Mark Coulton (Parkes, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Hansard source

In continuation: in the few moments I have left I'd like to call out the double standards and hypocrisy we see in this country at the moment. We have the banks that are showing strong support for the Voice at the same time as they're removing their services by shutting down branches that serve Aboriginal communities. We've got the NRL supporting the Voice, but where were they when my wife and I were called upon to fund the guernseys for the Macintyre Warriors and the Toomelah Tigers so they could attend football carnivals? They're quite happy to do that, but where are they in supporting grassroots Aboriginal communities? We've got our friends over here in the corner, the Greens, who have come out today in support of the Voice at the same time as they're looking at closing down the resource sector, which is the major employer of Aboriginal people right across Australia.

We go to the government, now pushing the Voice. But, by changing the distribution priority area for doctors, doctors have been removed from communities that have Aboriginal people in my electorate and moved to outer urban Labor electorates. How is that supporting people? We've seen the changes to pharmacies, where I'm getting letters from all the pharmacists in my electorate—and the minister has these letters—saying they are going to struggle to stay open to provide pharmaceutical services in these communities that have high Aboriginal populations. We've seen the changes to regional programs and talked about pork-barrelling National Party programs, but can someone tell me how the $10 million of federal funding that went towards the small-animal abattoir at Bourke, which provides 120 jobs for Aboriginal people, is pork-barrelling? These programs are now looking at being canned.

We go to Inland Rail. Already hundreds of Aboriginal people have been employed for the construction. Indigenous businesses have done well in supplying these services. That has now come to a halt with the cloud that the minister has put over that. That Inland Rail was going to provide economic certainty, underpinning the economies of communities right through western New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria and providing long-term employment and hope for Aboriginal people.

So what we're seeing in this debate is, I think, white middle-class Australia being given an opportunity to assuage some sort of guilt. We're going to see a small number of Aboriginal people receive high-paid jobs from which they can't be sacked, but I can tell you the good people that I've been representing in this place for 15½ years—the 16½ per cent of the population in my electorate who are Aboriginal—will get nothing from this program. I'm sick of the hypocrisy. We need to be doing more practical things to support our people, not this virtue-signalling we're seeing with this.

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