, told the Australian yesterday that permits had been misused in some remote communities and should not be reintroduced. She said:

I think it has been used as a tool by some people in communities to reject certain people that they disagree with or don’t want out there.

The Labor people who know best—the Labor people most in touch with the reality on the ground—want the permit system scrapped. Why are permits wrong? Because, as that great journalist Nicholas Rothwell, who has made the study of remote Indigenous places something of a life’s work, said:

You’re too fragile to face the world, you need to be protected and coddled, suspect all strangers, the government will serve as your only help.

That is the attitude which people like Warren Mundine and Noel Pearson know is destroying and poisoning Aboriginal communities, yet—alas—that is the attitude which the new government wishes to perpetuate. I again quote Nicholas Rothwell:

In fact there is one reason for the Rudd Government’s move to reinstate permits, and it is an ideological reason. The progressive support base of the Labor Party loves the idea of sacrosanct Aboriginal Australia, untainted by harmful Western influences, its people performing ceremonial activities and tossing off the odd jewel-like work of art.

I say to the ministers at the table: please grow through that. It behoves Aboriginal people for members opposite to grow through their ideological preoccupations, look at what works and what does not work and back the Indigenous intervention.

On the subject of health, it was good to hear the minister talk about Bill Glasson. Unfortunately, Bill Glasson has pointed out that the health checks are rolling out well but there is not the necessary specialist follow-up, despite the fact that 800 doctors—many of them specialists—volunteered their services last year. Those specialists should be deployed. Warren Mundine said, in advice to the minister, ‘I think we should take advantage of what the former government did. We have to build on that. The biggest fear I have is that we start to fall back on our old ways and some of the failed policies of the past.’ I share that fear. I would love to be proved wrong, and I say to the minister opposite: anyone can apologise for other people’s faults, but it takes guts to own one’s own faults. Anyone can judge others harshly; it takes character to avoid making excuses for oneself. In how it prosecutes the Northern Territory intervention, the real character of the Rudd government will be revealed. (Time expired)

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