Bob Debus (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As the Prime Minister said in his ministerial statement on 11 February, Australians want to close the gap. In a survey by Reconciliation Australia, 91 per cent of non-Indigenous Australians and all the Indigenous people surveyed said that the relationship between the two peoples was important to this country. As the Prime Minister also said, it is 10 years ago this May when, to John Howard’s grim disapproval, a quarter of a million Australians walked across Sydney Harbour Bridge and three-quarters of a million people walked in other places around the country in support of reconciliation. I do remember saying at the time to Aboriginal people in my electorate who felt despondent about the attacks of right-wing commentators on the idea of an apology and about John Howard’s obvious support for their attacks on what was disdainfully called ‘the black armband view of history’—I remember saying to them: ‘Don’t worry. The modern history of Australia is not on the side of those people. Those massive marches show which way the country wants to go.’ I think I was right.

Two years ago the Prime Minister made his formal apology in the parliament, particularly to the stolen generations, and that was news around the world—news that was good for Australia’s reputation. On 11 February, the Prime Minister indicated in his statement that we had achieved for the first time a bipartisan commitment to closing the gap in life opportunities between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. We acknowledged at that time the failure of successive governments to provide adequate services to many Indigenous communities. We recognised that closing the gap would not take a few years but a few generations, and we showed that closing the gap was a national priority that should indeed be above partisan politics. I acknowledge the remarks of the member for Calare, who has preceded me, in that respect.

The subsequent national agreement between all the governments of Australia to make an investment of nearly $5 billion in Indigenous-specific national partnerships to change the circumstances of Aboriginal people in health, early childhood development, education and employment was made against background principles that are not so much newly understood—plenty of people have talked about them in various ways in the past—but principles that have never been so clearly articulated before as a matter of national government consensus. Governments must take responsibility for addressing past failures of policy. Aboriginal Australians must take responsibility for change in the lives of individuals, families and local communities. All Australians should take responsibility for improving the relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous citizens.

It would be very hard ever again to reproduce the drama or the depth of emotion felt across the country in offices and schools and in the street on the day of the apology. But the dramatic change of policy agreed in November 2008 by COAG is the practical, lasting consequence of that moment. It is a new thing for government to set measurable targets—of which there are six, covering life expectancy, infant mortality, early childhood and education, literacy and numeracy, year 12 attainment, and employment—against which to establish a program of investment based upon the best carefully assembled evidence and against which to establish a framework for evaluation and accountability for expenditures and to seek deliberately to walk together with the Aboriginal community and its leaders while this great enterprise is prosecuted.

The book published last year by the noted anthropologist Peter Sutton called The Politics of Suffering makes a very powerful critique of the liberal ideology that from the 1970s laid emphasis on self-determination, an idea that the problems of Aboriginal communities are the consequence of dispossession and discrimination, to be overcome almost entirely by policies to promote self-determination and self-management. He suggests that that approach permitted policymakers and administrators to avoid truthful acknowledgement of the dysfunction that in fact occurred in many communities over the last 30 years when self-determination failed.

Sutton’s arguments are confronting, not least for someone like me, who helped establish the first Aboriginal Legal Service in Redfern in the 1970s. However, I do believe that it is easy to underestimate the nuance and complexity of the circumstances of Aboriginal Australia in recent times. Indigenous communities are not homogenous, as the member for Calare has just been saying. I have recently seen a paper produced by the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning at the University of Technology in Sydney which shows there are quite dramatic differences in crime rates between the two similar villages of Wilcannia, which the member for Calare was mentioning, and Menindee, nearby in western New South Wales. The latter has a much lower crime rate, accompanied by much higher levels of cohesion and pride. The member for Calare has just spoken about Wilcannia and I cannot disagree with much of what he said. So it is important that under the Closing the Gap strategy Wilcannia is one of those priority communities that are to be provided with a business manager, and I accept that that business manager should perhaps think about exactly some of the things that the member has been saying.

During last year I visited places that were sinking in despair and addictive behaviour. It has to be acknowledged that there are plenty of communities where social circumstances, crime rates and levels of imprisonment have got worse in the last 20 years. On the other hand, I have seen the great hope that has accompanied the dramatic improvement in social conditions at Fitzroy Crossing in the Kimberley following the successful campaign by local Aboriginal women to restrict the sale of alcohol. I know that, under the influence of the Redfern-Waterloo Authority in Sydney, social and employment conditions for Aboriginal people in the notorious ghetto of Redfern are improving. There are plenty of communities that have had similar success in recent years, not to mention most encouraging indicators in the Cape York welfare reform trials.

