Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

At the outset, could I recognise two constituents, Paul Myers and Sister Kerry McDermott, who have lobbied me about remote Aboriginal settlements. Each year, Sister McDermott runs a memorial for the Appin massacre close to my electorate. This morning she held a service in Minto, which my wife attended on my behalf. They have both lobbied me against the proposal in regard to remote settlements. And in contrast to the comments by Nigel Scullion, the minister, that this is an historic agreement, Western Australian Premier Barnett said that in contrast it will cause great distress. Furthermore, Reverend Sealin Garlett, chair of the Uniting Church indigenous committee, said:

This is not just a ‘lifestyle choice’—

to live in those areas—

but part of our cultural and spiritual identity.

This of course relates to the question of federal funding. In the 2013 book Spoken Here, by Mark Abley—I recommend it to you—which dealt with the disappearance of languages around the world, the author started an international survey with the example of Patrick Nudjulu, a speaker of Mati Ke. It is one of the 200 languages still spoken in this country, and only 20 of those are not on the endangered list. Yet, the government, in a budget where there is billions of dollars, decided last year to take out $9.5 million in regard to the preservation of Indigenous languages.

I heard the previous speaker talk about waste. We all know that there is waste throughout the private and public sector in this country. But one has to question priorities that would see 200 languages further threatened. I did not hear any reason as to why it was inept or incompetent and a waste of money. We see a situation in this country where on the health front babies born to Indigenous women are twice as likely to die in their first term than those born to non-Indigenous women. We have a situation where 39 per cent of Indigenous Australians aged over 55 have diabetes. And, as we all know—it has been quoted for decades but there has been a slight improvement—Aborigines have a lower life expectancy, lower that the age to which this government wants people to work until they can get the pension. Yet they can scrap hundreds of millions of dollars in the $543 million reduction last year in the health budget for Aboriginal people, including measures in regard to smoking. Despite the prevalence amongst Indigenous Australians of cardiovascular problems, I did not hear an account saying that in this massive budget, with very extensive increases in Defence expenditure, we cannot find the money to keep these services going, without there being any examples as to why they were so inefficient.

On the question of criminality and over-representation in jails, and, for that matter, over-representation in deaths in custody—

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