Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

What an important opportunity it is today to remember just how important the future of Indigenous Australia is, founded upon the availability of high-quality education. Let's concede that this very minor amendment, which makes it administratively easier for those students accessing Abstudy to be able to be part of education, both secondary and tertiary, is a significant step to making sure that we remove every barrier there possibly could be to Indigenous Australians getting the education they deserve.

Let's not forget Noel Pearson's great words about both the challenge and the advantage of Indigenous Australians walking in two worlds and doing so confidently, and it's education that allows that to happen. There is every argument that Indigenous Australians can have significant advantages because of their cultural connection to land as well as the Western benefits of an education that need not be Western at all. Today I want to make the obvious point: I see no reason why Indigenous Australians cannot lead, design and deliver their own education system within Australia's. They should be forming parents and friends groups—not just being teacher aides following the advice of Western teachers, but actively designing and co-designing. The member for Lingiari is in this chamber today, having been part of the discussions with the Northern Territory government. It is at the frontline of these challenges.

To take away an administrative concern from, potentially, pursuing tax file numbers from Indigenous Australian minors or their parents is logical, and of course it will have the support of both sides. But it raises the bigger question: while we endlessly debate here the importance of rights, are we as a nation serious enough to admit and can we agree that not only is education a right but it's an obligation of any extended family unit to ensure that all minors of the appropriate age are getting an appropriate education—not just enrolled, not just counting it for the sake of closing the gap, but taking on board that, if a child leaves at lunchtime, starving, we're going to do something about it? Can we commit to having a family commission's approach that says that, if we see children dropping out of education, it is a clear and present emergency to be addressed?

I don't know about the member for Lingiari, but I've been to plenty of community councils in remote communities in Australia where none of those individuals know anything about school attendance, nor have they ever been engaged seriously in the question of how do we keep our children at school? Gone is the time to claim that school is simply not cultural. Gone is the time to say that someone is potentially abusing substances and therefore the rest of the family can't go. Gone are the times of saying that parents simply can't find the shoes to send their kids to school or get out of bed on time to get them there. Gone are these recurrent excuses in a great civil democracy where there are not only rights but also responsibilities to not only confront a problem but seek a way through it. At every level in our social security law, no matter how well we design the back end, it seems that, fundamentally, if someone provides an acceptable excuse for not engaging, it's tools down for the system. It's no longer, 'How do we fix it?' and 'How are you a responsible part of the solution?'

I concede that, coming from my background, I may not have experienced a household where you cannot afford a pair of shoes or a school uniform or where a significant family crisis or a health status is such that you simply can't get your children to school. But are we a society serious enough to say that that is an emergency to be dealt with—no more excuses and shoving between agencies or claiming it's another level of government? Are we serious enough as a community to be saying that, if we're going to be an Indigenous cultural council, an elected town council or an Indigenous land council over a region, part of our responsibility is for our minors and seeing that, when they're of the appropriate age, they're in early education, primary and secondary school, and then a community wraps together to get those children through as young adults into tertiary and vocational education?

This has to be more important than fighting for grant money and internecine debates over which family benefits. But that's become the new reality. Don't for one minute misinterpret what I'm saying as me blaming Indigenous Australians for that. They had a structured working system over tens of thousands of years that passed on education far more successfully than we did as we tumbled into our own Dark Ages. So the question I ask is: how responsible are we as non-Indigenous Australians for the system that we designed and implemented, the system that moved in from the top and created governance that passed money down to families in remote Australia and then a Centrelink and social security system that effectively undermined individuals and their power by simply paying them a cheque for nothing in return?

What other outcome was likely but a complete disintegration of those kinship groups that have always looked after family? Fundamentally, the Western system never got that. And, by not recognising it, we devalue and demote it and we do not work within those kinship groups to acknowledge that senior men and women have that power if, as a Western government, we're prepared to confer the power. But we don't; we take the power away. We've created community organisations to fight over the money that comes from above—effectively a cargo cult—that activates internecine warfare between families, and we created an individualistic payment system that is blind to kinship groups and families. As anyone, even a person who has visited Indigenous communities as rarely as I have—I have had the privilege of visiting a few dozen—will tell you, if you talk to people on the ground under the tree they'll tell you who's responsible and who's in charge. And, I tell you what, it's probably not the person you expect it to be, but there is someone who can make things happen. But our system has made that almost impossible to deliver.

