Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Hansard source

As old sparring partners, it may be one of the first times. I do agree that for us to make our apology today meaningful—our apology about actions of past governments and past parliaments—we need to ensure that this is the first step in taking actions into the future that will make a difference for Indigenous people, particularly Indigenous children. We want to make sure that today is just the beginning in righting some of the wrongs of the past, and we will make sure that today’s words are accompanied by actions today, tomorrow and long into the future. I am very pleased to be following my colleague, the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, who has the not insubstantial task of making sure that we do deal with what can be correctly described as a crisis, a tragedy or a seriously difficult situation. But we do, within this parliament and within our communities, have the wherewithal to make a difference. We now just need to act.

I want to concentrate on the action that is being taken in the health arena. There have been some misrepresentations and, I think, some fears expressed in the media, and there have been some concerns expressed by members opposite, that the health component of the Northern Territory intervention is somehow faltering. Nothing could be further from the truth. Since the intervention was announced by the previous government, nearly 6,000 child health checks have been undertaken across the Northern Territory. The latest figure that we have is 5,796 health checks in 58 different communities and 12 town camps across the Northern Territory. More than 200 healthcare professionals have been involved in this stage, and preparations are now being undertaken for referrals and treatment of many of the conditions that have been identified through the health check process.

I want to make absolutely clear to this House, and to anybody who is listening to this debate, that we are honouring the financial commitments made by the previous government in the Northern Territory intervention. We are committed to the rollout of the child health checks and we are committed to providing the follow-up services that will be needed, but we are committed to much more than that. And this is really the difference. We want to be able to build a healthcare system for our Indigenous communities that will last into the future. We know we have to enhance our primary healthcare services in the Northern Territory. We know we have to find ways to make the workforce sustainable in the long term. We cannot see this intervention as a one-off check, a one-off treatment, and then go back to where we were before. The real art to making this intervention work in terms of health care is to also be building the structure for the future. In announcing today that we are committed to the health aspects of the Northern Territory intervention, I also want to highlight additional things that we are committed to doing which will make a significant difference. Then, if time permits, I will come back to talking more specifically about some of the issues that people have raised in terms of the intervention itself.

What is forgotten when we look at the previous government’s decision to intervene is that we talked about one-off child health checks and the follow-up that might come from that, but we are still primarily in the phase of undertaking the remaining health checks. Prior to the election, we committed to doing something which the previous government did not do, and we have now started to roll it out. We committed to actually having an impact on life expectancy and health outcomes for Indigenous people into the future. We have committed a quarter of a billion dollars to closing the life expectancy gap—starting with the babies who are being born today. We will be making sure that they get home visits from nurses and that there are intensive support services available through mums and bubs programs across the country. We already have a number of fabulous Indigenous health services with nurses who provide great maternal health care. They need more support, they need more nursing staff and they need more infrastructure. Our $260 million commitment will, amongst other things, start to roll out that support to communities across the country. It will fundamentally enhance the sort of one-off approach that the previous government took to the Northern Territory intervention child health check. We need to build the infrastructure that is going to do the checking well into the future, and we need to make sure that it is going to be there for every single Aboriginal child across the country—not just in the Northern Territory.

That $260 million also makes sure that we are tying together health support with educational and developmental support. It is critical for us not only to look at how we can make sure that our four-year-old Indigenous children are getting good developmental support—and there are many people in this parliament, such as the parliamentary secretary, who is here, who will be working on those sorts of projects—but also to make sure that the babies actually get a chance to turn into four-year-olds to get that service. We still have appalling figures in this country. The chance of an Indigenous baby dying before they turn one is three times more likely than for a non-Indigenous baby. We know what interventions can make a difference. We know if we give proper prenatal, postnatal and intensive support for mothers that we can make a difference to birth weight and to reducing smoking and alcohol consumption during pregnancy, and that we can help children to have early problems identified and dealt with when they are young so that they can grow into happy, healthy children.

Last week when I was in Alice Springs and visited one of the town camps, I found the circumstances just as confronting as everybody would expect from the media reports—perhaps even more so. It really brings home that, for us to be able to provide decent health services, we have to be able to provide decent housing, decent employment opportunities and decent education. The challenge that the Rudd Labor government have picked up, following on from the Northern Territory intervention of the previous government, is to tie those things together and to make sure that, when we want to invest serious resources, time, energy and infrastructure in health services, we make sure that those services have a proper chance of being successful—by ensuring that there is decent housing for people and that there is a pathway to be able to get early childhood education and get into schools where there are teachers, as my colleague has already flagged. These sorts of interactions are going to be critical in the next phase of the intervention and the Rudd Labor government’s approach to Indigenous affairs.

What I would like to say when people concentrate so much on the very difficult circumstances that we absolutely do face is that there is in the Northern Territory a great strength amongst the Indigenous controlled health service providers. For example, AMSANT, Congress in Alice Springs and others are fully functional and very capable services that were not involved in consultations on the Northern Territory intervention. They were not asked to use their expertise to roll out ongoing support for these health services. We intend to make sure that, with the resources, energy and momentum from the Northern Territory intervention, we develop a proper relationship with those existing services that can provide ongoing support into the future. I think it is really critical that we do that.

We have also made a number of other commitments that are going to be very significant in the Northern Territory. We have committed $20 million, of which $10 million will be invested in upgrading our primary healthcare services across the Territory and $5 million will be invested in providing something that there is, unfortunately, a growing need for—that is, renal dialysis facilities. There are very few satellite services for remote communities. There will also be $4½ million for sexual assault counselling in the Northern Territory. Another $50 million—agreed to by COAG before Christmas—will be provided for alcohol rehabilitation programs, counselling and other programs across the country. So there is serious new money being committed by the Rudd Labor government to complement what is being done in the Northern Territory.

I am conscious of the time but I want to quickly flag that the results of the child healthcare checks that have already been undertaken show that a large number of referrals are needed. The highest number are referrals to primary healthcare services—not, as the member opposite pointed out, to specialist services, although there is a need for those. It is those primary healthcare services that we are investing in and supporting long term that are most often referred to. The next highest, which will not be a surprise on this side of the House, is to dental care. The previous government’s dental care program, which they lauded so much last year, failed to provide a single dental care service to any person under the age of 25 in the Northern Territory. We are going to fix that with our dental program. The previous government should be ashamed of their record on that. (Time expired)

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