Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to follow the Minister for Home Affairs and I thank him for his courtesy in allowing the opposition to continue the practice of responding immediately to the ministerial statement. It is unfortunate, however, that the minister felt the need to make a partisan attack at the end of his ministerial statement. For 11 years the previous government had Indigenous affairs front and centre when it came to its policy priority areas. Addressing disadvantage in Indigenous communities should be an area where a bipartisan commitment to solving the very real problems is put before any petty politics of the day. But a partisan approach to Indigenous affairs is unfortunately what we are coming to expect from this government—the same government that announced a bipartisan war cabinet on Indigenous housing in order to get great headlines but then excluded the opposition from any real involvement and declined to make use of the very capable services of the Hon. Mal Brough. Further, it is remarkable that the minister accuses the previous government of providing insufficient funding to this area when the Attorney-General’s Department portfolio budget statement in the minister’s own area clearly shows that funding to output group 1.7—Indigenous law and justice and legal assistance programs—has been cut by $12.9 million from last year. This $6.3 million in one-off funding is really playing catch-up to the reality that this area is not able to cope with the required efficiency dividend.

It is a fact that petty partisan politics will never solve the problems of Indigenous disadvantage in Australia, and with that in mind the opposition welcomes this funding boost of $6.3 million to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal services to help them meet the extra demand that they are facing. The Commonwealth began providing funding to Indigenous legal services in 1971 when the Liberal government of the day first provided a grant to the New South Wales Aboriginal Legal Service. In the decades since, programs providing legal services to our First Australians have been expanded and built upon to the point that in 2007-08 the government was making outlays in the area of $336.9 million.

This is a group of Australians who the minister rightly described as experiencing unacceptably high rates of contact with the law and justice system. The previous Howard government’s philosophical approach to this issue is summarised in a 2006 document entitled Policy directions for the delivery of legal aid services to Indigenous Australians:

The primary objective of the Legal Aid for Indigenous People program is to improve the access of Indigenous Australians to high-quality and culturally appropriate legal aid services, so that they can fully exercise their legal rights as Australian citizens.

Commonwealth support for legal services takes a number of forms, including legal aid for Indigenous Australians, community legal services and pro bono services, grants of financial assistance to Aboriginal legal services and family violence prevention legal services for assisting Indigenous adults and children who are the victims of family violence or who are at immediate risk of such violence. There are also prevention, diversion, rehabilitation and restorative justice programs to divert Indigenous Australians away from adverse contact within the criminal justice system, and law and justice advocacy activities for the advancement of the legal rights of Indigenous Australians.

These are important responsibilities within the Commonwealth’s range of activities. We must work closely, as ministers in the previous government attempted to do, with our state and territory counterparts. I note that $300,000 of the money announced by the minister today will go towards meeting the immediate demands of child protection as a result of the Mullighan report into child abuse on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands—otherwise known as the APY lands—in my great home state of South Australia. The opposition particularly applaud this funding, and we hope that it will spur the Rann government into immediate action, in contrast to their approach that has been thus far characterised by interminable delay, followed by promises of action, followed by a great deal of media activity and sound bites, followed by nothing.

Four years ago, the Rann government promised to embark on a radical intervention in the APY lands. Nothing came of it. After I visited the APY lands in 2006 with the then Minister for Health and Ageing, the member for Warringah, we proposed immediate responses, which were met with indifference by our South Australian government counterparts. Upon receiving the Mullighan report, Premier Rann said on 5 May that he would need another three months to plan the detail of his response and some 12 months to move extra police into the area. It is not good enough and the South Australian government needs to lift its game.

In relation to the other $6 million of grants which the minister has announced, I would like to place on record the opposition’s support for the various programs which these grants will be supporting. In welcoming the minister’s announcement today, may I say that the opposition hopes that in future the government will stop using Indigenous disadvantage as a political football. The only way we can improve the lot of our First Australians is to work together.

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