Andrew Broad (Mallee, National Party, Assistant Minister to the Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Can I just thank the member for Solomon for painting the picture of this particular piece of land like a local member who has that knowledge. I myself, being a farmer, have—though not to the historic extent of our Indigenous brothers—that understanding of what land can mean and that sense of place.

I just wanted to speak briefly on this bill and reflect a little bit from my family's experience. In the early 1970s, my parents were involved in Indigenous missionary work, actually, in Western Australia. It was on the reserves, when people were dying and when the standards of living were horrendously worse than now. My father took the secretariat notes for the federal minister for Indigenous affairs, who came to Carnarvon and Onslow. As they took the notes, they were trying to work out whether the federal government at the time would buy a fishing boat for the Yamatji people of the Gascoyne and Murchison region so that they could have purposeful employment. The government—thinking it knew what was best, coming from Canberra—went there, and the Aboriginal elders sort of listened and nodded. And, when they'd finished, dad—who was just a bit of a quietly-spoken farmer before he got involved in this work—turned to the elders and said, 'Who's going to hop on the boat?' because the Yamatji people are land people, and they said, 'Well, we think the water is salty.' So it was a classic example of a government thinking that it knew what was best and coming in with an idea that actually never was a success because they couldn't get the people to hop on the boat—they were not sea people.

So what we have discovered is: when you work with communities you actually get the best outcomes, and when you can actually give a sense of ownership you get the best outcomes. So, as we have progressively moved across to granting rights and allowing people to use that land in a productive way, to gain meaningful, purposeful activity, you actually get a lot more positive outcomes. This is something that I think we have learnt, from where we were many, many years ago.

In my region, which has a strong Indigenous community around Mildura, we have a group called Sunraysia Regional Consulting. They have said, 'We have a choice for our town: we can actually include our Aboriginal people in our economy in purposeful activity, or we can exclude them.' Instead, they've gone very much for purposeful inclusion.

I talked to a guy called Alan Fisher, who owned a chain of IGA supermarkets in our region. He would take young Aboriginal kids and give them meaningful employment. What he found was that, when they had the pressure of a death in their family and sorry business, there would be pressure in their home life and from their family to have to attend, and then they would feel too ashamed to come back and work for him because they'd feel that they'd let him down. Once he understood the cultural sensitivities, he was able to address that, so that he could get these people back and get them working. So sometimes misunderstandings can be overcome by businesses that want to play a very active role, and that has been wonderful in our community.

Sunraysia Regional Consulting is a group that works very closely with partnering Aboriginal people—in particular, young people—in the Mildura region to get jobs. The federal government gave them $1.7 million to support them in this program. We now have 180 jobs as a direct result of that money and those people have continued to have gainful employment. We are going to announce another $1 million to do another 100 jobs. It actually works. When you can create an understanding of one another, when you can create employment settings and when you can incentivise people to gain meaningful employment, you actually lift the standard of living.

My parents are coming up to their 50th wedding anniversary. The first thing they did as a married couple was head off and do Aboriginal mission work in the early seventies in Western Australia—Norseman, Onslow, Carnarvon, Wittenoom and all over the place. When they travel back to those communities now, they take some comfort in the fact that things have improved. There is still a lot to do, but things have improved—because we have started to listen and work constructively to help people get involved in the economic activity of this country and we have an understanding of what land rights are and what that means to them.

This is a small piece of legislation but it is supported by both sides of the chamber. It shows the maturity of the government in dealing with the challenges. The challenges are still there, but we are making process and I think that is a good thing.

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