Barry Haase (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a member of the committee reporting on this issue in our report entitled Doing time: a time for doing, it is a pleasure to have the opportunity to make a comment. This report was the result of almost two terms of government. We carried on with this inquiry as a new committee in this parliament. That gave us the opportunity to reflect on the wealth of knowledge that had been accumulated by the previous parliament and add to that with our own fortes and, to a degree, preconceptions. From a personal perspective, I had my first association—which is ongoing—with Indigenous Australians when I first started school. A substantial part of our rural community was Indigenous. In those years, their welfare had been dreadfully neglected. That was prior to 1967.

The conditions under which those Indigenous people lived were to say the least Third World. But there were a couple of remarkable things about that era for Indigenous people in agricultural Australia. Certainly I can speak with first hand knowledge of my Shackleton and Bruce Rock area. Firstly, all children attended school regularly. There was much less mobility of parents in those days. The second thing that is important to note is that the greatest majority of the male heads of households—and please do not pull me up for being sexist; in those days, it was the male of the household who went out to work and put bread on the table—were gainfully employed, receiving a weekly wage and providing for their families.

The shocking thing is to contrast that situation and the situation that exists as the norm today. In this place, we have been discussing sporting and other programs that are funded to encourage Indigenous male youth specifically to attend school on a regular basis. I am speaking about the Clontarf program, which is now spreading across Australia, having emerged from the Clontarf Aboriginal Hostel in Perth, Western Australia. There is no doubt that it is instructive for emerging families today that there will be a circle of experience as an Indigenous person growing up, maturing, having a family and passing on in today's Australian society. Sadly, that circle is generally welfare dependent. It involves youth with the judicial system, then corrective services, then welfare, then the judiciary and then corrective services. The statistics that have been gathered in this report, Doing time: a time for doing, clearly indicate that anything that we have done in the past has failed to address the issue of recalcitrant Indigenous youth moving through a revolving door system of welfare and incarceration.

Rational people could only conclude that anything that we have done in the past is something that we should avoid doing in the future and that we ought to use this report as a foundation of knowledge on which to build a different approach to the problem. And it is a problem. You cannot ignore the fact that Indigenous people represent 2.5 per cent of the Australian population and the statistic that, of incarcerated Australian youth, 53 per cent are Indigenous. That is a statistic that you cannot find anything but horrendous and unacceptable.

So what is the solution? We have made 40 recommendations, and I would be a liar if I were to stand here and suggest (a) that the 40 recommendations will be adopted and (b) that, should they be adopted, the problem would go away. It is irrational to suggest that. The problem has been entrenched for far too long. But there is no doubt in my mind that the major cause of the problem—that is, revolving door incarceration—is lack of education on the one hand and the present societal acceptance that education will not be absolutely necessary for Indigenous youth.

We need to change the mindset of the Australian people. Indigenous kids have every right to education, as much right as mainstream kids. There is no difference in their intellect and there ought to be no difference in their treatment, yet we excuse the lack of school attendance by Indigenous kids. We turn a blind eye. We speak to state governments about the employment of truancy officers to make sure that Aboriginal families know that their children are not attending school and that something must be done about it because the cultural expectation is that children will go to school, and state government education ministers say, 'Well, there's nothing we can do about it.'

I believe there is something we can do about it. We ought to tie welfare payments to school attendance. I further believe that to not do so, and therefore to excuse Indigenous families from the responsibility of making sure their children attend school, if you analyse it and extrapolate, is certainly a denial of the human rights of those children. It could almost be compared with genocide, because we are guilty as parliamentarians if we do not enact laws that create outcomes for Australian citizens. We are contributing to an ongoing sin, and that is the denial of Indigenous children's rights. Everyone has a right to an education in this country, but if you are Indigenous we do not insist that you attend an institution. If you are mainstream, we do. Parents who do not send their children to an educational institution are brought to account. But if you are an Indigenous parent there would appear to be very active ignorance. We do not even expect it.

I hear employees of Indigenous agencies say: 'Look, there's nothing we can do. They're just Indigenous people.' I think that is horrendous—totally unacceptable. There is no reason why we should not apply the same rigour in our requirements at law to Indigenous people as we do to mainstream society, and part of that requirement is to send kids to school. It is a parental responsibility and it is accepted generally at law that it is a parental responsibility—unless you are an Indigenous parent, it seems. Then we turn the blind eye.

We need to change that. We need to work on a policy and even, dare I say, ignore political correctness. We have already done so much damage to the Indigenous population, their expectations and their role as part of mainstream Australian society. We have already done so much damage. Well-intentioned decisions resulted in the denial of opportunity, because we denied our responsibility of insisting that Indigenous families maintain the same culture as mainstream families and accept education as the norm. I can tell my colleagues here in this place that school attendance in Indigenous remote communities is not the norm; it is far from the norm. And it is accepted by all and sundry as being okay, because, 'Well, the parents had to drive 2,000 kilometres to attend a funeral and they were going to go for a week but they stayed for three months, and that is okay because it is culturally appropriate.' I do not accept that children should be denied their human rights on the basis of our current interpretation of what is culturally correct.

There is a far greater need today for tough love: the application of rigour in Indigenous funding programs and a change in the commonly held attitude that we will fund an Indigenous program but not really expect high performance and positive outcomes, because it is an Indigenous program. It looks to me as though this is perhaps not the actual situation, but I can assure you that agency after agency will say, 'We have got a program. We have got a bucket of money and we are moving amongst Indigenous communities and we are looking for groups to take up this funding. So, would you, or you or you perhaps take this funding responsibility on and deliver for your community, because it is going to have a very positive outcome.' People are almost coerced, as Indigenous individuals, into participation in programs that have been well-meaningly funded by governments of all kind. But at the end of the day there is very little expectation, and almost no audit, that the outcomes achieved by that funding will be positive. After the expenditure of the funding somebody says, 'Well, that provided employment for a period of time and circulated taxpayer funding for a period of time and therefore it must have had a positive outcome.' Well, it is not the case. My experience clearly indicates that this effectively creates a privileged position for those who are directly involved in the particular program, but in the rest of the community it creates a degree of jealousy. Then, when everyone observes that the program has achieved no positive outcome, the rest of the community in the future is not reticent when putting their hand up for a government funded program, so that they, too, can be part of it. And because they believe there will be no requirement for rigour and no actual audit, and no-one will be criticised if there is no positive outcome.

We need tough love in our communities. We need to remove our focus on political correctness and we need to focus on the necessity of positive outcomes. If that requires us to follow the path proposed by Noel Pearson, I say 'Let's do it,' because everything we have done in the past of which Noel Pearson, amongst others, is extremely critical has been a collective failure. Look at just one area: education. The most educated, employable, capable and responsible Indigenous members of my community, the seat of Durack, are those who were educated under the mission system. We are all very quick to criticise the paternalism of the mission education system and how teaching with an iron rod is not acceptable these days, but the individuals who were educated at Mogumber, Moore River, Mount Margaret, Karalundi and numerous other missions under a rigorous system got a good education, and they attended school. There was direct connectivity between school attendance and learning, the expectation and the welfare that was provided by the mission.

Having believed that I would speak a few moments only on this, I find that there is just so much to say. In these closing seconds, let me implore my colleagues on both sides of the House: something needs to be done. The stats are all there. The knowledge has been collected. We know that what has happened in the past is not solving the problem. Fifty-three per cent of the juvenile prison population are Indigenous, although they make up just 2.5 per cent of the general population. The worst possible result of this report would be that we once again do nothing.

See this speech in context