Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Defence Science and Personnel) Share this | Hansard source

I acknowledge the contribution of the member for Moore. It is always gratifying to hear his contributions to debates in this place, particularly because he is not cowed by views which might be expressed elsewhere within his own party. I hope that those people in his party who are cynical about the issue of climate change and the need for a price on carbon read his speech. Whilst we might not all agree with everything he has said, he makes a very good argument as to why this parliament, and indeed Australia, should have a price on carbon. He is a person who comes to this place with a great deal of worldly experience. From my observation, since I have been in this place with him, his contributions to whatever the debate of the day might be have always been thoughtful and insightful. I want to thank him for the contribution he has made to this discussion.

Whilst I would like to engage in a debate about climate change, that is not the purpose for which I am going to speak today. What I would like to do is paint a picture of how my own electorate of Lingiari benefits from initiatives from this government. I say that because, as you would know, Madam Deputy Speaker, as a minister you do not often get an opportunity to freewheel it in a discussion in the parliament, and not often do you get an opportunity to speak on behalf of your own electorate.

I now come here with two roles, really—my ministerial role and my role as a member of parliament. In my ministerial role there is one particular area that I would like to pay some attention to because it directly impacts upon my own constituents—that is, as the Minister for Indigenous Health. I was the first Minister for Indigenous Health appointed by any government, and it is something I am quite proud of. I am proud to have overseen an 85 per cent increase in funding for this critical sector since we came into government.

I think that how the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health sector works and the importance of community based health services within the structure of our health delivery system in this country are not properly understood. Within the context of the current debate in the main chamber about health reform, I think it is worth contemplating the engagement of Aboriginal community controlled health organisations within the broader question of health reform and, most importantly, their contribution to alleviating the very poor health status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and working with us to close the gap between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians and the rest of the community in life expectancy and in all matters to do with health.

We know that people are very poor in my electorate in the Northern Territory. We know that none of the health delivery systems that have operated in the past has been really successful—in fact it can be argued that, on the face of it at least, they have not been successful at all. But changes are coming. Change not only is coming but has come. It has come in the form of the collaborative relationship which has been developed between the government of the Northern Territory, the Australian government and the Aboriginal community controlled health services which provide fundamental primary health care to very large portions of the Northern Territory population.

They run health services in Darwin, Katherine and Alice Springs. For the Katherine West area they are run through the Katherine West Health Board. They are run through Sunrise Health Service to the east of Katherine, down to the area of Ngukurr and the gulf. There are the Wurli Wurlinjang Aboriginal Health Service in Katherine, the Anyinginyi Congress health service in Tennant Creek, the Utopia homelands health service to the east of Alice Springs, the Pintubi Homelands Health Service to the west of Alice Springs, and the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress in Alice Springs. These are very important initiatives. There is also the Miwatj Health Aboriginal Corporation health service operating on the Gove Peninsula, and the Laynhapuy homelands have their own health services. There are other organisations across the Northern Territory which provide these health services.

These health services are provided by Aboriginal community controlled organisations. They employ their own staff. They have cultural awareness and ownership of the services, which is quite important in making a difference in dealing with health issues that confront people. But I need to emphasise that if you measure them in the broader context of the success rate of delivery of health services—actual numbers of patients et cetera—then you will see that these are very successful organisations because they provide broad based primary health care. They provide doctors, nurses and access to physiotherapy, psychological services and the like—the sorts of services you would expect from a comprehensive primary healthcare service.

Unfortunately they do not get a great deal of visibility in the broader Australian health context. This is true not only in the Northern Territory but also in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. In every state of this country there are very good primary healthcare organisations that are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community controlled. They deliver fundamental services—very basic services but very important services—to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across this country. I am forever encouraged by the contributions they are making to their own communities.

In the context of the health reform which we are currently engaged in, I think they have illustrated what it is to be a good primary healthcare service. When talking about delivering superclinics and the like and how to deliver good, comprehensive primary health services, I think we need to see some of these organisations, because of the quality of the work they do, as benchmarks for the provision of best practice.

