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

When we were in this place in the turmoil of the last 24 hours, with discussions about budgets and the accusations flying across the chamber, with responsibility being ignored, or not, a whole range of things happened. I think we often forget the very important things in our lives that we actually ought to be contemplating more often than we currently do, and we should be thinking about them more in this place.

It is with respect to that that I want to spend some time talking about an old friend of mine who recently passed away. I want to do that because she was so very close friend—someone who worked on my behalf in successive elections since 1987; someone who showed me great loyalty over that very long period of time; and someone who was very forthright in her summation of events and in her views. She had no trouble at all in castigating me or bringing me to account for perhaps saying the wrong thing or not actually understanding all that I might in relation to her or her family and community.

I am referring to Mrs N Lalara, who was a senior Nunggabuyu and Warnindilyakwa woman. She was a senior traditional owner of lands in east Arnhem Land but had lived most of her life among her Anindilyakwa-speaking relatives on Groote Eylandt. She was born in 1946 and raised at the newly opened Church Missionary Society mission at Angurugu, on Groote Eylandt. That is where she was educated and was identified early on by the missionaries for her linguistic proficiency in Anindilyakwa, her natural teaching ability and, most importantly for the church, her fluency in English. It was no surprise that, as a result, when she left school Mrs Lalara became a school teacher. Later on during the course of my contribution I will talk about the importance of that educational role and what she might be thinking about the current issues to do with education in the Northern Territory, and Australia more generally.

Always a very strong and influential woman, Mrs Lalara worked with the missionaries but always had doubts about their methods. In an oral history interview conducted in 2012 she said of the missionary times: 'It was just rule bound, strict things. Missionaries were the bossy ones. They used to tell is what to do and they used to punish us.' Things changed for her with the election of the Whitlam government in 1972. It began a process of self-determination and the end of mission control at Angurugu by 1980. The Whitlam land rights legislation, which was subsequently passed by the Fraser government, was to make Mrs Lalara a lifelong supporter and friend of the Australian Labor Party.

However, unlike many, she was not blinded by the language of self-determination; she saw it largely as a masquerade. She said recently about the early 1970s: 'Self-determination was handled appallingly. It is just words. You see so many white people come and go. People do not give a '@$&!' about you. Corrupt principals. Teachers here to bludge in the bush. The white people were basically deadwood. They were conservative and interested in themselves. They wanted to earn money and get a good mortgage for a house somewhere else. Things could not be worse if all the white people left. Nothing has happened because it is bludge city here.' She was referring to the early 1970s.

Mrs Lalara was a very strong, traditional Aboriginal woman. In the late 1970s, while teaching at Angurugu School she met the love of her life, Grant Burgoyne—another very close friend of mine—a recently arrived schoolteacher from Sydney. They had a child, Kara, and were to spend the rest of Mrs Lalara's life together. This was mainly on Groote Eylandt but also travelling to schools and towns around the Territory and New South Wales, including Darwin, Pigeon Hole, Hay, Casino and Nambucca Heads. Everywhere she went, she made an impact as a strong, independent Aboriginal woman, including calling out racism publicly wherever she saw it. At the first cricket test at The Gabba in 1986, she insisted on barracking for the West Indies against the Australian 11, calling at the top of her voice: 'Where are the black players in the Australian team?'

Upon returning to Groote Eylandt she worked informally as an interpreter, without pay, for many years, ensuring that her family and community understood and accessed services. It was not until 1996, with the first trial of an Aboriginal interpreter service in the Northern Territory, that she was to be paid for this work. She sat for one of the first accreditation tests to qualify as an official interpreter and scored one of the highest levels ever for such tests. It was no surprise to those of us who knew her, and had witnessed her performance as an unofficial interpreter for many years, that she would succeed. The first Aboriginal interpreter service and its employees faced many challenges in the early days, but Mrs Lalara's professionalism always shone through. Colleen Roses, the then redoubtable head of the interpreter service, recalls one particular case in the Northern Territory Supreme Court: 'One of the defendants had the same last name and the prosecution lawyer tried to say that Mrs Lalara was related and therefore would take sides. You should have seen his face when Mrs Lalara stood up and advised him that she was related to every Aboriginal person in Australia and as a professional interpreter she did not take sides. I am sure that he had never been challenged before and probably has not been challenged again in such a strong and proud way.'

