Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Indigenous Health, Rural and Regional Health and Regional Service Delivery) Share this | Hansard source

I endorse the remarks made by my colleague, the member for Brisbane, for his contribution and particularly for the last points he made about Building the Education Revolution and the capital infrastructure expenditure. It is a matter of some moment to me because my own electorate—which of course as you know, Mr Deputy Speaker Secker, is all of the Northern Territory except Darwin—has some of the most impoverished people in Australia who have educational facilities that are really wanting. As a result of the Building the Education Revolution every school in my electorate will be substantially improved as a result. Of course, a substantial number of these projects, in fact the majority of them, are servicing Aboriginal communities.

Who have the poorest educational outcomes in Australia? Aboriginal people do and, indeed, Aboriginal people living in rural and remote parts of the Northern Territory. So it seems passing strange to me that the shadow spokesman on Indigenous affairs, a senator from the Northern Territory, chose to vote against improving educational outcomes for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, let alone for the broader population, as my colleague has said in terms of the opposition voting against every one of these initiatives.

So I want to endorse the remarks made by the member for Brisbane and say that they reflect broadly what the community thinks: how appalling it is to have this massive infrastructure investment going ahead, providing employment and business opportunities for Australians across the country and, most significantly, improving the educational infrastructure of the nation now and for future generations! Despite what the opposition have said about school halls, they will come to rue the day that they described this investment as investing in school halls. You only have to travel in your own electorate—and Mr Deputy Speaker Secker, I know you do because I spotted you there fairly recently—to see the impact of the investment on your own communities.

I am aware that this is a broad-ranging debate. It is one of the few occasions I get the opportunity to participate in this sort of debate. Prior to getting onto the details of the legislation before us, I want to talk about a number of people in the Northern Territory. I want to do this for a very particular reason: these are people who were friends of mine, and a very close friend in one case, and they have all passed away over the last three or four months. I want to mention them in this place.

The first is a woman, Carol Burke, who until she passed away in December worked with me every day I have been in this parliament, which is 20 years. She was here the first day I got elected, 23 years ago. Prior to that, she had worked for a Northern Territory government senator for nine years. So she worked for me for two decades, spending three decades in total of her adult life working for the Labor Party and Labor members of parliament. Unfortunately, she has passed away. Every member of this place knows how important their staff is. They watch your back. They look after your interests. When you are not at home, they are tilling the soil. I have to say that Carol was the epitome of loyalty and trustworthiness. She loved a good yarn and she had a great sense of humour. She was indeed a great friend of mine.

She was not a native of this place. She was actually born in England and brought up in New Zealand, where her father moved when he was in the Air Force. She had a very interesting adult life prior to working in the parliamentary sphere. She trained in office skills and management after she left school and then returned to England before securing a job with Schweppes in the then newly independent Zambia. It was in Zambia that she met her husband to be. Whilst there, she worked with the Zambian government, including as a personal assistant to two Zambian cabinet ministers, both of whom, interestingly, ended up in jail. I know her record in Australia was a lot better than that. Neither of the members she worked with in the Northern Territory has ended up in jail!

When she left Zambia she went to live in New Zealand for a short while and worked with her husband, Jim, who had secured work with the department of native affairs. When they came back from New Zealand they lived at Bamaga and Kowanyama in Queensland. Then they moved to the Northern Territory in 1976 and Carol took up work with Ted Robertson. She was, as I said, truly the heart of my office. Without her, I would not be here; it is as simple as that. She was a Catholic, so she may well be listening, and I do want to say how much we loved her and how much we miss her. She had an unprecedented knowledge of politics, bureaucracy and government processes. She cared for everyone regardless of their background and of who they were. In the Northern Territory we have people who are called long-grassers. They are not always, though generally, Aboriginal people who live it rough and who are sometimes on the grog. On more than one occasion she would jump to their defence when she saw a member of the constabulary approaching. She was a very, very fine woman. Carol died at the young age of 61 from liver failure. She was survived by her husband, Jim Burke. Unfortunately, they had no children.

The second person I want to refer to is another very, very fine woman: Margaret ‘Peg’ Nelson. Peg’s husband was a former member for the Northern Territory in this place, and his father was the first member for the Northern Territory in this place. Both were Labor members of parliament. Peg died recently, on 2 February, at the age of 96. She lived a very full life. Thinking about her life, I find it difficult to explain to someone who lives in Sydney or Melbourne what it is like to live in the bush. But just think about this. Peg’s father, Louis Bloomfield, was a ‘horseman’—a term from the last century—who lived in the Finke area of the Northern Territory at the turn of the 20th century. Her mother was a woman by the name of Lillian Kunoff. When they married they bought Love’s Creek Station, at Ross River, east of Alice Springs, and bred horses for the Indian army. Think about it.

Peg was born in September 1913 at Oodnadatta, in northern South Australia, which was three weeks by horseback from Alice Springs—a long way. Lou and Lil had three children: Peg, Jean and Harry. Peg grew up with many of the pastoral families whose names are prominent in Central Australia. Think about this place, think about us, think about what we do, think about our communication systems—and think about Peg as a small girl growing up in Central Australia. They had no air-conditioning and she was living reasonably rough. She was a very accomplished horse rider herself. In fact, she was a jockey at many picnic races, which are still popular.

