Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Regardless of where Australians live, there is little doubt they are moved by the plight of Indigenous Australia. Attitudes and knowledge vary markedly from our major cities where many people have met few Aboriginals and have little firsthand knowledge of the issues and circumstances facing people of Aboriginal descent, to regional towns and outback communities where residents deal with the reality of Indigenous communities living within their midst, with both the successes—and there are many—and the excesses and failures of the system and individuals and the penalties the larger community pays for those failures.

It was encouraging to hear the Prime Minister report the increase in mainstream Indigenous employment from 42.4 per cent in 2006 to 44.7 per cent in 2012. While I have no hard figures to back this up, I think I can see small but positive improvement in my major regional communities, in places like Port Lincoln, Port Augusta and Ceduna, where there is apparent growth in Aboriginal families with mum or dad, or both, at work, living in better housing, driving better cars and getting their children to school. There is still quite a way to go in many instances, but I sense that progress is being made.

Employment is simply one of the most important, if latter, keys to the puzzle. I say 'latter' because long-term productive employment is very difficult to achieve if an individual has poor education, poor language skills and a negative experience of being raised in a dysfunctional household. This is no truer with Indigenous communities than with the population at large. Not having a stable and loving household, good language skills and a reasonable education does not mean an individual cannot break the barriers and become a productive, fully integrated member of our society, but it elevates the degree of difficulty many times. So while the apparent rise in employment is encouraging, it is a concern that by far the majority of Indigenous jobs are in the government sector and, more particularly, in the Aboriginal industry. That sector should play an important role, but we will never achieve true equality in Australia until the workforce is truly integrated. While we have jobs that are perceived as black or white, prejudices are reinforced rather than broken down. It is important for the general advancement of Indigenous Australians that they are seen as 100 per cent part of mainstream Australia, and to do so they need to be represented in the mainstream workforce at similar levels to the mainstream population. However, I add a point of balance and congratulate those in the resources sector who have made a dedicated effort to raise Indigenous employment.

Overall, I am more encouraged than discouraged with the progress in employment in regional centres. However, it is in the remote communities where I fear outcomes are at best stagnant. All of the remote Indigenous communities in South Australia are in my electorate. Aboriginal communities like Oak Valley and Yalata in the west, Nepabunna in the central region and the APY lands in the far north are joined by regular towns of mixed populations like Coober Pedy, Oodnadatta and Marree. In all, those who identify as Aboriginal in my electorate make up about seven per cent of the population, or 10,000 persons. Of that, about 4,000 live in remote communities. The biggest group of these live in remote, isolated Indigenous lands, and by far the best known of these are the Anangu, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara lands in the far north-western corner of the state, where about 2,500 people live. The APY lands are by no means the only area where the problems exist, but they are a very useful tool for assessing the issues facing communities closer to the mainstream because they are in every way isolated from the rest of the state.

It is in the APY lands where the gap is the largest and, despite the very best efforts and an annual expenditure by the taxpayer of between $150 million and $250 million—it seems that no-one has any real idea how much—it is difficult to see progress. It is worth pointing out that this is around about $100,000 a head. Huge amounts have been invested in housing, schools and health clinics. While further housing would be desirable, these physical facilities are by and large very good—the kinds of facilities that most communities in Australia would be happy with. But it occurs to me that despite the best efforts of those who work within them, the net result in most cases is no improvement. There is a paradox that exists in these communities.

I try to visit the APY lands a couple of times a year. It is a one-week trip each time. My guess is that there are around about 80 different organisations on the lands, government and non-government, all trying to make a contribution to improving the lot of the locals. When I speak to people from any of these organisations they give convincing and enthusiastic evidence that they are making a real difference and closing the gap, if you like. I must say that when I look at the work most times I am convinced. However—and here is the rub—if all these programs and organisations were doing such a good job, then why aren't we making progress? Why in most cases are things getting worse? Why are there communities that are theoretically at least alcohol free with still unacceptably high levels of alcohol- and drug-driven violence? Why is there sexual assault on minors, very poor school attendance, astronomical incidence rates of diseases like diabetes and impaired hearing in up to 95 per cent of the children?

Noel Pearson has argued far more eloquently than I ever will that the root cause of these evils is passive welfare. He is right. Helping people is a double-edged sword. When we assume responsibility for a commitment in a person's life that would normally be their responsibility, we diminish their future obligation to perform the task. Eventually, if we do it often enough, everything becomes the government's responsibility.

Apart from the art centres, there are almost no business enterprises on the lands that provide employment outcomes that are not dependent on government. They are the only businesses on the lands that produce a tradeable resource, thus actually providing genuine market-driven work-related income to the communities. In the very high expense environment of the APY lands, even the art centres are not able to be self-supporting industries and require ongoing taxpayer support. However, they are the best that we have and I congratulate them for their progress and sincerely hope that the market will continue to support the growth of these centres. Virtually all other jobs related to income come courtesy of the taxpayer in industries providing services to the rest of the population or in environment driven jobs where locals are funded to care for country.

