Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I strongly support much of what the member for Herbert said about education. In fact it was Noel Pearson who said, and I hope I am quoting him correctly, that there is no self-esteem and self-worth without capability, and there is no road to capability without education. I am immensely frustrated after 2½ years of this government because in that time we have seen Central Australia frozen under an intervention that has not be reformed or improved. I find it quite galling that we waste time in this chamber in 2010 talking about a $10 million appropriation when we have a billion-dollar tragedy rolling out in Central Australia. After 2½ years, this government are almost frozen in the headlights of the Indigenous intervention. They do not know where to go and they do not know how to reform it. They are like a government walking on a Martian landscape, unable to step off and say, ‘This can be improved, this can be changed and these people can actually benefit from the lessons that have been learnt since 2007.’ Within the first six to nine months you could see the intervention was succeeding. Albeit with some barnacles on the edges and some minor reforms needed, it was succeeding. We have had a series of almost endless reports, investigations, inquiries and reviews into what is going on in Central Australia.

Let me tell you, one person has broken through, and that is Noel Pearson with his work in Cape York, through the Cape York Institute and Cape York Partnerships. The government does not deserve Noel Pearson; it does not deserve the outcomes that we are going to see out of the review by KPMG next month. The government does not know what to do when there is an obvious solution, which is breaking the cycle of destruction in remote and Indigenous Australia and replacing it with a series of positive social norms. That is the lesson that Pearson taught us and that is what was effectively implemented in Central Australia. But there is enormous frustration that the Rudd government is simply without ideas. We have had 2½ years of its rolling off figures about Indigenous disadvantage. It really annoys me. It may want to set a ‘closing the gap’ figure for 2020, long after the Prime Minister is gone and unable to account for his lack of action. The Prime Minister is quite happy to apologise for the actions of others, generations ago, but is unable to face up to his own inaction and apologise for that.

I am really frustrated because there are huge numbers of kids who do not go to school, and we should be finding a solution. That is not just to be done in this chamber; I speak about my own state and an appalling education department that has been slack on attendance at school. For too long, since the seventies, it has been a matter of: ‘You don’t have to go to school if you really don’t feel like it.’ Also: ‘You deserve your welfare—that’s unconditional—but, if you’re going to beat up your kids, drink all night, sleep all day and not send the kids to school, we’re not going to even touch your welfare.’ That was Labor’s socialist attitude that persisted for decades. It was only broken by Mal Brough in 2007. After three years, we finally have a chance to break the paternalistic way of thinking about Central Australia, and the government is not improving the situation. The government is not acting at all. The government gives us the absolutely insulting waste of time to talk about a $10 million sports grant that keeps all the pollies busy in Canberra.

I love the program; it is a great program. It barely deserves to be a piece of legislation. It should be a tick-off bit of regulation done by the departments to keep the great program going. But is anyone on that side going to talk about the kids who still do not go to school in those communities? No. What they do on the Labor side of politics is take urban Indigenous Australia and remote Indigenous Australia, put all the figures together and say, ‘Forty-seven per cent of kids go to school.’ The figures show that 80 per cent of kids in the city go to school and still only 20 per cent in Indigenous and remote Australia go to school. That is the tragedy. The tragedy is that the eye has been taken off the ball in remote Australia. As you travel around that area you will find—outside of where Pearson has intervened—that between 20 and 30 per cent turn up at school. They are all ticked off in the morning and they disappear by lunchtime. Nothing happens in many remote schools after lunch. I am not going to tell people how to run their lives, but, as far as I know, going to school is the law of this land. I do not think that should be compromised in any way, shape or form.

You have heard all the nice, warm accolades about the program and the importance of education, but we as a body, we as a corpus, do nothing to ensure that parents are encouraged to send their kids to school, and we pay a price when they do not. We are sitting around and watching an evolving train wreck that has been going on for three decades. If you pay a parent who is beating up their kids, exposing them to pornography or sleeping in all morning and not sending their kids to school the same welfare as a grandmother who picks up the pieces, what kind of white message does that send to Indigenous Australia? ‘You’re all worth the same’—that is the message it sends. So, forget about trying to break the destructive cycles in communities—‘You are all paid the same because, under white Australia since 1974, you are all worth the same.’ There is no reward for sending your kids to school.

Of course, what is the point of going to school if there are no jobs and no genuine, well-formed belief that employment is at the other end of education? Let’s never forget that many of us in mainstream Australia go to school because we can see the rewards in earnings, opportunities, approbation, degrees and licensure, but none of that is available in Indigenous Australia. There is no hope of that kind of reward at the end of attending school. In a way I can understand why turning up to play sport is perhaps the only thing left for Aboriginal kids, but I see a day when sport is part of an appropriate balance in Indigenous Australia, not the only thing they can ever hope for. That has continued under this government which wastes legislative time on an absolutely paltry movement of money when billion-dollar disasters are evolving around us.