Peg traversed a century of Territory life. She was born two years after South Australia gave the Territory back to the Commonwealth to look after. It was back then—and think about this—that there was a promise of completing the Alice Springs to Darwin railway, which, as we know, was only finished in the last decade. During her life, Peg saw the first plane land in the township of Stuart, as Alice Springs was then known. She married Jock Nelson in 1934. The couple moved to Tennant Creek, where Jock operated the butcher’s shop. He later worked sinking bores, before joining the Army during the Second World War and serving in the Top End. During that time, Peg worked for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. After the war, Peg and Jock started Stuart and Lloyds and the Dalgety agency in Alice Springs.

Peg was integrally involved in public life in the Northern Territory in part because of her partner. Jock was a member of the Legislative Council for the seat of Stuart from 1947, before being a member of the House of Representatives between 1949 and 1966. He was the first Mayor of Alice Springs in 1971 and was Administrator of the Northern Territory in 1973. Peg was involved in many organisations: the CWA, the Alice Springs Memorial Club, the Alice Springs Netball Association and the Red Cross. She was a very proud member of the Labor Party. For me, she was a person who really counted. If you tweaked her ear—and she was a bit deaf—she would say, ‘Listen, my son, what’re you up to?’ She would make sure that she passed her point of view on to me. She was a great woman, a gentle woman, who touched many lives. She was survived by her daughters, Pat and Lowan, both of whom live in South Australia.

The third person I want to refer to is someone of more recent vintage, someone I knew extremely well, someone who made a great contribution to the education scene in the Northern Territory and someone who I know would have been appalled at the lack of support by the opposition for the government’s education reform initiatives. This person is Greg Jarvis. He was born in Bowral and educated at Bowral primary and high schools. He got his diploma of education here in Canberra. He began teaching in the Northern Territory in 1979 on Groote Eylandt. He subsequently taught at Gapuwiyak, Milingimbi and Maningrida—names which may be unfamiliar to many people, but Gapuwiyak, Milingimbi and Maningrida, where he was principal, are in Arnhem Land. He had a very strong personality but he was a very fair man, who thought very deeply about his job and was greatly committed to it. He later moved to Darwin, where he was principal of Malak Primary School and then Moulden Primary School. He was a long-time member of the ALP and the Australian Education Union. It was in that context that I met him. I was a very active union member in the Australian Education Union, then the Northern Territory Teachers Federation. In his later years he became a member of Darwin City Council and was alderman for the Chan ward—for the Greens, as it happens. This man made an extraordinary contribution to education in the Northern Territory and to community life. He is survived by his wife, Trish Joy, and their daughter, Thea. My condolences go to them. He was buried only a week or so ago.

I mention those people because we do not often get an opportunity to talk in this place about people who matter to us. These people mattered to me for a range of reasons. They were outstanding citizens of this country. When we think about public policy and the contributions we each make in this place in public policy debates, we are in a sense, as we all know, talking on behalf of all our constituents and representing their interests. When we participate in debates about appropriation bills, we can get carried away with the minutiae of the bill. Let’s be clear about it, most of our constituents do not read the minutiae of bills, but they are concerned about the direction of our policies and about the outcomes that will be achieved as a result of what we do in this place.

I want to finish by referring to one element of the legislation. Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2009-2010 includes funding for small-scale renewable energy systems. There are many innovative and important projects in my electorate, including one at Gawa, which is a small outstation community of Galiwinku, Elcho Island. It was started in 1986, by Ngulpurray and his daughter Kathy Guthadjaka. A number of people—26 men, women and children—cut a 10-kilometre road, using axes, shovels and fire. It took six months. This is the bush. This is not Tuggeranong, where you get your bitumen laid. This is the bush. Kathy began a school in this community in the 1990s under a tarp. Sometimes, from what you hear in this place, you would think Aboriginal people do not have an interest in education. This is a very fine example of the desire of Aboriginal people who live on outstations in the Northern Territory to have their kids educated.

They had a problem with the diesel generator in the community because it cost them a lot of dough, for a start, and it was too expensive to run at night. It cost them 80 grand per year in fuel. Ultimately, after many trials and tribulations, and working with the NT Christian Schools Association, they designed a 24-metre wind tower and turbine. With the help of a Danish company, the Wind Factory, the project was developed to its completion and commissioned on 27 November 2009. What was the result of this? Cheap, efficient, sustainable energy, 24 hours a day. This is a small Aboriginal community in the Top End of the Northern Territory, a very isolated bush community, but people saw the opportunity and with the assistance of outside help were able to build this generating system. And what the outcome has meant, of course, is that the community is thriving. In a very small school, over 60 kids are now enrolled and they have attendance rates of 80 per cent. Six students have completed their HSC and one is working as a police officer at Galiwinku.

When asked what the turbine and the 24-hour power means to her community, Kathy says that the main thing is the school will have extra money to spend in the classroom instead of on diesel and everyone now sleeps well—as you can imagine. I can. It is a very, very tough life, but here we have a small community that we need to congratulate. We need to recognise the work of Kathy and the Gawa community, the NT Christian Schools Association and its principal, Geoff Bateman, because what they have shown is true leadership. When we talk who will benefit from the government investments announced in the budget and then recently through the process of the Building the Education Revolution, it is these people. Yet the opposition opposed it. As I said at the outset, what a shame it is that the opposition spokesman on Indigenous affairs, who is a senator from the Northern Territory, would oppose an investment in a school like this.

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