Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Health Services and Indigenous Health) Share this | Hansard source

I accept that intervention, Madam Deputy Speaker. It could have been consulted even better. But certainly an Australian government receiving bipartisan support in November of 2007 could have started a process of consultation. But, no, like you are looking through an oven window at a rising souffle of frustration, you just sit there and measure the intervention and talk about it, but nothing has been improved. Despite everything that was promised in 2008 and 2009, in those interminable reports written by well-meaning people, there is a fundamental failure here.

Minister Macklin is quite happy to fund Noel Pearson to increase school attendance to 85 per cent. She funds him to increase school attendance but does not have the wit to take the ideas of Pearson and disseminate them anywhere else in the country. So in the rest of Central Australia we have school attendance rates that have stalled at 60 per cent and have barely changed one per cent in the following three years. The ideas are there, they can be easily disseminated, but they have not been taken up.

Deputy Speaker, I appeal to you. There have never been a lot of jobs in Central Australia. There has certainly been difficulty matching jobs to people. But with the mining explosion and the thousands of jobs appearing, there is no excuse for having remote Indigenous communities hyperendemically unemployed right next door to mine sites. There is a time when we have to match these good young people to job opportunities just down the road. The Kimberley has more jobs than it has working-age Aboriginal adults, but this government has not had the wit to put the two together for the simple reason that they find it impossible with their left-wing ideology to make someone do something if they do not feel like doing it at the time. That means you do not have to send your kids to school, you do not have to take up a job if you do not feel like it, you do not have to drink in moderation if you do not feel like it, and that is the fundamental problem with Labor's approach—they have been unable to apply mutual obligation to the challenge of Central Australia.

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