Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Following the shocking findings of the Little children are sacred report and the recommendations that it made, the Northern Territory emergency response was launched in June last year. Initiated by the Howard government when we were in opposition, we supported the measures, acknowledging the need for an urgent response and we offered bipartisan backing. As I said in my press statement when I released the Northern Territory emergency response review report this week, the government remains committed to continuing and strengthening the Northern Territory emergency response. We are determined to work in partnership with Indigenous Australians to improve the safety and wellbeing of children and families in remote Northern Territory communities and to make real inroads towards closing the gap.

We are also committed to an approach that examines the facts and makes policy decisions based on evidence, anchored in what works. The Prime Minister reiterated this government’s commitment to evidence based policy after yesterday’s Press Club address. He said, ‘Our approach will be to embrace all those things that have worked in the intervention and be mindful of where there may have been shortcomings and how we can improve them.’ He stated:

This Government is driven by one thing: how do you close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and what in practical terms makes that work.

That is why we commissioned a review into the effectiveness of the Northern Territory emergency response measures—to examine what has been effective and what needs to be strengthened and to make recommendations for the future.

I received the report on Monday and made it public. I did not receive any drafts. I thank the members of the review board and the expert group for their personal commitment in preparing this report. I note in particular that they made a number of visits—over 30 individual visits—to remote communities, met with many delegations of interested people and reviewed over 200 submissions to make sure that they heard the concerns of all people affected by the Northern Territory emergency response.

The report makes three overarching recommendations and sets out 48 specific recommendations on a number of different emergency response measures. In recognition of the importance and complexity of the issues and the need to make sure that we understand the implications of solutions recommended by the review board, the government will take a small amount of time to consider the report. I do expect that there will be a comprehensive response from the government by the end of the year.

The government committed in the 2008-09 budget $666 million to address Indigenous disadvantage in the Northern Territory. As part of that, we will be continuing all the current Northern Territory emergency response initiatives while we considered the review report’s recommendations. We also made almost $100 million available for 200 extra teachers and almost $30 million for three Indigenous boarding colleges in the Northern Territory. One of the very concerning findings in the review report’s analysis is that there is an enormous amount more to be done in education. The regular attendance of children at school is still nowhere near good enough.

Income management is continuing in the Northern Territory to make sure that welfare payments are used for the benefit of children and to increase the financial security of families raising those children. As at 10 October this year, over 15,500 customers were being income managed in 70 Northern Territory communities and their associated outstations and 10 town camp regions.

The food security of communities has been assessed and upgraded on a region by region basis through community stores’ licensing arrangements. As at 15 October, 68 community stores have been licensed for income managed customers and five communities have access to bush order food security. The introduction of a school nutrition program operating in 68 communities and associated outstations and 10 town camps is providing breakfast and lunch to school-aged children. We certainly hope that that is improving their concentration and engagement in education.

The government decided this week to make a down payment on pension reform—a payment of $1,400 for single pensioners and $2,100 for couples—and a one-off payment of $1,000 per child to family tax benefit A families. These significant payments will be made automatically in early December. Eligible pensioners and families will receive this payment in the same way as other existing Centrelink payments. I announce today that this means that if a person’s pension or payment is currently subject to income management then 100 per cent of the one-off payment will be quarantined.

Income management is currently operational in the Northern Territory and in Cape York and, subject to the agreement of the new Western Australian government, income management is due to have commenced in selected urban and remote areas of Western Australia by that payment date. People will be able to discuss with Centrelink how they want to allocate the extra funding towards meeting priority needs under the income management system. Income management of these payments will prevent a sudden flow of cash towards items such as alcohol, tobacco, gambling or pornography, which has unfortunately happened in the past with one-off bonus payments.

The income management of these funds will support the government’s objective of protecting the health and safety of children. This is tangible evidence of our commitment to get our approach to protecting vulnerable families and children right and to put in place comprehensive welfare reform policy for all Australians. We certainly know that housing is critical to children’s safety, wellbeing and health. No family can function in substandard, overcrowded houses and we know that there are far too many of those in Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. We have announced that we are investing $813 million in remote Indigenous housing and infrastructure in the Northern Territory. We did that in a joint agreement with the Northern Territory government.

Just last week, while I was in Wadeye, I announced details of three building industry consortiums that will deliver the largest upgrade of housing ever undertaken in remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. Each of these consortiums will design and construct housing works packages with an emphasis on training and jobs for Indigenous people. A key focus of the program is to provide local jobs and training opportunities for Indigenous people. Specific targets for employment and training will be negotiated with alliance partners.

The housing works packages will be delivered across 73 communities and targeted urban living areas, 16 communities will receive major capital works and 57 communities will receive housing refurbishments. We expect to see around 750 new homes built, including new subdivisions, more than 230 new houses to replace homes that will have to be demolished, more than 2,500 major housing upgrades, essential infrastructure to support new homes, and improvements to living conditions in town camps. Long-term leases must be in place in the 16 communities before work can commence. Leases have already been secured at Nguiu, and negotiations are well under way at Tennant Creek and on Groote Eylandt. These leases are expected to be finalised later this month.