What can we do? There is a KPMG report coming out about Cape York next month and in it will be compelling statistics about Aurukun, where school attendance has gone from 40 per cent to closer to 70 per cent. In Hope Vale and Mossman Gorge there are drops in violence to the point where I believe they have had to change employment levels in hospitals. There simply is not the queue of trauma as a result of alcohol fuelled violence in those communities anymore. When the doors open at the hospital on Monday morning, there are fewer people waiting to have bones fixed and wounds sewn up. That is what can be achieved. We can break this senseless cycle of destruction.

But it will not happen, as I have pointed out before, as long as we do not enforce school attendance, as long as education departments palm responsibility off to school principals. How can a school principal in a remote community enforce attendance without support from authorities? It has to come from departments and political leaders. And when students all clear out of school at lunchtime there has to be a way of bringing them back. Education departments need to ask themselves that introspective question: what are we doing in the classrooms that is failing to engage Indigenous kids, the kids who cannot even hear the teacher because we have not rigged up the audiology assistance devices that could make teachers heard more easily? We have got education departments that are effectively saying, ‘Take our syllabus or leave it.’ Teachers are highly inexperienced and incredibly compassionate and committed, but they stay there one or two years and move on in many cases. We have not found a way to get security of tenure and longstanding teachers in many of these communities. That remains a challenge too.

I conclude what I say about state education departments with this simple comment. Our curriculum cannot be take it or leave it. We need an Indigenous focused curriculum with changes made to engage kids to stay after lunch and not disappear off home. But at the moment our appalling attendance records for schools are far worse than they even look, because we know for sure that schools are ticking these kids off at nine o’clock and they are disappearing at 10. We need to find a better way of doing it. It was Pearson who described that cycle of dysfunction that begins with nocturnal activities in crowded, inadequate housing, leading to people going to bed at two or three in the morning and not waking up until midday, kids not being sent to school and not being given a decent breakfast. Once you fall away from education, we have got that there. As you go through grades 3, 5, 7 and 9, levels of Indigenous reading literacy fall from 75 per cent to 66 per cent. We know it is the same for Indigenous writing, falling from 79 to 70 and ultimately to 60 per cent by grade 9. The numeracy levels are a little more stable, around 75 per cent all the way through grades 3, 5, 7 and 9. But don’t be fooled, because they include urban, regional and remote Australia. When you tease them out, we have a massive tragedy unfolding in Central Australia.

I put a simple challenge to this government: step out from the headlights. You are doing nothing in Central Australia as a government to improve this intervention. How can it be justified, after Mal Brough introduced the intervention in July 2007 and this government took over by November, that we have that Indigenous intervention in those prescribed communities still unreformed three years later? That is a national tragedy, to be quarantining the income of well-meaning families doing the right thing and sending their kids to school. We are going to see from Cape York a far more effective result by making it not so much optional but running through a family commission system, through a different structure. How many years do we have to wait before we will reform what is happening in Central Australia? It is utterly appalling that entire communities like Timber Creek, Lajamanu, Kakarindji and Yuendumu all live on quarantine regardless of whether you are complying or not, regardless of whether you are actually getting rid of the grog, sending your kids to school, paying your rent. These families should be rewarded, not punished. At what point did it occur to the Labor federal government to actually start to reward people doing the right thing? They stood around and watched it, frozen on the sidelines, half not wanting to change the intervention for fear of losing votes in the mainstream but the other half not actually knowing how to change it. It is so foreign to the genetic makeup of the Labor Party, they really do not know where to go to next. Every time I see the Indigenous minister stand up I pray hard, saying, ‘Do not just sit and look at that intervention like some kind of spectator in a grandstand. Let’s get it right.’

When the Prime Minister threw across a challenge to the then opposition leader to be bipartisan about this, there was a one-off statement at the time of the apology and of course nothing since. All those promises to go and visit Indigenous Australia, to report each year on the outcomes, have fallen away until, of course, the opposition had to remind the Prime Minister. The greatest tragedy here is a Prime Minister who is all tetchiness and all promises but the actual outcomes are so far away we will never be able to measure this individual as Prime Minister because all the goals are 2020. All I ask for in a Prime Minister is someone to be accountable for what he or she does right now, this year. I tell you what the record of this Prime Minister is: no reform of this intervention, no way of acknowledging the great parents doing great things. We know from Pearson’s work that if you take an average Indigenous community about half of them will eventually have some form of notification for abuse of tenancy, of alcohol, of education attendance or safety for kids or a magistrate’s court order. And when they go before a commission a number of them are quarantined. But we know one thing. Of the people who go into a 12-month quarantine the majority of them come out of it improving. We know another thing. After 12 months only about 10 to 15 per cent of a community ends up on quarantine for a longer period of time. They are the non-responsive segment of a community, about 10 to 15 per cent. And for the first time in Australia’s Indigenous history we can focus on a group that needs help most. Up until 2007, utter chaos reigned through the entire community. It was almost impossible for a single mum or grandmother to stick her head up to stick up for kids without having it knocked off.

