Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The bill that we are discussing in the parliament today, the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010, amends the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000, which was introduced by the former government. It provides an additional $10.93 million for the Sporting Chance Program, which was announced in the 2009-10 budget. It is a great program. It engages Indigenous children in school and education through sporting programs. It was first announced in the 2006-07 budget by the previous coalition government, and since being implemented has proved to be so successful. I am pleased that members of the current government have recognised just how successful this program has been.

In 2010, 22 groups will provide 59 projects for nearly 5,000 Indigenous students. It is very important to my electorate. I have some 8,000 Indigenous Australians on the electoral roll in Herbert, a number of them being on Palm Island. There are Indigenous students throughout the schooling system in Townsville, and certainly they understand and the schools understand the benefits of the Sporting Chance Program. I am proud to say I have a football team in my electorate, which is not doing quite as well as we would all like it to do at the moment. It is called the Cowboys in the NRL competition. The point I want to make is that many of the Cowboys are Indigenous players, and we are very proud of that. We are very proud of the development programs that the Cowboys run for up-and-coming players and the way that they take Indigenous Australians into that program. It underlines just how successful the involvement of Indigenous Australians in sporting programs can be. They love their sport.

In an editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald in March, Warren Mundine, the Chairman of the Australian Indigenous Chamber of Commerce, spoke about the positive way in which sporting programs can help disadvantaged young Indigenous Australians. He talked about the Indigenous Football Festival that was held in Townsville. More than 180 Indigenous kids participated in 2009 and it was a wonderful experience for many of these teenagers, some of whom had never seen the ocean until that week—remarkable. I have no doubt that the 2010 festival will be equally as successful, and I am proud of Townsville’s participation in such an important event.

There are many opportunities for Indigenous young people to do better and to involve themselves in the community. Indigenous children are just as capable as any other child of succeeding in our community. I have always promoted the need to make Indigenous families aware of how their children can become involved in a local sporting club and of the benefits of doing so. In Townsville there are just so many sporting opportunities, and we should be doing everything we can to involve Indigenous youths in one of their passions, sport. Too often Indigenous youths are involved in antisocial behaviour. That seems to occur across Australia; it certainly occurs in Townsville. It is probably because they do not get the proper parental direction, or they have nothing meaningful to do with their lives, or they just do not know how to be involved in the wider community.

There are avenues other than sport, and one that comes to mind is participation in the Australian Defence Force Cadets. Those young Indigenous men and women who do join cadet units have the time of their lives. I encourage Indigenous youth to participate. In Townsville we have cadet units representing all three services, and Indigenous cadets have risen through to the highest ranks of these services. It is a mark of what can be achieved. As the parliament will know, in the last government I had ministerial responsibility for cadets, and I never failed to be impressed with the young men and women in the cadet forces. They are future leaders of our country.

At times I was equally unimpressed with the bureaucratic nature of the head office system than ran the cadets. Just last month I was talking to one wing of the Australian Air Force Cadets, which runs a squadron at RAAF Townsville. These conversations often include horror stories about the bureaucracy in cadets. They reveal the stupid decisions that are made in the so-called interests of workplace health and safety, and they serve to demonstrate that there is a lack of common sense in the cadet system. They also reinforce the cadet culture of being risk averse—it is easier to say no than to say yes. Roadblocks are the order of the day, rather than a can-do attitude. One of those roadblocks seems to be Squadron Leader Robert Tandy, who appears to have a reputation among the staff of being a bureaucrat who so typifies the defence attitude that it is easier to be inflexible and just say no. I appeal to all officers in cadet branch to rethink how they exercise their command responsibilities and decisions, and to change their culture to one of can do rather than cannot do. The Australian Defence Force Cadets is a wonderful organisation and it should be given every support.

Everyone in this parliament is committed to Indigenous programs. The Rudd Labor government has made a lot of promises under their Closing the Gap initiative, for example; however, we need more than just words. Indigenous Australians are counting on the Prime Minister to deliver real action and real results in education, housing and health care, and of course in sporting opportunities. Unfortunately Mr Rudd is all talk. The bill today provides more funding for a successful coalition government program. This is highly commendable and I thank the government for supporting the coalition initiative that has been developed over so many years. The previous coalition government was committed to Indigenous programs, and in 2007-08 we spent $4 billion on Indigenous programs and services. There was a 67 per cent real increase on the amount that had be spent by the Keating Labor government in 1995-96. The coalition government was particularly committed to Indigenous education through initiatives such as the Sporting Chance Program. From 1998 to 2005, the participation of Indigenous students in year 12 increased from 32 to 40 per cent. Participation in year 11 increased from 52 to 62 per cent. But we can do better, and we must do better. Certainly education is one of the ways of the future for Indigenous Australians. These are just some of the projects and outcomes of the previous coalition government. The Rudd Labor government has professed the same commitment, but we are yet to see any real action. There is a long way to go in Indigenous education, and on such an important issue the Rudd government needs to do more than just expand coalition initiatives.

Late last year I travelled the Plenty Highway, driving from Alice Springs through to Winton—600 kilometres of dirt across the centre of Australia. In the middle of the drive we stopped at an Indigenous community. I though to myself that this was a community that was different. I have seen a lot of Indigenous communities across Australia. It was almost like Warburton, which is a very remote community in your state, Deputy Speaker Moylan. There was a new feel about this community. I went to the takeaway for breakfast. It was all clean and tidy, with an Indigenous workforce resplendent in their freshly ironed uniforms. All in the middle of nowhere. I asked to see the manager, who turned out to be a white woman. She had lived in Indigenous communities all her life, and she was fiercely proud, and so were the staff, of this takeaway. I said to this woman that, as members of parliament, we struggle to know what to do best for Indigenous Australia, because the more we do the more things do not seem to change. She said, with classic country logic, ‘Forget about the current generation; you will never change them. All you have to do is make sure the kids go to school. If they get a good education, Indigenous Australia will change forever, for the best.’ There we go. The Sporting Chance Program is one of the programs that can keep kids at school, and we as a parliament should be very mindful of those very simple but very powerful thoughts from the middle of the Northern Territory. I thank the House.

See this speech in context