It is often forgotten that while there are most particular problems associated with small and remote communities, half of all Aboriginal people live in New South Wales and Queensland alone and the largest single population is actually in the western suburbs of Sydney, where, I should point out, many schools with significant Aboriginal populations will benefit not only from the specific Closing the Gap measures but from the government’s $1.5 billion investment in 1,500 low socioeconomic status schools across the nation. Indeed, a total of 78,000 Indigenous students will so benefit. With the addition of the planned expansion of the innovative Stronger Smarter Leadership Program to support schools in more remote areas over the next four years, I believe we may reasonably expect success with our Closing the Gap educational targets.

I would like to dwell for a little time on the significance of the principles of community development and early intervention in the restoration of broken Aboriginal communities. These principles, quite strongly acknowledged in the Closing the gap report, have not always been favoured by our bureaucracies or indeed understood by them. However, they are well understood in the development aid community, in which I once worked, and they are well understood by institutions like the World Bank, which is concerned with the alleviation of poverty in developing countries. What I would call the community development approach certainly acknowledges the consequences of the history of loss and discrimination, but it also seeks to confront present destructive behaviour. Recently, Gregory Andrews, Chief Executive of the NGO Indigenous Community Volunteers, made a submission to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs in which he explained the causes of Indigenous disadvantage and dysfunction from this perspective. With admirable precision, he argued that the key causes were:

• Social and economic disadvantage.
• The transgenerational nature of disadvantage and dysfunction.
• The effects of passive welfare … when alcohol and drugs use are in epidemic proportions—

he is not against welfare but against this use of welfare—

• A lack of law and order in many Indigenous communities.
• Weak capacity and governance in many Indigenous communities.
• Perverse impacts from the well-meaning policies of self-determination that have led to buck-passing or disengagement by the state (until the recent positive changes) …
• Ad hoc and reactive policy and program responses from governments.
• A culture of permissive drug and alcohol use among many … people working with youth and communities.
• Mainstream ignorance and detachment—

that is, by mainstream Australian communities.

After such a list it was not surprising that Mr Andrews went on to say that these problems would only be overcome if communities, governments and NGOs acknowledged that these characteristics were also characteristics of communities in a fragile state and that international experience dealing with fragile states suggested that sustainable change would require the following things: robust and truthful analysis of the problems of any particular community; an acceptance that solutions would be found only over more than one generation; the establishment of realistic objectives and acceptance that the risk of failure was significant and that it might be necessary to have a few tries at a problem; the establishment of the same law and order conditions that exist in mainstream communities; working to ensure that as far as possible local people take ownership of development initiatives; ensuring that women are actually involved; ensuring that incentives are used to encourage positive change, not to support passivity; adopting whole-of-government and whole-of-community approaches; and employing and retaining the right people to do it. In this respect, I think government should give the closest examination to the appointment of the government business managers that are to be employed in the 29 priority communities that I have mentioned which have been chosen to benefit from the government’s remote service delivery initiative. This is a very important initiative in the context of the principles I have just been describing. I think the selection process for those business managers should be about as stringent as the process that the Antarctic Division goes through when it chooses a station leader for a remote outpost.

There is a final proposition that Greg Andrews has put forward—that it is necessary to maintain basic services and meet humanitarian needs while long-term development is underway. It is very important that a long-term development process not be impeded by the absence of a determination to ensure that the most basic of humanitarian needs continue to be met. And if they are not being met by the community then governments have to intervene and, with as much consultation as possible, provide services through an outside agency. To a degree that I believe to be significant, these principles are generally being acknowledged in the Closing the Gap program, and I think this does represent a profound change in the way that government is approaching this enormously difficult problem that exists within our society. I think it is reasonable to hope, especially if we are able to maintain a degree of bipartisanship in these matters, that our nation will indeed move forward.

I will take the opportunity to mention that today there is a very important event underway in the parliament. The Minister for Employment Participation, Mark Arbib, is hosting an Indigenous employment forum with some of the biggest corporations in the land. The Closing the gap report describes some extraordinarily encouraging developments in the area of business. Over the last few years, we have seen for the first time ever a serious engagement of big business in the issue of Aboriginal deprivation. Over one-quarter of the membership of the Business Council of Australia, including its 11 largest companies, have developed or are developing reconciliation action plans which cause them to make long-term commitments that include hiring Indigenous employees, using Indigenous contractors and offering school based traineeships and higher education scholarships.

In fewer than four years since those plans have been in operation, organisations adhering to them have created 6,000 positions for Indigenous people and filled 3,000 of them. Through the plan $750 million worth of contracts have been awarded to Indigenous businesses. The Business Council works with organisations like the Australian Indigenous Minority Supply Council, set up by my friend Michael McLeod and others, to engage for the first time with the business sector in assisting Aboriginal people to find economic independence. I must say that this is a most encouraging development. It is the kind of development that gives me hope that we may indeed finally be breaking the mould of despair that we have so often had to acknowledge in the recent generation. I commend the Prime Minister’s report to the House and to the nation. When many other things that we are doing in this parliament are long forgotten, this will not be.

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