Pearson has proved we can break that cycle, but this government has not lived up to the expectation that it would act on his recommendations. Here we are tragically midway through 2010 with simply no action at all in this area. It is the greatest tragedy of all. Two years ago we should have been helping the 50 per cent of Indigenous remote Australians who made the decision to break that social nexus and do the right thing for their kids. Two years ago we should have been helping the 10 per cent of Indigenous Australia who refused to look after their kids. But nothing has happened. Kids still flee starving to their grandmothers. They watch on as there is alcohol fuelled violence in those households. Why? Because no matter how you quarantine their income they still keep doing it. My challenge to this Prime Minister is: what are you going to do about that? What are you going to do about the hard cases who say, ‘Quarantine my income, couldn’t care less. I’ll humbug relatives, I’ll be okay.’ How do you deal with that defiance? This government has no answer. Communities are asking for a solution, they are asking for the government to stand up, but it is not. This Labor government has sat around and watched as a spectator the intervention and left it completely unreformed, and I think it is a great tragedy to impose that on well-meaning people.

I personally believe that our Prime Minister wants to leave it like this for as long as he can to make life under the intervention as tough as possible in the hope of getting Indigenous Australia to hate the intervention. It is time to learn from it. Pearson has given us the formula; the results will be released in a few weeks. We will then learn the importance of education—of truly attending. We will learn the importance of having Indigenous-specific and relevant education that keeps Indigenous Australians at school, and the importance of addressing hearing. Not only do hearing problems lead to poor educational outcomes but also, when Indigenous Australians first run into police, the fact that in many cases they cannot hear, let alone understand, the police leads to a sudden escalation of trouble and often to their being incarcerated when otherwise they might not be.

We have still seen no law reform on the other side. These kids who have no education build a criminal resume faster than they build a capability resume. They end up, after maybe getting one verbal warning if they are lucky, being hauled before white courts. They are lucky to even have someone to be able to translate the charges into their own language. They are lucky to even have an Indigenous elder there to act as an amicus. They are lucky to even have a sympathetic magistrate who considers diversion. Until we can have a mature Indigenous Australia that can actually sanction, incarcerate and rehabilitate its own people, what is the point of having white courts that continue to fail Indigenous Australia? How long does this federal government have to look at the problem and do nothing? That other side is full of Labor lawyers. You would think that maybe in their quiet moments, when they had little to do, they would look at reforming Indigenous law. But they are not bringing Indigenous culture into our white mainstream courts, which are still horribly painful foreign places to be. These young Indigenous people simply know no other way, and jail becomes a warmer place with a warmer embrace than their own community. That is a tragedy that this Prime Minister should have picked up on long ago, but we are just now debating $10 million for Indigenous sport in the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010. All I say is what a ridiculous waste of legislative time for a great program when we could be addressing the really big challenges.

In the end we know that when you go away to jail there are three square meals a day and, if you are an Indigenous Australian, many of your mates are there. When people come home to a community, some of them say, out of bravado, ‘It was a great place to go and I can’t wait to get back.’ But I know most of them must hate it there because of the loss of connection to their land, which means so much to remote Australians. So why have we not come to a point where we help the elders to support these young people? I have made the point before: this government since the intervention still pays these great people who are committed to Indigenous culture the same amount of money as paid to parents who are abusing their kids. This government found no way through that, no way to reward Indigenous Australians who support the court process. You do not pay them anything, apart from a bit of transport, to actually support a court process. You do not pay Indigenous elders to go and rehabilitate these young people. You are not even looking for solutions—for example, incarcerating these young Indigenous Australians, if we have to, closer to their communities, where they can retain a connection with their elders. What is happening? We are simply sending them off via white courts into white jails and letting them rot. That is the reality. In fact, if they are there for less than a year, they do not even have access to rehabilitation programs—they have to be long-term offenders. So what do they do? They offend again, at twice the rate as for non-Indigenous Australia, and get themselves a long sentence. Then they finally get some access to rehabilitation.

This might sound in many ways like a directionless rant about the challenges that face us. But I could not let this debate go without saying that what we are legislating for here today is not where the game is at. There are no Indigenous Australians here in this chamber to talk about this. But grasp the nettle and do the serious stuff in remote Indigenous Australia. Get a hint from what Pearson is doing and let us fix this intervention and make it work for 2010. That intervention was okay for 2007, but reform is long overdue for those local communities out there. The Rudd government over there are quite prepared to make billion dollar promises on anything that will win them a vote. Let us see this Labor government under Kevin Rudd do something for Indigenous Australia that gets these young families back on track and keeps young people out of incarceration. As we have all noted in this debate, it starts by keeping them at school.

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