The Australian and Northern Territory governments are working with land councils, communities and town camps to secure appropriate land tenure in the remaining communities. Work on upgrading essential services is expected to commence in Tennant Creek and Nguiu in November this year, with housing works to follow in Tennant Creek, in Nguiu and on Groote Eylandt from April next year. The entire program is scheduled for completion by June 2013.

The Australian government also recognises that creating socially and economically viable communities in remote Indigenous parts of Australia is a huge challenge. Our approach, as is known by the parliament, has been to set high-level targets to close the gap, to identify effective policy building blocks and to then put in place the policy and program settings to reach those targets. On employment, our target is to halve the gap in Indigenous employment within a decade. This is critical if we are to see economic participation, especially in remote communities. It is fundamental also to sustainable long-term improvement in the life outcomes for Indigenous Australians. Lifting Indigenous economic participation demands concerted, cooperative effort and attitudinal change from governments, industry and Indigenous people themselves.

Under the Northern Territory emergency response, as of 8 October over 1,500 Australian government funded jobs have been created in areas such as night patrols, rangers, broadcasting, education support, child care and municipal services. On 6 October 2008, the government released a paper on the government’s preferred model for Indigenous employment programs. It is called ‘Increasing Indigenous employment opportunity’. The model includes reforms to the Community Development Employment Projects program and the Indigenous Employment Program. These reforms are a key element to meeting our target of halving the employment gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians within a decade. We know that we have to create opportunities and also give Indigenous people the skills and training that they need to get and keep a job.

The government also welcomes the Australian Employment Covenant proposal initiated by Mr Forrest to work with Australia’s major corporations to provide 50,000 employment opportunities for Indigenous Australians. The Prime Minister has indicated that the Australian government will help bridge any training gap through the provision of appropriate employment related training.

Our Commonwealth agencies will work very closely with the business sector to make sure that we have the smooth implementation of this initiative and to maximise the employment opportunities that it will create. The proposed changes to the Community Development Employment Projects and the changes to the Indigenous Employment Program will certainly assist the Employment Covenant’s task. We want the Community Development Employment Projects to focus on work readiness skills. We want to see more Indigenous people able to get regular jobs in their communities and in nearby places. We want to see people moving into regular jobs where opportunities exist and, of course, to bring about the arrangements with the private sector that will see those job opportunities created.

Minister O’Connor has also announced the proposed changes to the universal employment service, which will begin from 1 July 2009. These changes too will see a much more tailored, individualised response, especially to the most disadvantaged jobseekers in this country. We intend to consult on our Community Development Employment Projects proposals. These consultations will be held from 20 October to early November. Following feedback from those consultations, the government will make final decisions and announce reforms that are expected to start on 1 July next year.

The government also values its relationship with Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory and in particular has made every effort to listen to the voices of the most vulnerable—and I would have to say that they are the women and children in these communities. We respect the positive leadership coming from many men in the Northern Territory and that was especially displayed at the Aboriginal Male Health Summit this year, when hundreds of Aboriginal men apologised to Aboriginal women for the impact of family violence. (Time expired)

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

It may be useful to evoke the memory of eye surgeon Fred Hollows and his outstanding remarks in the mid-seventies that brought through the mainstream media to the rest of Australia a realisation of the true conditions on Aboriginal communities. From Hollows we learnt that solutions to the Indigenous crisis as he saw it lay not purely in white Australia, but Indigenous people had to lead. Then, of course, a generation later it was the former Minister for Families and Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, who, through the Northern Territory emergency response in June last year, for the first time broke a generational fixation—a left-wing ideology—that believed that only Indigenous Australia had the solution to Indigenous problems.

From that intervention onwards it was clear that so many of the challenges that are superimposed onto Indigenous Australia will require a combined effort to fix—and that is the essence of the intervention. Although the minister has already departed from the chamber, let it be recorded in Hansard that that spiral bound, rote-read speech, presumably prepared by someone else, was utterly lacking, utterly devoid of passion or life. What she had in that 15 minutes was an opportunity to defend the intervention and to make it absolutely clear that she would rebuff page 23 of the report that she received a few weeks ago. Covered in the minister’s own liquid paper, sneaking through, were those five recommendations upon which this matter of public importance is based. Those recommendations bring to an end income quarantining and make it, as it was so euphemistically referred to in the report, ‘voluntary’ for those who wanted to remain on it and compulsory only for those enrolled to attend school or for infant health. By implication, income quarantining is removed where chronic alcoholism, violence, abuse of tenancy agreements, destruction of housing, antisocial behaviour and so on are involved. That is what is written in the report that has been tabled by the minister. She had an opportunity today and we got nothing less, as I have said, than a bland, anodyne response to the report.

