Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Indigenous Affairs Legislation Amendment Bill (No.2) 2011. As the previous speaker said, on the face of it there would seem to be only quite minor administrative changes embedded in this amendment. We in the coalition will support those changes, but there is a lot of serious business behind such minor changes.

The first is, for example, the title change for a number of officeholders, such as that from general manager to chief executive officer. Second, we need to ensure that information held by Indigenous Business Australia is appropriately protected but capable of being disclosed by that organisation in carrying out its proper functions, consistent with similar Commonwealth arrangements. This is a point that I stress—too often with Aboriginal agencies, institutions or special strategies or plans, the onerous requirements for review after review, for accountability and for multiple levels of red tape cause an enormous amount of additional workload and stress not just for the Indigenous recipients of that support or those who participate in the administration but also for government services and state, territory and federal agencies across the board.

I often work with my local Indigenous community in the electorate of Murray. I was with them just last week discussing the fact that, if this were a mainstream strategy related to mainstream clients of housing, the scrutiny, reassessment, accounting for spending and so on would be far less onerous, but at the end of the day the information available to the government on what it had invested in the outcomes for the clients of that housing would be no better. It seems to me that this bill is trying to make sure that there is consistency with other similar Commonwealth arrangements when it comes to Indigenous Business Australia.

There is also the removal of references to the availability of review under the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1977 for two discontinued Aboriginal Hostels Limited schemes. The objective here is simply to note the passage of time and the fact that those particular Aboriginal Hostels schemes no longer exist. So, as I said, on the face of it these are simple, straightforward amendments; but beneath them there is a legacy of generations of onerous requirements when it comes to managing the lives of Aboriginal people. Too often their lives are so tightly managed that they are emasculated as individuals and their capacity to be independent people—economically and in every sense—has been taken from them.

I refer to an article that has come out in the last 48 hours which says that in the remote Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yakunytjatjara lands in South Australia we have a bit of a debate going on between government officials as to whether the people in the 200-strong community being referred to are starving or just hungry. I think it is extraordinary that in this time in Australia, a developed nation, there should be a statement in this article that reads:

The actions of the Red Cross sparked a fierce debate in Adelaide about whether people in APY were "starving" or whether they went hungry and skipped meals when their money ran out.

I would not have thought that there was much difference between the two if you had very young children not able to eat when the money ran out.

The distress in the APY lands is a consequence of the extraordinary prices that people have to pay in the stores there. Of course it is a remote community and there are extreme costs associated with trucking in food and other perishables from Adelaide and other places further south to parts of this country. The reality is that it is extremely difficult for families to manage meals for all of their dependents for all of the week with the welfare that they depend on. In fact, some people in the APY lands are calling on state and federal governments to introduce a voluntary income management scheme that would allow part of people's welfare payments to be quarantined for use on food and clothing. The response is that South Australian politicians have not been keen about this.

Even when we come to the quarantining of income where it is voluntary—and in this case it may have been voluntary—I refer again to my own electorate and people in my electorate. We are now to become one of the pilot areas to have welfare quarantined for families where the children are seen as being at risk or where women are in abusive households. This will be a voluntary situation where women in particular can volunteer to have their welfare income managed; it may also be that, where families are recommended for this income quarantining by the Child Support Agency, the quarantining is not voluntary.

But, whether it is voluntary or not, the point is that it will not necessarily be followed up in these pilot programs. We are told that there is no automatic training and support in such things as budgeting households, buying nutritious food and managing your finances for those with quarantined welfare: financial literacy, if you like. It is going to be voluntary if the mother—if you can imagine this—can get herself to a place of training, can find the child care and is not totally put off any formal learning system, since she may have absented herself from school many years before.

There is a whole range of problems associated with how we tend to intervene to try to support Indigenous households. We often end up in a situation where we just reinforce a sense of hopelessness and despair and take away an individual's prospects for being independent.

I refer to another situation that has come to my attention fairly recently. There were a number of Indigenous Australians in Western Australia who were very interested in becoming formally qualified and professional cullers of feral animals like camels, donkeys and even wild horses that do great damage to local ecosystems. The Indigenous men in particular expressed great interest in becoming skilled and trained in doing this culling work and, as you would be aware, there are government programs now which fund this culling work. Unfortunately, the Indigenous people were then ruled out of being eligible to do this training on the basis that some had criminal records, that most did not have a driver's licence and that many did not speak adequate English. Here was a prospect of a job—ongoing work which could be self managed. Local Indigenous enterprises could have been brought together to do this very important and ongoing work, but so many barriers were in their way—barriers which may have been put in place for good reasons but which would tend to be expected to apply to non-Indigenous communities, not to a community where English is not the first language and where most Indigenous men have some experience of being charged with offences before they reach the age of 25.

We set up so many barriers between what an Indigenous person may or may not do without taking on board the extraordinary 200 years of the legacy from colonial times. Exploitation in that area on pastoral stations has now been replaced by welfare dependency, which has led to the same situations of communities in poverty, often with very little to look forward to but drinking and the attendant high-risk behaviour, and, indeed, to foetal alcohol syndrome, which can come from women drinking during their pregnancy.

So we have a lot of issues in Indigenous Australia. I believe absolutely that we have bipartisan support in this House that directs what we do to try to make better policy and learn from our mistakes of the past. This bill is quite simple in many ways in trying to recognise some movement in, for example, the Aboriginal hostels arena, where we no longer need to refer to them, and in trying to make sure that Indigenous Business Australia is less burdened by red tape so that it can function like a normal Commonwealth agency.

All of those are highly commendable, but I also want to commend at least two inquiries in this House. One has just been completed: Doing time—time for doing, which was part of the output of the Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs. In this we acknowledged the extraordinary rates of increased incarceration for Indigenous Australians—up 55 per cent for men and up 47 per cent for women. That cannot be tolerated in a developed nation like ours, which takes great pride in the effort and money it spends on foreign aid and supporting developing countries. I commend another report being undertaken by this same committee which looks at the retention of Indigenous community languages and at the same time seeks to make sure that those who help to maintain or revive their community languages are also supported to be fully functional in English. When they go to try to get employment or to get something as simple as a driver's licence or a licence to own and use guns for purposes of feral animal control, they are disadvantaged, discriminated against or exploited because of their lack of English. They can be exploited by others who realise they may not be fully across the issues in front of them.

We need to strive harder to support Indigenous Australia. We need to look to where policy in other countries that have been down a similar road to us can best inform us. But I find the statement I referred to in the Australian, where there is a controversy about whether hungry children are starving or simply hungry, abhorrent. I wonder why we have got to a point where, in a country like Australia, we continue to tolerate conditions such that when, if we were viewing the same settlements in—say—Rwanda or Zimbabwe or Papua New Guinea, we would be shocked and dismayed and instantly require that something different be done.

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