Courts and hospitals would always make special request to have Mrs Lalara interpret, so professional was she in her work. Judge Sue Oliver sent a special message of condolence to Mrs Lalara's family at her recent funeral. Mrs Lalara was always an active member of the Anindilyakwa Land Council. She campaigned for the removal of a disgraced former CEO and always endeavoured through the land council to make the Groote Eylandt mining company, GEMCO, keep its promises to her people. At her funeral, GEMCO representatives acknowledged this, saying: 'GEMCO always knew when Mrs Lalara was unhappy with them, so forthright was she in making her views known to the company.' It is a fact that she did not like what mining had done to her beloved country, but she still worked constructively with GEMCO to get the best possible result for her people, especially in regard to local employment and land rehabilitation.

In fact, for the last decade, she and her husband, Grant, ran a very successful cross-cultural training program for new GEMCO employees and their contractors to ensure that new arrivals had a better understanding of the cultural mores of the people. When former Governor-General Quentin Bryce visited Groote, Mrs Lalara hosted her at the cross-cultural training course in another example of her never-ending quest to make non-Indigenous people understand something of her people, their needs and their aspirations.

In 2010 a $2 mining company from Perth won exploration leases over 1,723 square kilometres of the seabed between the mainland and Groote. Mrs Lalara went on the offensive with strident opposition to their plans. She gave many media interviews condemning the plans, explaining that eight major song lines across the affected seabed and her people's very existence would be compromised if the mining was to go ahead. She mobilised her people and convinced governments of both political persuasions to put a moratorium on the planned exploration.

On behalf of myself, really, but also of the Australian Labor Party, I cannot conclude without acknowledging the exemplary service that she provided to us over more than four decades. No election passed without her manning the polling booths at Groote, Bickerton Island and Numbulwar on behalf of local Labor candidates including Bob Collins, Wesley Lanhupuy, John Ah Kit, Malarndirri McCarthy and of course myself. Though unwell, she campaigned hard for the current member for Arnhem, Selena Uibo.

She delighted in Labor victories, celebrated hard and was devastated by the rare defeats she suffered. She was a very, very tenacious campaigner and someone who would not take a backwards step at a polling booth. Future campaigns will not be the same without her, but I know her husband, Grant; daughter, Kara; and other family members will continue her great work.

This is a really personal thing for me because I knew Mrs Lalara very well, and I know her husband, Grant, very well. And I know how difficult the time has been since the funeral. But I know how proud he is about the life he spent with the love of his life for so long. Sadly, when she passed away she was a shadow of herself. I think she weighed something like 29 kilograms. She was very sick but always, always wise. So it is goodbye to Mrs Lalara.

She was an educationist as well. One of the things that we have noted now is, in her communities, Umbakumba, Angurugu and Alyangula, the schools are very remote. They are up in the Gulf of Carpentaria. The circumstances confronting the kids are difficult and the teachers equally as difficult. So it is really sad for me personally and as a member of this parliament to see that the budget that was to be delivered here last night is going to have a negative impact on those schools. It is a direct impact on Northern Territory. Compared to the funding commitment of the Labor government in 2013 to fair schooling, the Northern Territory will loose over $240 million. Over the next 10 years, Northern Territory government schools would move from the current Commonwealth funding rate of approximately 23 per cent of the SRS down to 20 per cent of the SRS. In transitioning to the lower rate the Commonwealth will apply an average indexation rate of 1.3 per cent between 2018 and 2027. Based on what we know of this calculator, the indexation rate will decrease year by year. The average per-student funding for government school students will grow less than $1,000 over the next 10 years. I heard the shadow minister, the member for Sydney, talk in the previous parliament about the impact of this funding on Northern Territory schools, and she mentioned one school in particular. She mentioned Anula Primary School in suburban Darwin, which will receive $554 over 10 years—not a lot. At the very same time, Trinity Grammar School in Sydney, which has fees of up to $24,000 a year, will receive an increase of $2,734 per student over 10 years. How can this be fair? If you think about the students at Angurugu, Umbakumba and Alyangula, you will understand that many of them are the most disadvantaged educationally in the country. If the government thinks that somehow or other slashing funding in the way in which they are proposing will get a better outcome for remote Aboriginal kids living in bush communities around this country, particularly in my own electorate of the Northern Territory, they are sadly mistaken.

