Ken Wyatt (Hasluck, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

We had the privilege of being part of the fifth anniversary of Closing the Gap. This is without doubt an incredible achievement, not just for the parliament but for our entire nation. Closing the Gap is an important bipartisan effort that recognises that the way forward will depend on people working together, irrespective or race or background, to improve education, health and quality of life for all Australians. It is an effort that, I am pleased to recognise, both sides of the political spectrum are striving towards. As the Prime Minister said in her speech:

… the Indigenous and non-Indigenous people of this country have decided to walk the path of reconciliation together.

Importantly, the Prime Minister acknowledged:

The mistakes made in one generation are being repaired in the next. The gap is being closed. So for all the challenges we will inevitably encounter between now and 2031, this is a moment to savour. Not just because we reached a target but because we showed what we can do together.

The Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, also rightly acknowledged the hard work that has gone into achieving the progress that has been made so far. Mr Abbott said in his Closing the Gap speech:

There is a new spirit in this land. There is a new spirit which reaches out to embrace the indigenous people of this country, so different from the spirit that was abroad when the Prime Minister and I were young. It is a tribute to so many people in this place and around our country that that is now the case.

I rise to add my voice to the support of the many in support of the continued work to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. I am pleased to see the involvement of parliamentary colleagues over the term of this parliament making contributions to those debates on many fronts. We see positive changes in the number of Indigenous Australians in employment, with 47 per cent of Indigenous Australians now in mainstream employment. That is significantly up from five years ago. It means that they participate in the economic opportunities that this country affords those who wish to take the pathway into different jobs and ultimately earn incomes that benefit their families.

I also raise my concern that we do not lose focus at this critical point in our endeavours. I think if we take the headline messages out of both those speeches and walked into communities and the suburbs where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families live, we would see a gap that we would find hard to comprehend, given what we have heard in the parliament. Some of that gap is around missed opportunity in respect to education.

I also look at the incarceration rates that are continuing to climb in every jurisdiction. That means you have young Indigenous Australians taking a pathway into corrective services and, in some instances, into recidivism where their incarceration rates become cyclic. They spend time out and they go back in. It is an opportunity that is lost in terms of the hope and aspirations that we desire for all young people.

When I look at the Australian Public Service, I see Indigenous Australians employed within a number of agencies but there are very few in positions within the Senior Executive Service where they are contributing to not just the debate on the needs of Indigenous Australians but also the debate on the needs of the Australian public through the agency in which they work. For example, the Office of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health focuses on the health of Indigenous Australians and yet in its history I have never seen any Indigenous person appointed to the most senior position within the organisation or to the branch manager positions within state and territory offices. I have seen them appointed to levels much lower than that, which is a pity.

If we are truly closing the gap and changing the mindset we would have developed the capability for them to participate anywhere within the public sector. I hope that in 10 years we do not have identified positions within the public sector, that what we have is the same strategy that applied when we focused on equity for women. We did not create positions that were made for women as we do with Indigenous Affairs. Within the decade what I want to see is an Indigenous person holding a position at the deputy secretary or secretary level of a Commonwealth agency on merit and on the basis of the skills and capability that they bring. Although we have had gains, they are not significant enough to be uniform across the board.

We are closing the gap, we are making tremendous gains in leaps and bounds. But if we take the whole spectrum in terms of housing, community infrastructure and the number of people who are progressing in their quality of life, we see some disparities still. I would hope that, when we achieve the targets we have set under the national partnership agreements and through the COAG processes, we do not overlook all of those other factors that come into play. If we halt that then we will see a discrepancy between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. What I would also hope is that in the future Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander programs become the lesser pathway for progression within Australian society and a greater pathway of opportunity is created in a much broader context. I am always concerned, when we walk into Aboriginal communities, whether we really see the true story. That is why I have been a strong advocate of members of this parliament getting out into their electorates and identifying the gaps themselves. It is when you go and visit constituents, work with the organisations in the process of meetings, and understand the challenges and things that we have to change, that you will really see the gap close in a number of areas beyond just the five aspects we have targeted to achieve.

