Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I am aggrieved on behalf of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples locally and nationally and non-Indigenous people of goodwill committed to closing the gap. On 15 March 2013 the now Prime Minister and then opposition leader declared in a speech to the Sydney Institute:

Should the Coalition win the election, Aboriginal people will be at the heart of a new government, in word and in deed.

The now Prime Minister's claim to be a Prime Minister for Indigenous affairs has been exposed as a pointless platitude in this budget—a mendacious mantra and a hollow homily. His budget of broken promises has gutted $534.4 million from programs run by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples which support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and those people who are assisting them across the country, from the Torres Strait to Tasmania and from the Gold Coast over to Perth. No true Prime Minister for Indigenous affairs would be so heartless about one of the most important challenges facing this nation. The Prime Minister has broken a fundamental commitment he made to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples before the election. This broken promise goes to the character of the government. He made solemn commitments to Indigenous Australians and he has not kept them.

This is a Prime Minister who has form in saying one thing before an election and doing an entirely different thing afterwards. On many occasions before the 2013 election, when he was opposition leader, he promised no cuts to health, no cuts to education, no changes to the pension and no changes to the GST. In fact, on the Sunrise program the day before the election, he said:

No cuts to health, in fact health goes up. No cuts to schools, in fact schools go up.

When Labor tried to warn the Australian people what the Prime Minister would do, he had the gall to say we were scaremongering. But on 13 May this year the coalition government handed down its budget, and the extent of the betrayal shocked everyone in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. They had no idea these cuts were coming. Under the sneaky cover of streamlining, the coalition's first budget does not explain where most of the $534.4 million in cuts will fall. In fact, when I looked at the press release of the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, the Hon. Nigel Scullion, it seemed there was a massive increase in funding for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs. In fact, there is no mention at all of the cuts I have outlined. You have to go to the budget papers—Budget Paper No. 2—to discover that $534.4 million is being cut over five years from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet's allocation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs.

There is no mention at all in the minister's press release of the $165 million in cuts to Indigenous health; there is no mention at all of the $9.5 million in cuts to Indigenous language support programs; there is no mention at all of the $3.5 million being cut from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in North Queensland through the Torres Strait Island Regional Council; and there is no mention at all about the COAG Reform Council being cut to the tune of $8.3 million over four years. The reform council reports on the Closing the Gap initiative. The lack of transparency, openness and accountability in the minister's press release shows just how sneaky and tricky the minister and the Prime Minister have been in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs.

Service providers across the country have been left out in the cold as a result of this, and Indigenous people and communities face an uncertain future. If the federal government does what coalition governments have done at a state level, some second-order bureaucrat will ring up in the next few weeks or months and tell a service provider in, say, Newcastle or Ipswich or Townsville, 'By the way, your funding was cut in the budget—we just forgot to mention it on 13 May in the budget speech by the Treasurer, or indeed the press release or indeed in the budget papers.' That is what happened in New South Wales, and it has happened elsewhere—in Queensland and other places. This is a budget of broken promises and bald-faced betrayals when it comes to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Prior to the election the coalition's Indigenous policy document made strong promises that there would be no cuts to Indigenous health. In fact, it said:

The coalition has provided in-principle support for Closing the Gap initiatives and will maintain the funding in the budget allocated to Closing the Gap in Health.

In COAG last year, in December, they stopped the funding for the national partnership arrangements in relation to Indigenous health. That expired in June last year, and we continued the funding—$777 million of federal government funding. But as a result of the decision of this government the bureaucracy has no focus on Indigenous health at all. There is no national partnership in relation to Indigenous health, so the states and territories do not have to put any dollars towards it whatsoever. In the budget we see cuts and cuts. Preventative health programs will be on the chopping block. How do we know that? Because the coalition, in its budget brought down on 13 May, cut preventative health programs by close to $400 million and the National Preventive Health Agency was abolished. Ripping $165 million out of Indigenous health programs over the next four years will have a deleterious impact on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people—most of whom, by the way, live in cities and in regional communities up and down the Queensland and New South Wales coast.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people will also be slugged with the GP tax and with the increase in the Medicare and pharmaceutical co-payments. What we will see—because it is price sensitive—is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people not necessarily consulting community controlled health services like Kambu, like those run by the Institute of Urban Indigenous Health in South-East Queensland, which, according to The Australian today, is providing 'great success outcomes' with respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health. As a result of the mainstream programs being cut and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health services being cut, we will go backwards, in all likelihood, in relation to infant mortality and the longevity of life. The lack of commitment by this government to the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Plan developed in partnership with Indigenous people across the community, after extensive consultation, will mean a lack of emphasis on targets, objectives and outcomes. It will also mean fewer dollars in this space and less community control.

The states with the largest number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are New South Wales and Queensland where there is the least amount of community control. What we need is greater emphasis on community control services like Kambu Medical Service, which runs in the Lockyer Valley, and other areas like that. This government is doing exactly the opposite in relation to the commitment to closing the gap. The funding should be redirected in relation to Indigenous health programs and put back into those programs.

I believe Adrian Carson is a terrific CEO of the Institute for Urban Indigenous Health. If The Australian is correct today, those outcomes should be looked at and the minister should have a good chat with Adrian to see what they are doing right in South-East Queensland because that emphasis on community control, good governance, probity and integrity in governance are really what is driving those outcomes. We can see it all across South-East Queensland. The facts and the figures are in.

There is no funding in this budget for the 38 children and family centres funded under the National Partnership Agreement on Indigenous Early Childhood Development, which expires on 30 June this year. It means that we will go backwards. This is a significant, detrimental impact on closing the gap. I fear that, as a result of this budget, we will see closing the gap to be a fiction in the future. The government has shown through this budget that it lacks the will, the determination and the commitment to closing the gap.

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