It is just criminal, really, that—when we hear the Prime Minister talking about closing the gap in education and employment—we have a very deliberate attempt here, by their own admission, that will have an impact which will be extremely detrimental to the capacity of the Northern Territory to provide an adequate and appropriate educational outcome for all the children of the Northern Territory. As I say, it will impact most adversely on those most disadvantaged and educationally deprived kids who live in remote parts of the Territory. It is worth noting the response from the Council of Government School Organisations in the Northern Territory. They have put out a press release today in which they have slammed the Turnbull government's 2017 budget for failing to invest in the Northern Territory children. I quote Tabby Fudge, the president of the NT Council of Government School Organisations:

Parents need to understand that rhetoric and spin from the federal government does nothing for our children without the funding attached.

She says further:

Despite the Turnbull government putting out a Fact Sheet on our dreadful levels of disadvantage they have failed to fund our level of need for our disadvantaged students.

Calling your funding ‘student needs based funding’ doesn’t mean you are funding student’s needs and they’re not.

Calling your funding Gonski 2.0 doesn’t mean you are funding what the Gonski report recommended to provide a quality education and they’re not.

Telling parents that you are increasing funding to 20% for government schools doesn’t tell Territory parents that we receive 23% and we will be the only state or territory to have to ‘transition down’ in funding.”

Announcing you are increasing education to the Territory without declaring that government schools will have to do the ‘heavy lifting’ is not fair.

Despite the continual funding attacks on Territory government schools they continue to top the Year 12 results every year thanks to our amazing staff and families. Our schools deserve the funding it actually costs to provide every Territory child with a quality education, no matter where they live.

Federal Budget 2017 is a clear fail for our voiceless children living with the highest level of educational disadvantage.

That says it all. But we are expected to jump and clap when the Prime Minister gets up here and says this is a fair budget that is fair to all Australians. It is not fair; it is not fair at all. I know that those teachers who work in those bush communities and in urban committees in the Northern Territory, who work their backsides of trying to improve educational outcomes for the students—particularly for those kids who are most disadvantaged—will be most upset by this.

It is very clear that you cannot, on the one hand, be talking about improving educational outcomes, saying teachers have to have better qualifications, be more highly motivated and deliver better outcomes if, on the other hand, you do not provide them with the resources they need—and, in this case, the resources are required. We are talking about my own electorate, where 42 per cent of the population are Aboriginal people, and there are a very large number of disadvantaged students living across rural locations. If you do not invest the resources that are required to alleviate the disadvantage, you will not get better educational outcomes, and, as a direct result, the life opportunities of those young people will be limited. And we all know that it is about not only education but also health—that if you do have healthy young people being educated well so that when they leave school they are in a position to either apply for a job or go for further training, then we have not succeeded.

Sadly, this is the case for so many young people in the Northern Territory. We want to break this cycle of dependence and poverty, and the only way we can do this is by making sure we get better educational outcomes. We will not get better educational outcomes in the Northern Territory as a result of this budget, because, as I have pointed out, our schools are being disadvantaged as against other schools across the country. Instead of getting the resources they properly require, they are getting far less. It is a shame. It is something which will hang around the necks of this federal government long into the future.

See this speech in context