Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Families, Community Services, Indigenous Affairs and the Voluntary Sector) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. In light of the Prime Minister’s commendable commitment this morning to set concrete targets for improved outcomes for Aboriginal people, will the Prime Minister commit to achieving 95 per cent school attendance and 95 per cent work program attendance in remote Northern Territory townships and to regularly publish actual attendance rates?

Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for his question because it goes to the question of how we monitor and implement effectively the arrangements we supported on a bipartisan basis in this place last year concerning the Northern Territory intervention. We will continue with that implementation. We will, as we undertook to do prior to the election, monitor the effectiveness of that implementation at the 12-month point. We anticipate that review to occur some time around the end of the third quarter of this year. That will cover all the measures which were imposed at that time and review the effectiveness of the various education, health and policing programs which form part of the intervention.

More broadly on the question of how we deal effectively with Indigenous communities and education outcomes, we on this side of the House—as I hope we all concluded from this morning’s deliberations—welcome any positive suggestions from anyone in the community about how we can achieve better education outcomes for Indigenous children. As I said quite frankly, about both the government that the honourable member himself was part of and other previous governments, state and federal, none of us— I repeat, none of us—have got this right. It is time to put it beyond the partisan divide and to try to get it right.

In the middle of April we will convene here an Australian 2020 summit. I have invited the Leader of the Opposition to attend that, and I look forward to his participation. One of the working groups within that summit will canvass very widely and very broadly all innovative proposals from across the Australian community on how to achieve better education and health outcomes in Indigenous communities. If, as consequence of that summit or in response to the monitoring and evaluation of the intervention in the Northern Territory, we come up with new approaches for the future, we will pursue them.

As for the intervention itself and any reservations we had about it, we articulated our reservations prior to the election and, since the election, we have implemented changes, and they refer to the CDEP and permits in particular. The rest of that intervention is on track. We will monitor its effectiveness and then determine an appropriate course of action for the Northern Territory and the rest of Indigenous Australia in the future. So many people are depending on us all to get it right.