What I do want to talk about briefly are some of the issues that confront people in regional and remote communities but particularly in remote communities. One of those issues is, of course, very poor infrastructure. Over recent weeks you will have heard, Madam Deputy Speaker, about Wadeye in the Northern Territory—sometimes referred to as Port Keats but its correct name is Wadeye. There have been difficult times there, going back over recent years, with social volatility and a whole range of issues. It is a community of about 3,500 people with its own health clinic. It is a Northern Territory government health clinic but the Commonwealth funds the services it provides, largely. I was in the fortunate position of going to Wadeye only a week or so ago to open a new clinic. This new clinic provides state-of-the-art health services to this community. From memory, it was a $7½ million spend, which means that this piece of infrastructure is second to none not just in terms of its physical attributes but also in providing accessibility to Aboriginal men and women. It understands the cultural appropriateness of dealing with men and women separately, and it does that through the design of the building, and it is staffed by very professional and highly motivated people who are delivering first-class care to their community.

I have used Wadeye as an example; I could have used any number of communities across the Northern Territory and, indeed, Northern Australia. I could refer to the organisations in your own state, Madam Deputy Speaker Livermore—the Queensland Aboriginal and Islander health services do an exceptional job in providing primary health care. But it is not only in primary health care where we need to be looking and listening to what is happening in Aboriginal community controlled health services, and I want to refer to one program in Katherine. The StrongBala Male Health for Life Program is an initiative underway in Katherine. This program helps men who have endured social alienation through substance abuse. It helps them to rebuild their lives. It has grown from the ground, coming from an initiative from Wurli Wurlinjang, the community based health service in Katherine. There were effectively a couple of key drivers, Phil Richards and John Fletcher, who have coordinated the contribution of the Wurli Wurlinjang Aboriginal Health Service committee and other sections of the Katherine community to establish a place for men to rebuild their lives, to provide employment pathways and to express and affirm their culture.

This program is unique, for a number of reasons. Not only is it actually addressing the health status of men but it sees the whole of life, the whole story. It is saying: ‘If we want to make you a healthy individual, we can give you access to primary health care, we can give you health checks, but we need to make sure you are looking beyond the health centre and the health environment and looking at your whole life. How can we make sure you don’t become further dependent on alcohol if you have been dependent on alcohol previously? How can we make sure you have a pathway to employment?’ These are the sorts of things that will make a significant difference to the lives of many Aboriginal people in and around Katherine—not only the men themselves but also their families, because they will impact directly upon the relationships they are involved in. If we can help control some of the poor behaviour that exists in some family relationships then we will improve the life outcomes for young Aboriginal kids who are being born into these families—and that has got to be our objective. So, if we can see this as not only developing the individual but having a significant impact on individual families, their own family and their broader family, in terms of their extended family, and on their communities, then it will have made a significant contribution to the wellbeing of many Australians and be a positive outcome for so many.

These are the sorts of things that are engaging people—that when we talk about health we are thinking about it in a more holistic sense than we may have done previously. We need to understand the interrelationships that exist between drug and alcohol dependency and life outcomes for others. That is why StrongBala is a very, very good program, a great initiative and one which deserves to be understood. It should also be seen as an opportunity by others to learn from it.

I might also say, while on the subject of men, that in Alice Springs the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress has a unit which is run by a very good friend of mine, John Liddle. Mr Liddle runs this male health program and as part of that they now run biannual male health workshops. These workshops have concentrated on the role of men in the family. The last one, which I attended a few months ago, was about violence in the family. As a result of this discussion, which took place with Aboriginal men from around Australia but principally from Central Australia, they took what I think is a very strong view about themselves in relation to their partners and their children, their families and their communities, and they have now started a movement entitled Stop the Violence. It is about trying to get people to understand that there is no place for violence in any family in any community and that if they are on the grog that is not an excuse for being violent, and what we need to do is to get people to understand that it is unacceptable to behave violently in any given set of circumstances.

