Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I congratulate the member for Solomon on his genuine interest in the constituents he represents and in the broader Indigenous population. Let me say of the AFL that I am not exactly sure that there is a degree of altruism in their giving opportunities to Aboriginal footballers; it so happens they are very good at the game. Let me also make a comment in passing, and a reference to the shadow parliamentary secretary for energy, who is at the table, about the efforts of Gerard Neesham in the early stages—and Mr Randall, the member for Canning, also prosecuted this—in gaining Commonwealth grants for the program: ‘If you go to school, you can play in the footy team.’

I have some serious things I want to say, but I might just add while I am on these ‘anecdotal facts’ that when I went to Carnarvon in 1958 we had three football teams and the East Carnarvon team was 90 per cent Aboriginal. It may seem a funny thing to the member for Solomon, who has been a football coach, that in those days we played to position—and your coach gave you a nice old bollocking if you were in the back pocket and were seen running up the ground to try to kick at goal. I used to make the odd contribution—I was very ineffectively as a footballer, I might add. But, as the president of the Warriors football club, if we were short I had to play. But we always used to laugh at East Carnarvon because they used to run up and down the ground following the ball wherever it went, and we would say, ‘That’s not football!’ Of course, today that is the way the game is played. I want to make another point there, and that is that in all sectors of society we should always give people the opportunity to be good at what they are good at. You just cannot turn people into things they may not be, but our Indigenous people will excel in many areas of sport, as Cathy Freeman and others have demonstrated, and there should be a strong effort to ensure that they get the opportunity to achieve that potential.

I could not go through a whole speech without a little bit of political irony. I note that the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs said in her second reading speech on this Coordinator-General for Remote Indigenous Services Bill 2009 that:

… this bill will give the coordinator-general the powers:

to require people to provide information and/or documents;

to require people to attend meetings; and

to request assistance from Commonwealth, state and territory agencies.

Those first two items sound a bit like another piece of legislation that is being hotly contested at the moment when it is applied, of course, to trade unions. As I said, I just could not avoid the irony of that circumstance, and I understand and hope there is a difference.

I want to take this opportunity in speaking on this legislation to make a point that the member for Solomon actually put into words: getting the money on the ground. This is the challenge for the coordinator: is this another layer of bureaucracy that consumes money that would be better on the ground? And that question arises in many respects. For example, I have been a long-time critic of the type of house that we build for Aboriginal people. We seem to think we do them a favour by giving them a European design because we want to give them equality with us. I know a lot of the $800 million mentioned has gone to transportable homes; furthermore, they in themselves, by the nature of their fabrication, are not suitable. I have proposed to our shadow minister that, instead of him having another Pollie Pedal, we have a pollie house-building exercise, because there are methods of construction which can be easily taught to people in remote communities, using a lot of remote area equipment, that would provide very adequate housing of a robust nature and of a design, to my mind, that better accommodates the housing desires of people in remote communities, but I will go no further into that.

In the time available to me I want to touch on some issues from our history. I took my wife as a very young person to the town of Carnarvon in 1958. That was nine years before a constitutional amendment gave any power whatsoever to the Australian parliament, in fact the parliament was forbidden, to pass laws relevant to Aboriginal people. It was forbidden to spend any money in that area. The peculiarity was that the Aboriginal people I knew at that stage were hugely self-reliant, partially, I guess, through neglect. They did not have a nanny state of any nature. They had some supervision by state agencies. They even had to apply for citizenship, which I always thought was pretty outrageous. But what did these people do? They all had jobs. They were very, very competent workers. And they did have houses, they paid rent for them and they got them, in competition with white people and others, as residents of the community.

When the Western Australian Main Roads Department constructed the North-West Coastal Highway from just north of Geraldton all the way to Onslow, the third in charge was an Aboriginal man and good friend of mine. I ended up having a business hiring out graders and I was very happy to get some of those Aboriginal people to drive my graders and other forms of earth-moving equipment. And, yes, out there on the pastoral properties were communities. They lived on the pastoral property as a community and as a labour pool, but they had employment.

Then along came a Liberal government—so I am not applying this criticism on a party basis—and, with the best goodwill in the world, got a constitutional amendment that was supported by something like 97 per cent of the electorate, and my vote was yes also, to give the Australian parliament a responsibility and the capacity to assist these people. I believe that, one after another, we have failed. This legislation is probably another recognition of that fact, that we are uncoordinated et cetera, but it is another process of top-down funding.

I have a paper, and the member for Solomon might want to read it some time, presented to John Howard—after he closed down ATSIC—by every member of the coalition who had a significant Indigenous population within their electorate. We referred in that paper to bottom-up funding. It is interesting if not just for the simple arithmetic alone. If the total expenditure of this parliament were $3 billion on Aboriginal matters, although I think it would be closer to $4 billion these days, and you shared that equally on the basis of the 300 identified language areas, the grant to each of those bodies in average terms—of course the amounts would be much greater for some and much less for others—would be $10 million per language area, and you could then divide that up as you like. The fundamental issue of our proposal was to do as is done with local government whereby the financial assistance grants are not distributed by this parliament, so it is not about going to your friendly local member of parliament to get you a bit more. This parliament puts a one-line item in the budget and the federal Grants Commission, on this occasion, distributes that on a needs basis to the states and then in this case it goes through—and it would be unnecessary in terms of this parliament—what the states have. A state local government grants commission—and I was one of the original persons on that—distributes all of the money on a needs basis.

