Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank our deputy chair, the member for Lingiari, a very expert and concerned person who, of course, in a previous life was the Minister for Indigenous Affairs. He is right: we have a very bipartisan committee. We have been together a very long time, and our actual party affiliations do not matter when it comes to Indigenous affairs in this country. All of our governments have tried their very best, but the realities—and this is why we are undertaking this inquiry—are that, when it comes to educational outcomes for our Indigenous students, we still have a very long way to go.

We know that, currently, educational outcomes for Indigenous students fall way below those of non-Indigenous students. By 2020 the Australian education system will have an extra 100,000 Indigenous students enrolling for their first day at school, but that will not be sufficient to guarantee that that extra 100,000 young people arrive at school with their hearing intact, with their nutritional needs having already been well met from their birth or even prior to their birth, or with those students' languages attended to if they are coming to school with English as a second, third or fourth language. We are not sure that the teachers they will encounter in their schools will be respectful of traditional culture and understanding or of the parents' backgrounds. They are often in very remote parts of Australia. We are beginning to see more students enrolling. That is a very good thing. We need to see the outcomes of that enrolment, though, to be equal to any other student in Australia—in fact equal to world best.

The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Indigenous Affairs is inquiring into what educational options there are now, whether it is, as the member for Lingiari said, boarding school, out-of-community education, in-community, an all-Indigenous school environment or one of mixed student background. What works best? What data do we have? We are repeatedly reminded, as we were in Adelaide just on Friday, that there is little to no data in Australia about what works best. We have a lot of anecdotes and a lot of Indigenous and non-Indigenous opinions, but we need data so we can say: 'That's what works. That's what doesn't work. Let's get it straight and move on.'

We have a questionnaire, seeking the views and experiences of current students, former students, parents and teachers. It asks them, because we do not want this to be a desktop inquiry where we do not hear from the students themselves and their families. We want to hear from past students about their experiences at school. I am very pleased to say that nearly half of all the responses are from Indigenous people. We have had about 400 responses to this questionnaire and it is still open, so we hope people will get onto the website to give their views.

We also have already found some common threads of concern, for example, about access to ABSTUDY. ABSTUDY is a critical program—not for a minute do we ever hear that it is not of vital importance in helping fund students' education, particularly when they have to move from home. But what we do hear is that the forms that have to be filled in are too complex and too bureaucratic, especially for parents who are not literate themselves, perhaps, or where there is no computer access or the access online is very sporadic. And, of course, when it asks you for something like a birth certificate for your child or children and you do not have a birth certificate—a common situation in remote Australia—then it just goes from bad to farcical.

We also know that there is a potential for ABSTUDY to be used to fund people who take Indigenous kids in residence in some big towns or cities. Those—I will call them 'host families'—are not subjected to any scrutiny for their level of responsibility or accountability as foster parents, minders or carers of those students who are in their care, either in domestic homes or in homes that have been set up specially.

Communities have also expressed concern about the scholarships to elite schools in metropolitan areas and wonder if they are the best thing—when you hollow out the kids who have perhaps achieved the highest and the best in their community schools. They have been removed from their peers and the cohort of kids of the same age and have gone off to the city, perhaps never to return again. We have that same situation throughout Australia, of course, with non-Indigenous students—with the hollowing-out of the brightest and best from rural and regional communities, across the board. But for Indigenous households and communities this is a critical issue to deal with when it comes to trying to give students the best access to all that is available in mainstream society, without losing culture, their family identity and their connection with country. This is the overwhelming desire expressed by Indigenous parents—that their students achieve in mainstream Australian society but also remain proudly and distinctly aware of and capable and competent in their own culture.

So this is an important inquiry. When we have our report available, I commend that to the House. And I thank the deputy chair for making his preliminary remarks.

See this speech in context