Jim Turnour (Leichhardt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to talk about the report that has been tabled by our chair, the Hon. Bob Debus, and to thank him for his leadership of the committee. Everybody’s business is the report of an inquiry into remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community stores. It is an inquiry that I spoke to Minister Macklin and the former chair, Richard Marles, about last year, and we were very pleased to see the reference come to the committee.

As the representative of the great electorate of Leichhardt, which includes Cairns, Cape York and the Torres Strait, I have a particular responsibility to represent Indigenous people in this country. Around 8,000 in the Torres Strait and 12,000 in Cape York Peninsula gives a total population of 20,000 Indigenous people in remote communities in my electorate alone, as well as the communities in Cairns. I would like to recognise the traditional owners and the elders of those areas as well as those of the other lands that we are speaking about today and thank them for welcoming us to those Queensland communities and the communities in the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia that we visited during the period of this inquiry.

This is a particularly important inquiry for remote communities because, as we know, closing the gap is a government priority, and going to that are health issues. We have an 18-year gap in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, and obviously health is a critical part of that. Having access to good-quality, nutritious food is part of that. Often we see government investing in new preventative health services, in hospitals or in health clinics, but critical to closing that gap and making a difference is the availability of foodstuffs, and this inquiry goes to the heart of that issue, which is very much the availability and supply of them in stores. There were 112 submissions to the inquiry and we travelled extensively, visiting remote communities all across the country.

Health flows onto cost of living. You can have available foods in these communities—and there is a real issue with the availability of foods—but they also have to be affordable. The committee looked at those issues and we had a range of submissions on that, particularly in my electorate from areas in the Torres Strait and also in Cape York Peninsula. The other area that we looked around during the inquiry in a general sense was the issue of governance. We made some specific recommendations around Outback Stores, but the whole issue of governance of remote Indigenous stores and the importance of that was also discussed during the inquiry, and a number of recommendations came down in relation to that.

Central to what we heard regularly, whether it was through submissions or whether it was through presentations to the committee, was the importance of the management of the local store and the engagement of the store manager with the local community. When we were in the Torres Strait we heard some really poor examples of engagement by the IBIS stores in the community. I am pleased to hear, on visiting the Torres Strait subsequent to this inquiry, that there have been some changes with a new CEO coming into IBIS, and I believe there is a new culture developing in terms of engagement with that local community.

Similarly, in my electorate in Leichhardt, some of the feedback that we heard was that there is a well-functioning store in Aurukun run by Island and Cape. Concerns were raised in Kowanyama about the Queensland government-run store, which is in real need, about centralised buying. We need to make sure that store managers are properly engaged with their communities if these stores are to function correctly. There were recommendations made to that effect in this report. The engagement of the community store manager with the community is critical.

If we go back from the store, the supply chain is critically important to the supply of fresh fruit and vegetables and other goods to these stores. We have made a number of recommendations for the supply chain. I will come to them in a second. As I said earlier, cost of living is critically important as well. You can have fresh fruit and vegetables available and regularly, but they need to be affordable, and the real issues are cost of living—particularly in remote communities—and governance.

The committee made 33 recommendations as part of its report. I am going to jump around a little bit in the order of these recommendations, but I am going to talk about them in relation to the importance from the point of view of communities. Committee recommendation 13 was that the Australian government establish a national remote Indigenous food supply chain coordination office. We were talking about the importance of the store manager in the community, but the supply chain is critically important. What we heard is that there are issues and variations in the quality of the supply chain to remote Indigenous stores. We saw that there were some advantages to collective buying at a reasonable level. Outback Stores, ALPA Stores and Ibis have some capacity to do that, but there are some individual stores that would benefit from a national office that would work with them to pull together bulk buying and look at how they can support their supply chains. We made a recommendation about the minister establishing a national supply chain coordination office to work on those issues.

There are some new technologies to monitor cold stores as they travel across the supply chain, and we thought it was important that those technologies not just be available to corporate stores but be worked through with some of the smaller community stores and privately run stores. We want to make sure that technology is available to those stores. Similarly, the coordination office would have an important role not in terms of bringing groups together to look at their supply chain but to make sure they were utilising the most up-to-date technology.

The other supply chain issue that came up regularly with the committee was the increase in the cost of travelling and taking food along the supply chain and the impact that had on costs at the store level. With particular regard to the Torres Strait, we made a recommendation that the committee, following on from the assessment from a national supply chain coordination office, look at the options of a freight subsidy of the Torres Strait, recognising that in Tasmania there is a significant subsidy to freight across the Bass Strait. It is for different economic reasons; Tasmania is disconnected from the mainland and there are some competitive trade disadvantages there, while the Torres Strait island communities, similar to Tasmania, are disconnected from the mainland, but they are at the very end of a barge system in which you often have to have fruit and vegetables go from down south to Cairns, then on to Horn Island and then the outer islands. We felt it was critically important that this supply chain be looked at technically and that we also advise that down the track the minister and the office look at a freight subsidy to the Torres Strait specifically to address issues around cost of living.