Our proposal went further, and I am pretty sure the member for Solomon will not disagree with me on the management responsibilities that we give to Aboriginal people. All those Main Roads workers in those days used to get paid by cheque and my hotel was the bank. On Thursdays we had to have a very large amount of cash for when these people brought their cheques in and got them cashed. We also had to have a large amount of small-denomination notes, because these hardworking people, managing their own affairs without any government assistance, knew that when they got out the door there would be a few hard-up rellies wanting them to give them money. They had an obligation to give it and they managed that by having small-denomination notes. That is not a criticism; that is a fact of life. When asking these people to manage taxpayers’ money, we must always ensure they are protected from a cultural fact of life.

So we said, having decided that all moneys would be distributed by the federal Grants Commission on a needs basis according to whatever was an appropriate formula, that it would be managed at the grassroots level by an Aboriginal board of trust. We used those words advisedly because there were to be trustees and we suggested that they be, in most cases, the local government authority which already had a high level of prudential legislation applicable to its management. We then looked at the opportunity of how you would spend that money. It was our view that that body would be buying services from all echelons, including the state and federal governments, as they needed them. If it were the view of a community that an additional police officer was a need or that upgrading a police station was a need, they could fund it from that money. More particularly, if they thought they needed some public health nurses, they could hire them from state authorities or from, in our state, the charitable agency called Silverchain. Furthermore, we said they should have the power to say to those service providers, ‘We want you to create a couple of training positions which we will also fund.’ So there would be a process over time of training in all sorts of skills being achieved. Of course they would have a right to buy housing and of course they would have a right to do many other things. The decision would be theirs with appropriate assistance in doing so. They would not be paid large salaries. They would be paid a meeting fee and whatever costs were associated with a meeting to decide how the money should be spent.

I am prepared to bet that you would get a lot better outcomes from that. But above all, member for Solomon, just think of the money that these people spend from time to time to get a grant. They actually have to go and get consultants to get their money, which we have provided in the budgets in this place. I am saying that with those communities, however they were structured—and we used the language areas but it was evidenced that those boundaries could have been adjusted somewhat to be more sensible—the whole idea was to give people some power over the way that money was spent and I think then you would not need a coordinator. By the way, as far as I was concerned, an Aboriginal legal service would survive on how many customers they got from those groups, as would land council services and others. In other words, if you thought locally known solicitors would provide better representation for your group in whatever area—not as occurred in the Kimberley recently where they killed off a negotiation without even saying what the final offer was—then you would have the opportunity to buy services from those people. Think of the money: if we are dividing $4 billion by 300 community areas, it is a lot more than $10 million per group on average. I put that forward as I consider this process brought into this House, with all the goodwill in the world, as an admission of failure to date—a failure as much administered by our side of the House as by the other. Let me say that when we took that proposal I have outlined to Mr Howard he would not have a bar of it, which shows the problem of having prime ministers coming from Sydney: they do not understand and, unfortunately, they still believe that this is the dominant parliament to assist these people.

The money—to quote the member for Solomon—needs to get on the ground. After having taken his salary and the salaries of his staff out of this budget amount, which we allocate in various lumps and in a variety of ways, maybe the coordinator will achieve that on this occasion. With the best of goodwill, I doubt it. The problem is top-down funding and this is another process of top-down funding. The member for Solomon is a person who might want to get a copy of this and have a look at it. You can have variations of the scheme, but my fundamental view is that there is no solution other than to give people the first decision about how they should spend their money. You want to create scholarships and send some of the young kids to better schools or you want to hire a truancy officer? All of those things should be their responsibility and their first choice. I think those people exist in those communities and the advice they might get from the local shire clerk, as part of that system, would be beneficial.

I do not go back to Carnarvon very often nowadays, but after I left someone up there decided they wanted an interpretative centre. From my recollection, that community had grown a long way away from Aboriginal culture. There was quite a significant infusion of Asian bloodlines that had occurred over the century. But they were going to have an interpretative centre. They spent $4 million on it while there were still inadequacies in housing and education. It has never opened because, after building it, they could not decide who was going to run it. We know why—it goes down to family issues. I think that has got to be better understood.

I do not oppose this legislation. The shadow minister gave it a glowing reference. I understand that the government has done this in the hope that it can make things better. But, until this parliament decides in a bipartisan fashion that the whole funding structure is wrong and that the involvement of federal parliament has brought no good to the Aboriginal people, I think we will go on passing similar laws, introducing more public servants and bleeding more of the funds away from the grassroots and it will not succeed. I do not want to predict that on this occasion but I think that it is time that we revisited the whole program and took that local government example as a basis for distributing the money to the people who need it most and allow them to decide how it should be expended, from community to community. The people of Redfern are going to have a different view on that than the people of Yuendumu.

In closing, substance abuse and all these things are first driven by idleness—although I do not want to make idleness a dirty word. Regarding children, my attitude always was that, if they were not so tired by 6 o’clock that they needed to go to bed, there was a chance that they would want to go out and get into trouble. The original lifestyle of the Aboriginal people was such that they spent all day hunting and gathering. They were a very fit people and very much involved. We come along and replace the kangaroo with the government store. Of course, they have extra time, and it is a great tragedy that in many cases they have consequently resorted to substance abuse. We have got to create environments where the people have got something to do. I agree with the member for Solomon that we should give them more sporting opportunities and things of that nature—in which they are very capable—or else we are just leaving them to missed opportunities.

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