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

The Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010 is legislation that obviously will be supported by all persons in the House. It recognises the practical aspects of assisting Indigenous or Aboriginal people. It recognises that they have inherent sporting skills. It recognises the professionalism of sport in this day and age—in other words sport is a respectable means of earning a living, which should always be the target of our education system.

My purpose originally is to draw to the attention of the House why these provisions have been recognised by the government and are eventually being acted upon. Most of this was proven originally by the one-time coach—I think the first—of the Fremantle Dockers, Gerard Neesham. He was a very capable footballer in his own right and someone who consequently gained the respect of young people whose focus on sporting heroes is well understood. The reality is that Gerard, at his own initiative, went down to the Clontarf Boys Home—where a school was established and where the school population was primarily Indigenous—and started a football team. There was a simple rule for those who wanted to play in that football team: they had to be at school at nine o’clock and participate until closing time. So it was not a compulsion but an incentive for those young people who wanted to play sport.

They knew and understood how other kids they knew had risen to the peak of sporting attainment, particularly—as it is in Western Australia and as it was with Neesham—in the Australian Football League. It is probably where Indigenous people, Aboriginals, excel, and I think that might be because there is a higher degree of skill required in AFL as compared to just brute strength or the ability to run fast enough in a straight line. As we see as we watch these games from time to time, the ability of those people to have the football on a string is amazing. They seem to be able to anticipate which way it is going to bounce and many other things, which gives them a very high degree of skill and excellence in those sports. The Neesham initiative has expanded and is now known as the Clontarf Foundation. It has activities throughout Western Australia and the Northern Territory, and probably in other parts of Australia.

This bill, as the second reading speech advises, amends the table in a subsection 14B(1) of the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000 to include additional funding for the Sporting Chance Program in order to bring it into the Commonwealth suite of targeted assistance measures and to adjust the 2010-12 appropriations agreed as part of the new federal financial relations network. That, as I said, is the initiative of government, and this will be money well spent.

It is a bit of a change because it is my observation, having been closely associated with Aboriginal people for 50 years, that much of the moneys that the Australian parliament has allocated since 1967 have not been to the benefit of Aboriginal people, particularly the youth. It has been a substantial benefit to people whom I refer to as the Aboriginal elite: those that got an education in mission schools to which they had been delivered—some say stolen—and were able to participate in the funding arrangements. Please remember that, prior to 1967, the Australian parliament was forbidden by the Constitution to make any provisions for Aboriginal people.

It is a great misfortune, considering the billions that have been allocated since, to look around and see the disadvantage that still exists with those people. I believe it has increased, not decreased, since that time. When I commenced my close association with the town of Carnarvon in 1958, where 37 per cent of the population were Aboriginal, they were all employed. They were employed because they were not even eligible for unemployment benefits under the peculiarities of the Constitution. They were wards of the state. They made a major contribution to the construction of the North West Coastal Highway between Northampton and Onslow, or in the vicinity of Onslow, during that period. They were skilled grader drivers and truck drivers. They had all those skills, and in fact the third-in-charge of that program was Aboriginal. He was highly regarded and frequently referred to rather than the two university-qualified engineers who held the positions above him. This bloke just knew how to build roads, and, I might add, in quite unusual circumstances. The usual forms of road base were not available throughout that road distance. The road base was a sand-clay mix—and it was very effective—mainly because the normal gravel deposits that we expect to find around Australia did not exist along that route.

So these people could do all that. Of course, many of them chose to remain in their Aboriginals lands, which had become pastoral properties. For a variety of quite sensible reasons they tended to locate their living arrangements close to the pastoral homestead. As such, they were a highly skilled labour pool for the pastoralists. We have heard all the stories of how they were treated as slave labour and all those sorts of things. They were paid the award when they worked, and, whilst their circumstances were not what we understand today to be appropriate in terms of housing and things of that nature, theirs was a township, and they were frequently assisted by the pastoralists with additional food supplies and things of that nature—notwithstanding that they had a free run of the property to do the hunting and gathering that had been their practice prior to the arrival of the colonists, if you like.

All of these matters point to the fact that, when the Australian parliament became involved, with the best will in the world, it did not know what it was talking about and it encouraged these people to be mendicant. Today, we have a piece of legislation that recognizes the high sporting skills and capacity of these people and that sport is as good a form of employment as any other. But, without a basic education at the end, the funds they have accumulated during their relatively short period as elite athletes can be dissipated, and of course they can be subject to fraud and corruption. So the education component is equally important to developing these people’s skills so that they can reach the top in elite sport, and they do so with ease, and that is to the credit.

The point I wish to make in the first instance is that the fact this is termed the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act must never neglect the Neesham principle that if you want to be in the footy team you have to be at school for the full working day. There must be the opportunity to learn. There are adequate examples around the place of some of these young people having very successful careers after their period as elite sportsmen or sportswomen. One might refer to Cathy Freeman, a heroine in our society. Evonne Goolagong Cawley is another in the sport of tennis. The skills and natural skills across most sports are the same.

