Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

In the hope that our chair, the member for Murray, will be here shortly it gives me great pleasure to speak about our inquiry, which is the inquiry into educational opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. I want to thank the secretariat staff who are here this morning for the wonderful work they are doing.

In her absence, I want to thank Dr Stone for the way in which she has chaired this committee. She has done it with equanimity and style—and she is just walking into the parliament in a stylish way! I am pleased she is here! But I want to thank her for the way she has led this committee. She continues to work in a very collaborative, consultative way, and I want to applaud her for that.

This committee's inquiry is actually very important. It is something which we need to comprehend in a broader context other than just talking about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education. We need to talk about it in the context of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, families and, indeed, our national interest. Unless we get it right, we are condemning further generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids to low education attainment levels, few job opportunities and, ultimately, a shorter life. That is something which we all need to work against.

What is clear from this inquiry is that one size does not fit all. There are people of goodwill from all sides of the discussion in relation to this matter. There are those who argue that boarding schools are the panacea for Aboriginal education. I do not accept that, and I do not believe that the evidence we have received tells us that. We actually need to develop concentrating our minds around place-based student-centred approaches to educational opportunity. We need to be aware that things are different right across this country. They are different in Darwin from what they are in Alice Springs and Yuendumu, Papunya, Balgo, Perth, Broome and the Cape—they are all different. Anyone who believes that you have a one-size-fits-all approach is deluding themselves.

So I am mindful that there are schools in this country in urban environments where a majority of the families of those children are from a strongly Aboriginal-centred population. At one school I know of, where 95 per cent of the population are Aboriginal kids, about 70 per cent of the parents of those children have themselves not finished year 9, about 65 per cent are not in paid work and 60 per cent of those children are at different times in and out of care of the state. That creates an enormous dilemma.

Then there are those students who are of high need within the population. Many come traumatised because of the environment they live in and what they have observed of their family interaction. We know that FAS and FASD, which have been the subject of this committee's inquiries in the past, is now an important issue which needs to be addressed, yet in the Northern Territory there are simply not enough clinical staff to do the work of looking at the children and doing the diagnosis. So kids are starting in these schools from traumatised backgrounds, impoverished and suffering greatly from the circumstances in which they live, yet we do not have the tools available to us in the health department or in the education system to do the diagnosis properly required for the mental health issues and needs.

This inquiry is really very important. Instead of blaming people for not being high achievers at school, we need to understand the context of the education system in the schools they are in. We need to appreciate that non-attendance might be a matter of a whole range of factors. I know of kids who do not go home at night but turn up at school the next day. They do not go home at night not because they do not want to be at home but because home is not a safe place. These kids will roll up. They will be in trouble with the coppers and go back to school the next day. They are not fed. It is really very difficult. Yet we have a penchant in this place to blame those victims for having poor outcomes. We have got to be a whole lot better than that. We have got to do our utmost to make sure every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander child is treated as an individual within the school and community context and get the best possible outcome we can. We must not believe that one size fits all, because it does not.

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