Barry Haase (Kalgoorlie, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure, Roads and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

I thank you for the opportunity, Mr Deputy Speaker. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to speak this evening to the Social Security and Veterans’ Entitlements Legislation Amendment (Schooling Requirements) Bill 2008, because it is something that I have been deeply concerned with for my 10 years in this place. This bill is not before time. It ought to have been considered back in about 1967. And it is with some regret that I confess that not a lot of progress was made in the eight years prior to the last two, if I can put it that way. But, in the last stages of the previous government, the Hon. Mal Brough had the intestinal fortitude to take policies like this to the people, having been badgered by me for the previous eight years.

The problem that exists currently in rural and remote Western Australia—and I will speak passionately about that location on behalf of the constituents of the federal seat of Kalgoorlie—is a shortage of labour, and especially a shortage of unskilled and semiskilled labour. We are talking today about how we can possibly solve the labour shortage—perhaps by granting working visas to Pacific Islanders. We had hoped to have East Timorese as well, but that is not going to come to pass, it seems. And writ clearly in the public mind presently is that we are abusing the opportunity to work for Australians. But my experience indicates that nothing could be further from the truth.

In my electorate I have horticultural industry, I have vineyards, I have restaurants, I have roadhouses—I have a multitude of employers in the low-skilled and semiskilled areas screaming out for employees. I also have, in most of these areas where they are crying out for the opportunity to have an employee come through their door, a large number of able-bodied, very capable, Indigenous people. And very rarely do the two come together to form some sort of workable solution, because the majority of these unemployed people do not have the foundations of education and the ‘three R’s’ skills that we speak of. You will excuse me, Mr Deputy Speaker, for generalising to some degree. But the problems are most obvious where the situation is most extreme—that is logic. In Broome, I see restaurants with half of their tables roped off because they cannot get waiters and waitresses to serve their public. I see roadhouses that apologise for their atrocious service because they cannot get somebody to fill the pie-warmer and take the cash. The situation makes some of my small business people literally weep.

This bill will go some way, I believe, towards encouraging Aboriginal parents to be concerned about the attendance at school of their children. So many of my Aboriginal couples have no interest whatsoever in whether or not their children attend school, because there is nothing in it for them. They have no interest in education because they see the outcomes of education as having no significance. Certainly there are never going to be jobs provided to Indigenous people living in communities, because there is no commerce as such; therefore, why bother with all the rigmarole of sending kids to school, getting them out of the house, getting lunch for them, making sure they have clean clothes, making sure they go to sleep the night before and mucking around with homework and all the other humbugs? Education has never, ever had significance for a great number of my Indigenous parents in communities.

This legislation, hopefully, will change that. But the solution is not going to be achieved with just this single tool. I am very tired of educational situations in my communities where the principals of the schools spend the majority of their time rounding up students to get them into class and apologising to parents for having to do so. I am sick of seeing the destruction of any sort of discipline or rigour within the classroom because teachers have to pander to the students to keep them in the classroom—fearful of imposing any sort of discipline, or rigour, as I said, for fear the children will simply up and walk out because it is no longer entertaining and fun. I go into so many classrooms where I see kids with runny noses and skin sores, and scaly, infested dogs. Why are the dogs there? The teachers say, ‘If I shunt the dogs out, the kids are going to leave with the dogs.’ There is no imperative for those children to attend school. Truancy officers throughout the majority of my lands are a joke; they do not exist, or they finish up with a patch of thousands of square kilometres. It is unworkable. I am sick of teachers having to play the role of truancy officers.

We need to tie this legislation into a whole package, where the message is sent to communities and parents within those communities that it is imperative, for various reasons, that their children attend school and that that involves feeding and housing them satisfactorily and giving them an environment where class work can be kept up with because there is an opportunity to attend to homework.

When teachers go from a suburban or high-standard country educational facility to some of my lands, communities are absolutely gobsmacked at the fact that they do not really teach anything; they just spend their time rounding up kids, occupying them, breaking up fights and keeping the skin rivalries under control. At the end of the day, or should I say at the end of the perhaps 18 months or two years of the teacher’s residence in the community, the exchange of information and knowledge has been from the members of the community to the teacher, in the main. The teacher goes away having experienced a very unusual environment and they dine out on it for the rest of their life. What do they leave as far as knowledge of the three R’s in a competitive sense in their students? Very, very little. The teachers have a lot of fun learning the local language. But do they equip their charges for whom they are responsible for the next grade, for job training or for financial independence so there is a high level of self-esteem and mobility, so those people can go out into the cities around Australia, possibly the world, and attend tertiary institutions? No. The great failure is because there is no motivation presently for children to attend school. This bill, as I said, will go some way towards providing that motivation.

It is time we used a little bit of stick, but there needs to be consideration of a carrot as well. In what form? I am not qualified to suggest. But it has to be practical. It has to say to parents, ‘Yes, there is a reason to send your kids to school, because there is a future for your children.’ Those parents might just be given an understanding that in the future welfare will not be automatic or, dare I say, mandatory; that there will be an opportunity for financial independence and an increase in self-worth; and that there will be consideration by government that you cannot, as an Indigenous person in league with others around you, choose to live where you want to simply because of some cultural attachment and expect the taxpayer of Australia to support you in your lifestyle.