I want to highlight that this, again, is an initiative from within the community, just as StrongBala in Katherine is an initiative from within the community. It has the support of the whole community and will make a great deal of difference over time to the health outcomes of many people. Most importantly, it will have a direct impact on young Aboriginal men who live in and around these communities. One of the by-products, of course—hopefully—is that it will teach them responsible behaviour. It will teach them how not to behave irresponsibly when they are involved in the consumption of alcohol. We know about the higher levels of violence in some communities that are the direct result of abuse of alcohol and other substances.

There is a very strong discussion going on within the Northern Territory community about alcohol. It is a discussion that needs to have the attention of the broader Australian community, because it is saying that we need to control not just the abuse of alcohol but its consumption, the way it is retailed, who it is retailed to and how people behave when they have been consuming alcohol. These are very important discussions that people need to be aware of.

I will complete my contribution by referring, for a moment, to Building the Education Revolution. I am not sure what planet people in this place are on when they say that there is something wrong with Building the Education Revolution. They have not visited the schools in my communities, where there is absolutely 100 per cent support for the work which is being done through Building the Education Revolution—over 300 projects in my own communities. In Lingiari, it has benefited 130 schools to the value of $180 million—an enormous amount of money. Not only is this a great investment in employment and job opportunities generally and in business opportunities but the impact it is having on the life outcomes of young Territorians is obvious to everyone. It has transformed schools in a way we cannot imagine.

I am sorry for the opposition, who bleat and moan about some of the issues which have emerged in a small number of schools across the country. I say to them: open your eyes, go and have a look at what is happening in some of these communities and understand the immediate educational and social impact of the new infrastructure on these communities. If you were able to open your minds to those things, you would see that you would be opening your minds to the new opportunities that now exist for young people that did not exist previously.

A fortnight or so ago I was at a community at Gapuwiyak, in Arnhem Land. Recall that in 2000-01, prior to the election of the Labor government, there were no secondary education opportunities for kids in the bush—none. Whose responsibility was that? The Country Liberal Party—the conservative party, to which the member for Solomon and a senator for the Northern Territory belong. It was disgraceful.

Do you think you would have seen a science laboratory in Gapuwiyak before the election of a Labor government? Not on your nelly! What we were able to do a fortnight ago was open a new science laboratory on the northern coast of Australia—the Arnhem Land coast. This year seven of its students will be graduating from year 12. That is such a fillip to that community, and the infrastructure which we are providing will add to the opportunities that new and current students in the school will be able to avail themselves of. There is also the Gunbalanya CEC.

The Katherine High School has a really innovative program, a sports science centre to complement the very successful Clontarf Academy program. Unfortunately, I do not have the time now to talk about Clontarf, but at some point I will, because it is a very successful program in attracting kids to school, leveraging off sport and giving them an educational outcome which they would not otherwise have got. It has been a very successful program, and those people involved in it need to be congratulated.

I note the Maningrida CEC, with its language centre; the Milingimbi CEC, with its science centre; OLSH—Our Lady of the Sacred Heart—at Wadeye, with its science centre; Shepherdson College at Galiwin’ku, with its science centre; and Tennant Creek High School’s science centre. All of these things are initiatives of this government, yet we hear in this place question after question of the Prime Minister about the supposed inadequacies of the Building the Education Revolution program.

Let me tell you: in the real world, there is nothing that could be said other than positive things about Building the Education Revolution and its impact not only on the physical infrastructure but on the capital infrastructure of this country—the human capital benefits that will accrue as a direct result of having this infrastructure built and the opportunities that it creates for young Australians to get improved educational outcomes as a result of this infrastructure. I am a former teacher, and I have to say to you that I have not seen better school facilities in this country in the 35 years that I have been involved in public life. I say: congratulations to this government for the work we have done in this regard, and shame—real shame—on the opposition for trying to undermine it when everyone knows it is very successful. I have not visited one of these communities where I have been talking about Building the Education Revolution without hearing the question: ‘What goes on down there in Canberra? What is it about the Australian newspaper? Is it just New South Wales? What is it?’ They speak glowingly of Building the Education Revolution and its impact upon their communities, their children and their families and the opportunities that will inevitably result from that investment.

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