My concern is that some of the true nature of what is happening at our regional and remote Aboriginal communities is not accurately reflected in data. One of the things I love about data is that you can collect data, analyse it, bring it into a national construct and see where we have made change and differences, just through the trending of data. It is when we dig down and go back to the realities of families and communities that we see there are still gaps yet to be addressed. In a bell curve, 25 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have made significant advances, both within their career pathways and in the income that they bring home on a fortnightly basis. They are highly successful and they do the same normative things as any other Australian family whose members work full-time—although there is still a cultural obligation that you support and help family members. I suspect that that is why you do not see too many Indigenous Australians as millionaires: because we tend to have a cultural obligation of sharing the grief and pain.

As part of my work on the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health and Ageing, I have seen with my own eyes the work that still needs to be done in our country. I have listened to community members and service providers on the ground, who work hard to achieve improved access to services that many of us take for granted. There are still people living in abject poverty with no help and no hope for a better future. There is a sense of futility for some individuals because they see no horizon of hope from where they currently sit within the context of the continuum of opportunities that prevail within our broader Australian community. Many Indigenous people are living under substandard living conditions relative to other Australians in all settings—rural, regional and remote.

Only recently, I met with a group of Indigenous leaders in my own electorate and they talked about the substandard housing that some of them are living in and their frustrations in working with government agencies to try and remedy the problem. One of the elements that I really appreciated when the NPAs—national partnership agreements—were being framed was that the National Indigenous Reform Agreement had a set of principles as to how government agencies would work with Indigenous communities, organisations and people, whereby they were equal partners in shaping the way programs, services and initiatives would roll out to make a difference. Sadly, that has not occurred to the extent that I would have thought.

Life expectancy, employment rates, childhood mortality rates and literacy rates still show a marked difference between our Indigenous Australians and the rest of the Australian population in rural and remote regions. We still have a distance to travel to close the gap in Australia. We still need to fight for many families and young children who are facing an upward battle to have access to the same healthcare and education as children living in the metropolitan areas. One of the key challenges that still remain, as I said earlier, is the youth incarceration rate. I once participated in a review of imprisonment programs, and the element that came through in that was the normative thinking and expectation that imprisonment was a pathway in life—that it was just the normal process of living.

We have really got to focus on dealing with that issue. We also need to initiate long-term, lasting change. One excellent example of this is the training of Indigenous doctors. Doctors are making a tangible, positive difference in closing the gap. I saw the beginnings of the medical school in Newcastle, where Dr Sandra Eades graduated as one of the first Indigenous doctors. From that grew the pathways for many others. We now have in excess of 120 doctors. Kelvin Kong in New South Wales has completed the requirements to be a surgeon.

So we have made strident gains in some key areas but we need that uniformly. We need to see individuals go into the financial sector and into areas that will generate opportunities for a rethinking of the contribution that can be made through the financial gains available to all of those who seek to invest and seek those opportunities. Young men and women are establishing their own enterprises and are being successful in a slow and steady way. Joe Proctor is a financial adviser and investor with Macquarie Bank. Terri Janke is the owner of Terri Janke and Company. Natalie Walker is the CEO of Australian Indigenous Minority Supplier Council. David William is from Gilimbaa. Quinton Tucker is at BYAC Contractors. All of them are employing other Indigenous Australians as part of their workforce but are engaging external people to skill them. Eventually they want to become strong economic entities in their own right to participate not only in the mining boom.

Isabelle Adams at Vision Network has had her own consultancy company for some time and has made a tremendous contribution to some of the reforms. Whilst we can acknowledge that we have closed the gap in some key areas, there is still much more work to be done. There needs to be a greater effort of consistency. The other element that has to be considered as a gap is the active participation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people being equal partners in the delivery of government services and programs. There is still a desire for the control to sit with state and Commonwealth government agencies. If the change occurs then we will see real ownership of many of the facets of the gaps that are still there and I think we will see improvements within the decade that parallel the achievements we have made thus far.

I hope that we see within the next two terms of parliament further reporting on other key areas that demonstrate that we are on the path to success and that we are on the path where all Indigenous Australians work very closely and are part of the leadership of this nation in every field of endeavour—not just in Indigenous affairs but in the institutions, the financial structures of this country and the corporate sector. I congratulate both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition for their fine speeches that reflect the gains we have made thus far.

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