Warren Entsch (Leichhardt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have to start by saying that I represent the electorate of Leichhardt, which is the home of the Torres Strait. I have 19 Islander communities—14 of them in the outer islands and a couple on the mainland on the tip of Cape York. I have 13 Aboriginal communities dotted throughout Cape York and down around the Cairns area and very large Indigenous populations in two other Cape York towns, Laura and Coen. I have spent most of my life up there. I have been involved in the cattle industry for many years. A large number of the people I went to school with were Indigenous, and in my previous life in the grazing and the crocodile industry I had a large number of Indigenous people who worked for me as well. I have seen the deterioration of their quality of life, the problems associated with Indigenous Australia and the challenges faced in trying to deal with a lot of these problems.

I listened with interest recently when I heard the minister make a statement about achievements that she believed had been made in relation to policies associated with a three-word slogan, ‘closing the gap’. I was very, very disappointed, to say the least. I find it rather distressing when ministers come into this place, put their hand on their heart and gauge their commitment to Indigenous Australians by the amount of money that they have squandered, quite often without any sense of outcomes. If they squander the money—and we are talking large amounts of money—they feel that they are doing the right thing. The reality is that they are feeding bloated bureaucracies and they are continuing to condemn Indigenous Australians to a very, very sad future. Until such time as ministers and governments start to focus on outcomes and measure those outcomes by successes of programs rather than the amount of money that they have thrown at the insatiable bureaucracies that they tend to create, I think we are going to continue to stagger along and see some very, very depressing figures in relation to any sorts of achievements in Indigenous Australia.

When we start talking about closing the gap, the first thing the minister could do is deal with the insidious suggestion of locking up the entire Cape York community with the wild rivers legislation. I was in Cape York at a time when the Indigenous community started to fight to recover their lands. After decades of campaigning, they successfully started to recover large tracts of that land. They are now the largest single pastoral leaseholders in Cape York. I sat down and talked with Allan Creek, who got back his land near Coen, and he talked about his greatest aspiration. He said that with a bit of age he is a bit like me, a bit old and too fat to be tossing bulls anymore, but he would love to be able to sit on the top rail of his own place and watch his grandkids working their own cattle.

That is never going to happen, given the concept that is being pushed on them with wild rivers. At the end of the day, it should not be the southern based Wilderness Society which determines what people can and cannot do on their land. These people have campaigned for decades to get that country back. It may well be that the traditional owners who have got their leases may well want to have it as sit-down country. They may want to turn it into nature reserves. They may well want to do all sorts of things with it—run cattle, have agriculture or maybe even do a bit of tourism—but at the end of the day that determination should come from them. It should not be predetermined by the Wilderness Society. As Allan said, he has not got the education behind him to do comprehensive management plans. It may be another 10, 15 or 20 years before one of his grandkids has an education which gives the capacity to do that. I can tell you, many of the non-Indigenous people do not know how to do that up there; they would struggle with it.

We need to give them the time. We do not want to lock the country up so they cannot do a darn thing. It is just amazing that the government blindly follows the will of the Wilderness Society and ignores the needs and the aspirations of the Indigenous people, who are desperately wanting to make a future for themselves and demand a say in their own country. That is what will close the gap, not driving a wedge through them with the Wilderness Society.

I just put through an application to the minister which started last year—$75,000 to have three leadership programs organised by the Regional Organisation of Councils of Cape York. This is something that represents every Indigenous council in Cape York. They wanted three leadership seminars for their young people. They have already done a couple themselves and they have been an outstanding success, as reported by wonderful young Indigenous Australians like Tania Major. It was $75,000 for three of these programs over 12 months. The minister tells me she cannot afford it; she has not got the money for $75,000 for three years. They were offered $30,000 and they said: ‘Keep it. We can’t do it with $30,000. It’s just another $30,000 to be squandered.’ And, of course, it will be the blackfellas who are accused of wasting the money. It was an insult to them. But the minister did say to me, ‘Come back and apply again next year’, so I did. They put in another submission. They actually cut it down by $10,000. They went in for $65,000. The minister came back and said, ‘No. I’m sorry, we can’t afford it.’ But she can afford to put $213 million into chosen bureaucracies in Cape York, and between them there is not a single outcome where there is any sort of economic future or success for Cape York. It is absolutely disgusting. Sixty-five thousand dollars to the Regional Organisation of Councils of Cape York is closing the gap. It is giving them an opportunity to take control of their own future.

The state government introduced the alcohol management plan throughout Cape York. They beat their chests. They said: ‘Look at this. We’re doing this for all the blackfellas. We’ll get all the votes in metropolitan Australia’, and everybody supported it. Could you imagine introducing total prohibition into Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra or Brisbane in relation to removing a methadone program? That is what they did up there.

There is prohibition today, in communities with huge numbers of alcoholics and no detox—and you wonder why we have a problem! First of all, they are spending huge amounts of extra money trying to buy illicit grog. When they run out of money, they start finding innovative ways of using boot polish and a whole range of other things, and we start burying them. Those who are a bit smarter end up in the towns like Cairns, Cooktown, Weipa, Mareeba and Mossman. They then become a social problem. Everybody looks at them as drunken blackfellas on the street. But they have been driven out of their own communities. There are no detox centres—there is no medical detox—and no rehabilitation centres up there. And these are the victims. But, of course, as far as the government is concerned—

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