Let us remember some history, because they have been in government only nine months. Across the aisle was a Prime Minister falling over himself to apologise who then, to make it look like the sleeves were being rolled up, announced some teachers the next day. Since then, what have we seen in Indigenous communities? Virtually nothing. The Indigenous field has been left vacant for nine months. Let us remember that, with this review in place, it has almost been used as an excuse to do nothing. It has been an excuse to not take those rough edges off the intervention, to not support it where it needed support and to not give additional resources where they may have been required. It has just been fine to add an additional 100 teachers. We could have done so much better than the 18 alcohol inspectors. We could have done even better than the 11,000 that have currently had child health checks. There is so much more that could have been done and so much more that additional resources could have been used for. What we have had is the excuse that, because this intervention is under review, it has to be in some black box and not reinforced and not supported.

Judge not then on their absence from the field but on the legislation they have been moving at the same time. This is a government that has sought to change the rules on pornography, that has sought to change and soften the rules on the broadcasting of 18+ subscription television into Indigenous communities and that has sought to provide loopholes so that, if you have a boot full of pornographic DVD material, you can simply say, ‘I am moving through a prescribed area’, and not be intercepted. The very point of the intervention was the damage, as Sue Gordon and many others have pointed out, that alcohol, kava and pornography do. We have a minister that can read a speech like the one that preceded me only to then further relax permits, the broadcasting of pornography and the availability of pornographic DVDs in the very communities where we are trying to break that dysfunctional cycle. It has been referred to before as a horrid, dysfunctional cycle of ‘piss, petrol, poker and potato chips’.

This is the first time that we have had coherent voices of mums who finally have shopping trolleys full of food and of children who finally have food in their bellies. Yet we have this unbroken nexus supported by the other side of this chamber that allows that ongoing relationship between big men, chronic alcoholism and opposition to the intervention. I have been given 15 minutes to support the intervention and the principles on which it is based. I do not care which side of government came up with this intervention, but let us remember how weak the support for it was. It was there but it was weak and through gritted teeth from the current Prime Minister when it was announced. It may run deeply against the grain of left-wing ideology. As Marcia Langton pointed out today in the Australian, it goes against those human rights advocates who are caught up in 50-year-old abstractions about the sanctity of the individual compared to collective social rights. We need to move away from that and remember what the intervention is based upon. It is based upon the children. As Sue Gordon has said, whatever breach there might have been of human rights, it is no match for what has been neglected by successive governments and the damage that has occurred to children. That is why the intervention is in place, and that kind of support was absent from the minister.

We need to remember that income management simply ensures that 50 per cent of income is spent on clothing and food. I do not see that as some sort of human rights violation, and please forgive me if it is. I do not see support for children to attend school as some sort of human rights violation. Remember that we are operating in an environment of territory and state governments, many of whose education departments have railed against encouraging attendance at schools and have railed against providing school attendance data to Centrelink because of privacy concerns. These are education departments that do not back up the very principals who want to ensure improved attendance at schools. The principal are not supported by their own department. That is where this debate was as recently as 12 months ago and it took the former coalition government to change that, to break that and to connect school attendance to Centrelink for the first time. It was such a novel concept. We regard it as almost normal now, but it had not happened for a generation.

The intervention is about health; it is about health checks. My urging to the minister is: do not lose the nerve now. You have a report that provides an out but do not lose the nerve, because this intervention is about providing housing that is not destroyed and tenancy agreements that are respected. Do not lose the nerve. It may well be about changing land tenure agreements that some academics can twist as being some human rights violation—do not lose the nerve. It is about delivering housing stock where it is needed most. It is about providing meaningful employment and meaningful on-the-job training. That means reforming CDEP, not protecting it in its current form and waiting another year. We do not have a year to lose. Do not lose the nerve. Of course, most importantly of all, it is about an opportunity to break the cycle of antisocial behaviour that comes with chronic alcoholism. The women of the communities are speaking but they have so often been liquid papered out of this report by the selective choice of the individual who wrote this report. The very people who were the architects of this intervention have been ignored in the report. Was the well-known Bill Glasson, who played such an important role and who is also an eye surgeon, consulted about the minister’s report? In the entire review, Dr Bill Glasson was not even consulted. I remember those words spoken in the House of Commons by Churchill that:

The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences.

That period was last year. We have another similar moment appearing right now, with a minister who can go soft on this intervention and follow the recommendations that that minister allowed not to be liquid papered out—they remain in the report as an escape clause for this government when the timing is right. Let us remember what this intervention was all about: bringing the Little children are sacred report to life so that it did not remain an ignored and dusty report with recommendations that were never acted upon. They were acted upon last year; it was a changing and defining moment for Indigenous Australia and, as a matter of public importance, I urge the government to retain all those elements of the intervention.