Pastoralists in the industry have gone out, taken up land, leased it and built all of the infrastructure out of their own pocket in the past. But we are faced with this expectation by Indigenous people—handed to them, I might add, by various governments over time—that they may simply elect to live where they wish and they will be sponsored for every requirement. Blessed be the day when we decide to send the message that there will be a point in time when, like every other Australian, Indigenous Australians will be expected to move to where there is employment.

Consider, if you will, why we have our towns and population centres in mainstream Australia. They are there because of some geographical feature. We have cities based around old shipping ports, cities based around resource rich areas and cities based around agriculturally rich areas, and we have huge bodies of people that are where they are in Central Australia and north-western Australia simply because they choose to be. There is no supporting job infrastructure; there is no commercial activity. The taxpayer of Australia pays.

We live in a wonderful nation where many are heard to say that, as Australians, we have a safety net called welfare, and you may choose to work or you may choose not to work. I do not subscribe to that. But I believe the situation that exists in so many of my Indigenous communities today is there simply because there has not been any insistence that real employment be found. That takes me back in the full loop—if you are not having to work, you do not particularly want to work and you are fed and watered with a fairly substantial welfare payment, why would you worry about having a job?

The day will come, I trust, when individuals will not automatically think of being on welfare as they mature but will consider that this existence may not be sustained forever and that there may be a requirement—as there is in the rest of the population of the nation—that one moves from a community, finds real work and is self-sufficient. When that day arrives, there will be true motivation for parents to say to their children, ‘You are going to be very poorly off indeed if you don’t go to school, get an education and be job trained and ready when the time comes so as to have a job, have financial independence and have improved self-esteem as a result.’

There have been many innovative ideas about getting children to school. Under the previous minister, Mr Andrews, there was a proposition to link welfare payments to school attendance that was put in place in Halls Creek in Western Australia in my electorate. This was a process that was very local, but word got out—goodness knows how—that if children did not go to school then their parents would not receive welfare payments. School attendance went from about 58 per cent to 85 per cent and that was a great thing. Additional classrooms had to be brought in to accommodate all these people. Very sadly, this program came to the attention of Canberra and it was analysed and found to be unacceptable, because one could not tie welfare payments—at that time—to school attendance. It was attacked by the Aboriginal Legal Service in Western Australia as being discriminatory on the basis of race. I would have loved to have seen it introduced in all schools, quite frankly. But that was what happened in that case.

It got so bad—even though, do not forget, that this meant so many more children were getting an education than had done previously—and it became so unpopular that the Western Australian education minister issued an edict to educational staff that no attendance figures were to be provided to the Commonwealth. That leads me to the question in relation to this bill: what are we going to do to guarantee the on-the-ground support from the education departments in the states and territories—especially my state—to make sure that there is a flow of information in relation to attendance? What guarantees do we have that this—what I see as the beneficial aspects of this legislation—will ever be practically put into place? I have not heard any strongly expressed point of view so far that that will be the case. There are so many unanswered questions as to how this is going to be applied exactly.

I have already said that I do not have all of the solutions that would make sure children attend school. But the one thing I am absolutely passionately emphatic about is that children must attend school. And parents must be involved in that process. There must be a degree of carrot as well as stick. In that regard, at Balgo Hills recently the experience was—or, should I say, the decision was taken—that, because there was such a problem of truancy and that was leading to petty crime around the community, something had to be done. The corporation—with elders’ leadership, of course—to their great credit, decided upon something quite innovative. They have the control of these communities. The decision was that the store would not open on any day until such time as a certain percentage of the total school enrolments had attended school. For the first few days when, by 10.30 in the morning, none of the parents could make a purchase at the shop because the shop was closed, there were a lot of kids very quickly rounded up and sent to school so that the basic commodities could be purchased. I commend the Balgo Hills community for such innovative ideas. I would recommend that leaders of many communities take a leaf out of their book—not perhaps in the use of the opening or closing of the community store but at least in thinking about the problem.

I would like for this government today to send a signal to communities that says, ‘The future may not be as the past has been. There is a future for your children in real employment, gaining meaningful jobs and maintaining personal self-esteem.’ I would like a message to be sent that says, ‘We will not impose upon the taxpayers of Australia, from now until day dot, to support the individual Australian who simply chooses with others to live where they want to live.’

I would love the opportunity to be fed and housed and accommodated—with sewerage, electricity and running water—where I would like to live. It would be a special spot, believe me! But I do not expect that as a right. Indigenous people today do because they have been led to believe that they can, they may and they ought. I believe changes have got to be made. The sooner those changes are made, the sooner the message is tweaked to give some indication that the future does not hold the agonies of the past and that there will be a requirement of mutual obligation, the sooner we will have a real future for Indigenous people in this country.

I have gone so far as to say in the past—and I will say it again—that to deny this future for children is in fact an act of genocide. If we do not think about the malaise that besets Indigenous people in remote communities today and do something about it quickly, we will lose those people and it will be at the feet of the government of the day.

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