Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to support my very dear and valued colleague the member for Durack on the motion which she has moved in this place predominantly addressing some of the issues around closing the gap. Those of us who represent electorates that have large populations of very remote Indigenous communities, where I think everyone in this place would agree the level of disadvantage is completely and utterly unacceptable and third-world in its nature, just want to see the improvements that we need to make. Many things have been tried from both sides of politics in, I believe, good faith in all instances. There is no doubt that people in this place, on all sides and from all parties, want to see major improvements made.

Having said that, I've seen lots of these programs that have been rolled out in my electorate fail quite dismally, to be quite honest, and fail the people who deserve help the most. As I say, that is those people living in my very remote communities such as Warburton, Warakurna, Laverton and Leonora. These are places not known to many Australians, but certainly to the people living live in those communities it is their land, it is their home and it is their culture and lifestyle. We need to support them and provide them with the amenities that we all enjoy in broader society while enabling them to live in their home territories and their homelands and to live their traditional lifestyles.

There are programs that we have tried. There has been a multitude of them. In the town of Leonora we discovered that there were 53 separate programs targeted at children. In Leonora around 800 people live in the township. There would be maybe 100 children in the town. So we've got one program specifically targeted at children for every two children. We've never been able to identify the amount of actual expenditure on those programs, but I would say that the amount of money per child being spent in the town of Leonora would be eye-watering. So, while we've seen many programs, we have seen many that haven't necessarily been particularly successful.

Children in the town of Leonora are still not attending school in the numbers needed for them to achieve and move on. That's not to say there aren't some success stories. There are some wonderful children in Leonora. When I was in Leonora recently with Senator Kerrynne Liddle, I met with a young Indigenous girl who was off to Murdoch University. She studied years 11 and 12 via SIDE learning, which is remote learning. There is no year 11 or 12 at the Leonora District High School. So there was this beautiful young girl, with all those hopes and fears and nerves about moving to the big smoke and going to university, and I wished her the very best of luck. That was a success story. But, more broadly, we are seeing an abject failure in policy in this space. That is why I support Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price's call for a royal commission into these programs.

We need to know what is working and what is not working. The previous speaker, the member for Moreton, said, 'Oh, we just need to ask the people that are delivering those programs.' Well, quite frankly, they are the last people we need to be asking. Of course, they have a vested interest in talking up their book; they have a vested interest in telling the government that the millions and millions, in fact, billions of dollars being invested in this space are being well spent and achieving the desired result. Well, patently, they're not achieving the desired result. Those people who live, work and travel in my electorate and who see those remote communities firsthand would be able to tell you that those programs—I think it's up to $30 billion worth—are failing dismally. We need to look closely at how these programs are being rolled out, why they are succeeding in the odd cases they are succeeding, and why they are failing in the many cases they are failing.

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