It is worth noting as this parliament is presented with more legislation on native title that the APY lands are owned freehold by the communities. That is not title guaranteeing access, not traditional ownership and not pastoral leases but the most secure title to land available—freehold. It was gifted to the Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara people by the Tonkin Liberal government in 1981. While I support Indigenous people to establish their links with the land, I send a strong word of caution to those who think that ownership in any form is the silver bullet that will address the breakdown of traditional culture. The APY lands are a 32-year demonstration that that is clearly not the case. In so many areas, things are no worse, and that is certainly in the area of employment, alcohol and drug abuse and levels of literacy.

In fact, in some ways I wonder if the granting of ownership has made things worse. One would wonder how that could possibly be. Perhaps there was an air of expectation that with ownership would come wealth and the work to generate that worth was expected to be performed by others. Certainly jobs on committees and on boards, accompanied by cars and travel benefits, are seen as real jobs. Jobs cleaning schools and health centres cannot be filled and have to be performed by teaching and medical staff. Perhaps it was the interfamily battles over the spoils that to this day debilitates attempts at governance. Appalling governance has led to repeated failures. The APY Lands Council, for instance, has once again just recently been bailed out by the state government to compensate for funds that have been lost to shoddy management.

If we are truly to close the gap, there must be a consolidation of the plethora of local boards ultimately funded by taxpayers on the lands. The amalgamated bodies must be given more responsibility but also face a far greater responsibility to meet the same demands of probity that local government must meet. If these bodies cannot meet those levels, as with any local government that suffers chronic failure, administration must be installed. Part of the malaise of remote Indigenous Australia is that we set a lower expectation of Indigenous communities. That is, we set the bar lower. Eventually this is totally unproductive and leads to accepting lower employment performance, lower standards in schools and lower levels of compliance with the law of the land. The idea that we accept this because people are Aboriginal is condescending. It is offensive and racist and should not be accommodated.

I will draw your attention to the schooling system for a short while. Tens of millions of dollars have been spent on schools on the APY Lands—in one case as much as $4 million at a school which is now closed barely four years later. Yet for all this expenditure, according to the study collated by Professor Mark Hughes, an academic extremely well regarded in this area, South Australia is the worst performing state in Australia in Indigenous education, according to the NAPLAN information. The schools in themselves are fascinating and seem to be mostly staffed by dedicated teachers. Teacher-student ratios are extremely low. Breakfast and, in some cases, lunch programs are common. A plethora of travel, excursion and life education programs exist. Yet attendance rates are appalling.

The attendance issue is exacerbated by cultural activities, with perhaps the most disruptive and unpredictable being sorry camps. These camps are yet another example of how the culture of the Indigenous peoples has been distorted by its head-on collision with the modern world. I visited a sorry camp that had been sitting for almost 6 weeks, camped in the rubbish which accumulates around such camps and within 800 metres of a small town with running water, toilets, housing and showers that was empty for the duration. There were infants in the arms of mothers amongst the flies and filth, and children some hundreds of kilometres from home, absent for weeks from their normal schools. Traditionally, the deceased would have been buried within a day or two. The cultural guardians of the Anangu simply must sort this issue out, and I acknowledge that they are making some efforts to do so in this area.

To return to the schools, apart from sorry, attendance is still an issue, and I am pleased that at least there has been a move to income management on the lands, albeit as a voluntary model at this stage. More than 250 people have signed on to the program, and it is at least implied that the compulsory management may be enforced if parents fail to get their children to school, although it is yet to be seen whether governments are prepared to commit to the tough love required to enforce this outcome. I watch that space.

Classroom teachers are faced with the dilemma of trying to get children to school with no other incentive than making learning a fun experience with small bribes. It is concerning to see children dribbling into schools over an extended period in the morning. This is hardly an ideal start to the day. The problem with having to be constantly entertaining and fun is that the core tenets of education get demoted. This is a tragedy because we know that those lessons are the ones which will, in the long term, deliver the mainstream jobs that I spoke about earlier. I have spoken before in this place about my visit to Cape York, and I am very pleased the Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth is here to hear this. The Cape York Institute is run under the direct instruction method by Noel Pearson, and I can only say that all of Australia's remote communities should be interested in the package. I urge the South Australian government to at least make the package available at some trial sites in the state.

All of this raises this issue of the difficulty of ever closing the gap in this remote world where there is no genuine economy. Certainly we must support these communities and allow the adults of today to live their lives as best we can provide for. But every effort must be made to break the cycle and educate the next generation to equip the new generation, as Noel Pearson says, to walk in both worlds. That means having good English language skills. It means having strong basic maths and an understanding of the social demands of living in the outside community. Denying these children those keys means that they are tied to a region where there are few jobs, and it will condemn them to the uselessness of a life on welfare. I do not doubt the good intent of the political class in Australia to address the deep-seated problems of remote Indigenous Australia. But I think in so many cases we are addressing the symptoms rather than trying to apply a long-term vision to the issues at hand. What is needed is an independent analysis of the economic possibilities of the communities and honest assessments of the population these communities are capable of properly supporting, and then making appropriate and evidence-based decisions about their future. Maintaining, supporting and encouraging new generations to live in communities that cannot ever support them will not only destroy the individuals but will destroy the culture of those whose future we are seeking to advance.

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