There was a recognition as part of the discussion of freight, though, that it was not just freight that made food expensive in remote community stores, and I encourage people to read the report and the evidence given there. Obviously, refrigeration equipment costs—if they break down people need to be flown out to communities; they often find out what is wrong with it and have to order the part—have a range of back and forth that can go on with the maintenance in the stores. That can add to the cost levels. Food can sometimes have to be thrown out, so there is increased cost with the supply of that food, because not as much of it can be utilised if it arrives in poor quality. These were the recommendations focusing on the supply chain and ensuring that we do not have wastage of food, but there are other issues around the cost flow-through. Freight is important, but other issues include maintenance of stores and the fact that you can have people from outside who not only need to be employed in the store but also need housing and a range of other support mechanisms.

Another critical recommendation that flows from that is the issue of some stores having good-quality infrastructure. Effectively, the federal government invested extensively in Outback Stores to provide them with the capacity to upgrade infrastructure in stores following the Northern Territory intervention. We felt it was important that community stores and other stores also had the opportunity to access a government fund that would improve community store infrastructure, because having good-quality fridges and other sorts of presentation facilities in stores keeps that food better in the store and also makes it much more attractive to community members making purchases. So a store infrastructure fund was also one of the recommendations that we made in relation to this inquiry.

Another issue we made recommendations about concerning access to fresh and good quality food was that of growing local produce and the availability of local produce. In the Torres Strait the federal Rudd government is investing in a program called You, Me and Gardens, through the Torres Strait Regional Authority, and we felt that there was a real opportunity in some situations for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to grow their own food and look to see if that can be linked to marketing not only into the stores but also directly into the communities. We wanted to make sure that was also picked up in the committee’s recommendations.

I will move on to some of the governance issues. One of the issues handed down to us as a committee was to look specifically into Outback Stores. We have already heard the committee chair talk about the fact that we have made some recommendations on the registration of stores and their corporate governance. Outback Stores were part of the inquiry’s terms of reference, but we felt it was of particular importance that the federal government and the minister did not just consider one particular model as the right way to go. Outback Stores are doing a good job—we have heard positive feedback from communities about their work—but there are also good quality community stores and privately owned stores out there. We believe that the government needs to consider an approach to community stores that looks at ensuring, as part of government policy, innovative approaches that enable individual communities to meet their needs for fresh fruit and vegetables. Simply saying that Outback Stores are the best model and we should therefore provide government funding through Outback Stores was not necessarily the result of the inquiry or the recommendation that we made.

The committee made a number of recommendations on Outback Stores, including that they should have Indigenous representation on their board and nutritionists on their board, recognising the need for clarification of roles in the delivery of commercially viable stores. We heard evidence that there are a selection of stores that are not currently commercially viable, and the government is effectively providing subsidies through FaHCSIA to support those stores. We wanted to make sure there was not some confusion in the longer term governance of Outback Stores in those two areas. Particularly for those stores where there is not necessarily sustainability at the moment, we thought that, rather than simply saying that was the responsibility of Outback Stores, in the longer term government should engage with those communities and look at how it can work with those communities with a long-term approach on innovative ways to deliver fresh fruit, vegies and produce in store to those communities. For example, in Western Australia there was a store that was meeting community needs by getting someone to drive out once a week to the community, having purchased goods in Kununurra. That was the way that local community met their needs.

There were other hub-and-spoke models that we thought were effective that were being run out in particular communities. We thought it was important that, through government policy and government regulation, we enable different communities to look at different models to meet their own particular needs. If we are going to build up local communities, and we need to make sure government regulation allows them to have the capacity to meet their own needs and be empowered. For the longer term, we have made a number of recommendations on licensing so that, if the government does move to a national licensing framework, it ensures that these innovative hub-and-spoke models—community supported, owned and managed stores—are not put at a disadvantage in relation to corporate stores or Outback Stores. There are a range of recommendations about that.

In my closing remarks I would like to thank once again the traditional owners and elders of the communities we met. I would like to particularly thank some of those in my electorate: the Chair of the Torres Strait Regional Authority, Toshi Kris, who presented to the committee; Pedro Stephens, the Mayor of the Torres Shire Council; Councillor Fred Gela, the Mayor of the Torres Strait Island Regional Council, who also presented to the committee; Councillor Wayne Givara from Badu Island Council; Councillor John Morsby; Councillor Ron Day from Mer; as well as councillors in Cape York: Joseph Elu, Neville Pootchemunka and Tommy Hudson from those communities. These people made us so welcome in my electorate. I also thank those people from other parts of Australia who made us so welcome.

I would also like to thank the chair, the Hon. Bob Debus, and the former chair, Richard Marles, for the support that they provided throughout the preparation of the report and the hearings. I thank the secretariat, including Ms Anna Dacre and Ms Sharon Bryant, who led the secretariat well; inquiry secretaries Ms Susan Cardell and Ms Rebecca Gordon; research officer Ms Loes Slattery; and office manager Ms Claire Young. I thank them all for the work that they have done. I really do recommend this report to members from remote communities.

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