Having made these points and having welcomed this government initiative, I repeat how tragic the Australian parliament’s efforts and this government’s efforts have been in addressing the housing needs of people whom I fear should not be encouraged to stay on tribal lands in our modern society, because hunting and gathering is no longer accepted in the Australian context as being adequate for a person’s sustenance. We say to them—and I have an ironic anecdote I might refer to in a minute—‘These are your traditional lands, but if you don’t stay on them you might lose them.’ I do not know that they would, but by staying there they are left in an environment where there is no sport and no education of consequence because the kids do not go to the schooling that is offered. Their living standards deteriorate. The standard of the accommodation provided by the Australian government deteriorates and it deteriorates primarily because of the methods of construction. They are not suitable.

I was delighted to have a letter published by the Australian newspaper—it does not happen very often—the day after it ran a big article about another failure in a housing construction program for Indigenous people. There was a large coloured photograph of a house that was under construction. From the framework, it looked to have a single glass window, which would have been three or four metres wide and probably two or three metres high. Why should you not have that much glass in these sorts of houses? Firstly, glass is too fragile but, more importantly, it emits heat. We all know about the effects of a glasshouse on vegetables and crops. It is not a good idea. Secondly, the structure required expert tradesmen who can make a lot of money in the cities and want twice as much to go to remote areas and construct that sort of housing. Furthermore, once the house’s framing is up you put plasterboard type products on the walls. They are not durable. They are too easily damaged. I read with sadness the other day of a woman photographed in her house, which was a shambles, who advised that her house had been broken into and trashed while she had been away. She had gone somewhere, for whatever reason, and had come back to find that this had occurred to her house. It reflects on her as the tenant, and that is extremely sad, but one does not have to go very far to see the status of housing that was built with good intent.

Thirdly, the basic roof design of the house came from Europe. This is ideal when it is snowing for half the year, but it lacks natural flowthrough of air, which provides the best form of air conditioning. Houses which accommodate a semi-open space as the preferred means of living and where the benefits of a breeze can be utilised are not considered in their design.

I am pleased to say that Mr Kerry Stokes’s Wigmores business is prepared to assist me with some machinery. I have had an offer to build what I think is appropriate housing for these people—me personally, with a pick and shovel and a cement mixer to assist them build their own houses out of tilt-up concrete. Tilt-up concrete today is the preferred structural or cladding material for just about every commercial building in Australia, and I can point to some excellent houses that have been built in that fashion. The advantage is that a tractor suitable to handle a three-point linkage cement mixer and a front-end loader are virtually all the machinery needed to construct this sort of housing on site. That is assuming there is, as there typically is, a washed sand resource, which is usually found in even the smallest of creeks. The technology has been around for years. You pour the floor and then you pour the walls on the floor horizontally. You stand them up with a front-end loader and put a roof over them. The design that is required, and I have discussed this with many Aboriginal people, is for accommodation—that is, bedrooms, kitchens, ablutions et cetera—to be separated by a significant width of breeze block and probably with a facility therein for an open fire.

So you have a typical house which happens to be rectangular. It is robust, it has been built by the very people who are going to occupy it, it can be as long as you like and in hot weather, rather than rely on the broken-down air conditioner or the broken-down generator set that is needed for its functioning, you turn around and shift your bed out into the breezeway. But you are still under a roof if it rains, you have the other protections available and even the roofing can be constructed using manufactured trusses and things of that nature. The walls can be painted with the right colour and the right type of paint that allows for easy repair if graffiti or something else is applied to it. I now have to go off to the concrete construction people to see if they will provide sufficient cement and the other products needed. A mould is needed. It is very simple and can be reused over and over again.

In response to my letter to the editor on these matters, I received a letter from a charitable trust in, of all places, Tasmania. The trust has gone down this technology road and created a construction base to make these sorts of slabs with the purpose in mind of picking them up, putting them on a truck, taking them somewhere else and building a house. I find that a good idea but not really the answer you need when you are talking of seriously remote places.

The boundaries of my electorate, for example, have been changed dramatically. I am a Western Australian member, but I have an Aboriginal community that treats Alice Springs as its town centre. While I was speaking with members of that community on a phone hook-up the other day, their spokesman said to me: ‘You really think you could do that for us, Mr Tuckey? They have just come down here and built a house for $500,000, and nobody wants to live in it. It is too hot, the air conditioning breaks down and we really have not got the generating capacity to support too many of those. It is an absolute pain.’ Yet the community could be building its own housing which could be very durable and have all the necessities of a home. In simple practical terms, I would have all the piping and so on coming through the wall rather than under the building so that it would be easy to service. You can do all those sorts of things if you know anything about building.

You might wonder what I do in my spare time. I am rebuilding my own home. I am an owner-builder. My son and I recently laid out about 75 square metres of concrete in two one-hour sessions and then I trowelled it all off. I reckon it was good fun, and I would love to be able to take my skills out into the country and assist people to do things for themselves. In a sense, that is what this targeted policy is about: do something for yourself; learn at school and become an elite athlete. That is wonderful. But back there in the lands people need accommodation, and if they can build it for themselves there are no delays and there is no breakdown in the process. (Time expired)

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