Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Talk about timely! To begin this important address, I would like to repeat words from my maiden speech:

There is a belief in my community that there is enough money in the system for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health, that there is enough money in the system to house them and that there is enough money for the education of their children but it is just that it does not get through to the people who need it the most. My community is telling me that there is a consultant class of government and non-government people taking too much on the way through. They need two things: the opportunity to do it themselves and the understanding that some will fail. My community is no different to any other and I take it as my solemn pledge that I will not leave anyone behind. We are one team … They need a hand and they need us to give them the whip handle.

I, like the Prime Minister, lament the lack of progress in this field. This is again, just as the Prime Minister said, not due to any bad intentions. In fact, I believe the complete opposite occurs in this field. We are all full of good intentions; it is the experience on the ground which needs to be addressed. It is the experience of those people who are dying too young, who do not have a job, who are being incarcerated for crimes where poverty is a primary factor—it is these people who understand our intentions. But intentions do not matter if you are 19 years old and strapped onto a dialysis machine or have a nappy soaked in Rexona planted on your face. Those are the people who are dying, or going to jail, too young and too often.

During NAIDOC Week, I attended a flag-raising ceremony at the old Thuringowa council chambers. I was asked if I wanted to say something, so I stood up there and told them that the decision to be made must be made by them, the people concerned. I told them that although I have an opinion, I have no real personal perspective. My perspective as a middle-aged, fat, white guy means nothing to the 12-year-old trying to understand why he or she must work hard at school to get a job when no-one in his or her family has ever had one. That is the issue. That is what we have to get around. As Senator Nigel Scullion always says, 'This is not a black problem; it is a poverty problem.' No matter where you go in the world, where there is poverty there will be disengagement from the education system and bad health outcomes. All these things come from poverty. So what we have to do is address the basic question: how do we get people out of poverty?

I am a great fan of Kevin Andrews, our Minister for Social Services. His statement was that the best form of social security we can give anyone is a job. That is the key here.

We have some real issues to confront, but we can only do so much. We need to provide, as my good friend the member for Longman always says, 'a hand up; not a hand out'. We need to understand that people have been hurt by processes for over 200 years. We have to know that commitment to change is a two-way street and that we will see failure. We have to see failure in order to succeed. Failure is, by nature, proof positive that someone is trying something with which they are not comfortable. We need to get people to step out of their comfort zones and be supported in doing so. We need to challenge but we need to support. Everyone can master turning the TV on and watching day-time television. For those people who have never been engaged it is very hard to master getting out of bed and going to work.

Again, as the Prime Minister stated, education is the key. I am convinced of that. He said, in his speech, that we need full participation in education in modern Australia. 'That does not mean,' he said, 'access to a good education. It means actually going to school.' I would take it a step further. We need people to commit, from as early an age as possible, to full participation in education—in learning to learn, and understanding that sometimes learning is plain hard work. Only then will we have the means to address the wrongs we are seeing in our cities, towns, and remote communities.

Recently, we saw the death of a young girl in Townsville. She was 18. She stole a car and went for a joy ride, crashed, and was killed. She had a mum and two sisters pleading with her not to do it. But she saw this as something she just wanted to do. It was fun. The dead girl was 18 years old. She had two children of her own. I do not know her circumstances, but she fits the basic model of the accident waiting to happen. She had a mum who loved her but could not stop her. There is a sense of inevitability and hopelessness in her Facebook posts from that night. She had a lot to live for but chose a course of action which was at best reckless and at worst suicidal. She is now, sadly, a statistic.

That there is a sense of hopelessness in so many people today goes to the way we roll out programs, ask people to commit 100 per cent to them, and then defund them. You can only maintain your resolve for so long here before you must throw up your hands and ask, 'What is the use?' That is the issue here. We continue to tell people that this is a real problem. We continue to tell people that they have to commit. They commit, and then six months later we tell them that there is no money for the program.

We are a great country. We have great people who make up our community. We have great people in Townsville and North Queensland who care deeply. We all need to be responsible for this—not just government, ACOSS or the churches. All of us must do our bit to assist our first peoples in living a full, happy, engaged life of purpose. We must close the gap and we must do it as a nation.

In the time I have left I would like to address an issue of youth justice in Townsville. In Townsville there is a group of Aboriginal elders trying to start an outstation where we can take the at-risk kids. In my discussions with Townsville police they have stated their frustration when they knock on a door to arrest a young offender. When they take charge of the young offender they will see three or four kids—cousins, brothers and sisters—standing there. The question is: as a society, do we just let the police go back one at a time and keep on picking them up and putting them into this system? Or is there some way that the police can access the system and say to Centrelink or to Wayne Parker or to child support, 'Here is a group of people who may be in need. We need to get to these kids before they start disengaging from primary school, before they hit high school, and put them into something'?

I said to people in Townsville last weekend that it costs a lot of money to bring kids up, and today's society cannot just let them walk everywhere. If we want kids to engage, we have to do it at a basic level and we have to do it at a level with which they are comfortable. We say a lot about getting kids to engage in education, but our education system is becoming deskbound, even in prep. It is becoming book learning. We talk to Aboriginal kids about coming into school. We talk to them about music, dance and sport, and as soon as we get them into a school we sit them down at a desk to tell them just how stupid they are. We have demonstrated that they are struggling with this. We have to change that basic proposition and allow teachers to teach, to display their art and their skill in bringing the best out in every child. If it takes a little bit longer, we have to have the courage to sit there and say, 'Look, you have to do this again.' We have to get through the basic message that it is okay to fail, as long as you try. That is a big one. At the moment we are simply not closing the gap. Something that will haunt us all as we leave this place—and we all leave it eventually—is that one thing we did not do was assist in this process.

I thank the House for the opportunity to talk to this statement. It is one of the most worthy things we have done here. I stood and watched then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd give the apology, and it was a truly great moment. But it has not kept one person out of jail and it has not stopped one person getting out of the system. We must have very concrete things. We must make sure that we have very tacit and tangible outcomes.

I thank the House.

Debate adjourned.

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