I have spent a lot of time thinking these thoughts and talking to Indigenous people about them—it's mostly been in remote and regional areas, where the services taken for granted by the rest of us are not immediately available—and they tell you that these problems are surmountable but that, every time someone tries to crawl their way out of the slippery bucket, they're pulled back in, and we don't have a sustainable solution. The government's tried everything, you could argue. We tried making it an element for the Family Responsibilities Commission in Cape York to monitor and enforce. The end result was that school principals didn't want to enforce school attendance or be the cop on the beat.

Today in this chamber we make a minor administrative amendment to do something entirely sensible, and that is to bring Abstudy and AIC back in line with every other piece of educational assistance—to not require a tax file number. It takes me back 20 years to the mid-1990s. I know that the member for Lingiari was representing the Northern Territory at the time. I was working as a young doctor, learning more about the semi-desert community of Lajamanu. At the time we were pushing out Medicare numbers in a similar way to tax file numbers today. Would you expect traditional semi-arid community people to carry a Medicare card everywhere? It was impossible. The solution was that every Medicare card from the community was stored in a shoebox, and, when they came in and they needed care, we found a way to deliver Western care in a way that was culturally appropriate.

So I conclude today: what is the solution to what all of us can agree on—and we have to agree on nothing less than the lesson learnt from around the world—which is that, no matter how traditional the community, there is no substitute for a good education?

We've got to be prepared to change the way we deliver education, and if that means more support for families that most need it to attend school, we've got to be committed to doing it. Removing a tax file number obligation? That's important, because it's a barrier to engaging with the system, but, once through it, our obligation doesn't stop. Our obligation isn't just to enrol students. Our obligation is that students turn up, engage, retain, remain and graduate, and that is a never-ending challenge that every level of government is responsible for, including for those communities that do not talk about it.

Let's be honest: there is no tougher public policy challenge in a nation as wealthy as this than delivering social security and social services to the remote corners of Australia. This is not a comment about whether or not anyone is Indigenous. It's challenging in every way to deliver those services, but it is right to have an expectation that a child growing up in the most remote corner of Australia can gain a complete education and retain a connection to country, but can leave with confidence knowing they can always return. There are a million ways you can tailor that, but I tell you what we can't accept at the moment, and that is surrendering, giving up on families, doing nothing after visiting a community that says: 'There are always a couple of families that simply never send their kids to school, and that's just how it is. There are a whole lot of kids that turn up for the breakfast, but they're gone by the middle of the morning, and that's just how it is.' There are a whole lot of excuses around support between siblings and family connections where, quite rightly, young people who should be getting an education are forced, through health or another crisis, to be delivering care for extended family members. We need to work with that. In the Western world we found putting schools in hospitals worked. Maybe we have to deliver this differently?

Today we take a very simple measure and prove that there can be support on both sides of this chamber to remove, let's be honest, a ridiculous requirement that wasn't enforced on anyone else. Long may there be decisions like this. And let us not waste our time in this chamber but ask ourselves really hard questions about why there cannot be 95 to 100 per cent attendance.

The Closing the Gap targets simply aren't right at the moment. I have made the point that a snowstorm of 16 targets is too many. They're poorly designed, despite how much they have been workshopped. They simply are too heavily focused on administrative inputs. You cannot measure enrolment if you don't care about what they're doing after they're enrolled. It's okay to count graduation, but too many are casualties in between. My academic career, which I began by being part of Australia's greatest education faculty and doing a doctorate in just this area, tells me that you cannot write a family off. You have to take the entire cohort and work with what you have. Not all of them can see a direct line of sight from education to employment, so we need to make sure that is possible. Not all of them are close to an employment opportunity or close to a large metro centre. We need to be imaginative about those empty fly-in fly-out flights that could be taking students into culturally appropriate accommodation for short periods of education with the automatic right to return at any time. Of course it's expensive, but is it more expensive than not doing it?

These issues must be put on the table at community level. I'll defer to the member for Lingiari—he's had more of these conversations than I have—but I want to know which communities are serious about this. Take a 100 per cent enrolment, attendance, retention and graduation and work backwards. The minute the first person drops out of that it's an emergent situation. We ask ourselves what's it going to cost to get that child re-engaged? But what does it cost if we don't?

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