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

I am pleased to see that the first part of my speech was so riveting that there are now lots of people in the gallery to listen to the second half. It is great. For those people who are in the gallery now, I am talking about the government's social security legislation to trial the use of debit cards. It follows a recommendation from Mr Forrest in relation to alcohol in Indigenous communities. What I have said is that, if the government is serious about this, there need to be additional support services and more services to the Ceduna district hospital, the Aboriginal community controlled health service and other services in the Ceduna area, as well as in the East Kimberley area. Without those services, this trial will fail.

So far the government has not provided any additional funding and there has been no response, as I understand it, to the requests by the South Australian and Western Australian governments for this support. I have spoken to people on the ground in the Ceduna area and have talked to a number of people up in the East Kimberley, and they support the idea of these additional services. If you are going to get people off the scourge of alcoholism, if you are going to reduce the addiction to gambling, you have to have those services on the ground to support it. Otherwise this trial will fail. We also support a Senate inquiry to allow the impacts of the trial to be thoroughly explored and to give the people who are affected a say. It is important that locals can have a say.

The government has, as I have said before, had a House of Representatives inquiry, and recommendations have been made to the government. Those recommendations—which deal with alcohol hurting people and harming communities in Indigenous areas of Australia—were bipartisan. But sadly, before those recommendations were delivered, the government decided that they would not proceed with the alcohol management plans and they did so without telling that bipartisan committee. The government last approved an alcohol management plan—these are plans which come from local communities—back on 26 May 2014 in relation to the Titjikala community. I am a member of the committee that made those recommendations. Recommendation 7 was that the backlog of alcohol management plans—plans which are driven by the people of these local communities to deal with the challenges of alcohol, domestic violence and substance abuse—be fast-tracked by the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Nigel Scullion from the Northern Territory, by January 2016. Unbeknownst to our committee, he made a decision. On 10 July 2015—after the report had been handed down—he answered a question on notice that we put to him, saying that they would not be proceeding with the alcohol management plans.

In opposition the coalition said they would support the alcohol management plans because they were community driven. That they have broken this commitment is consistent with their budget cuts of about $800 million to preventative health programs that help people to address the issues of alcoholism. In addition to that, the Abbott government—who now might like to call themselves the Turnbull government—have cut $165 million from Indigenous health programs, including preventative health programs aimed at such things as tackling smoking and encouraging the adoption of healthy lifestyles. They cut the funding, they have not proceeded with the AMPs and in the inquiry that they established they got no cooperation from the CLP Northern Territory government. We recommended they restore the banned drinker register. With the CLP government in the Northern Territory—the colleagues and comrades of the Minister for Indigenous Affairs and this government here—we recommended they restore the banned drinker register, which was working in the Northern Territory. We also recommended that they stop criminalising drunkenness and start treating it as a health issue. But the minister says no. He says that, if we are going to deal with issues of alcohol, we are going to come up with ideas like this and this alone, that we will cut funding and that you can rely on the Northern Territory government, who have a shameful record in this area.

I call on the government, if they are fair dinkum about this strategy, to provide the necessary resources and reverse the cuts. Get on the phone to Adam Giles, the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory, restore the banned drinker register, work with local communities, provide the additional resourcing and make sure they can deal with issues properly—because we have real scepticism about this. We have real concern that they are not fair dinkum and that this is a symbol. We hope this works. We are expecting the government to provide the resourcing. I ask them to cooperate with local communities and the Western Australian and South Australian governments in relation to these matters.

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