Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Roads and Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to continue speaking on the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010but without my phone today, which caused me considerable grief last night! I will not go over what was said last night, due to time constraints, but I do want to talk about the Clontarf Foundation and the role that it plays in Indigenous education, which is quite outstanding and involves strong mentoring by leading Aboriginal figures who come to the academies. The foundation is under the strong leadership of Gerard Neesham and a board of directors led by Ross Kelly. They have had some huge success stories, including this year Lewis Jetta, the 14th pick in the AFL draft. The staff include former AFL players such as Dale Kickett and Shannon Motlop.

This program began in 2000. When it commenced, there were only 25 students enrolled at the Waterford academy. I was pleased to go there with Mr Philip Ruddock, who was then the minister with carriage of Aboriginal affairs. ATSIC at the time owed the academy something like $30,000 and they would not hand the money over. When the minister turned up, that encouraged the ATSIC commissioner at the time, Farley Garlett—I actually went to school with Farley—to hand over the money. It was the first tranche of federal funds, realistically, that went into this program.

From that fledgling single academy in Waterford, there are now 36 academies across Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Victoria, educating some 2,300 students and employing some 106 staff. In Western Australia the academies are far-reaching, established in places such as East Kimberley, Casuarina, Halls Creek, Derby and Esperance. There are 1,174 students in Western Australia, 856 in the Northern Territory and 150 in five academies in Victoria—and the numbers are continuing to grow. On that note, I will be doing my best to make sure that there is an academy in the Armadale area of my electorate, because there is a large Indigenous population there. I will be doing my best to speak to the Western Australian Minister for Education, Liz Constable, about that.

These academies attach themselves to existing high schools. It is a really good model, because the high school enjoys the attachment of the football academy and obviously there is infrastructure there for the academies in terms of buildings, administration, playing fields et cetera. One of the three schools in the Armadale area—Armadale Senior High School, Kelmscott Senior High School or Cecil Andrews Senior High School—would be a very good fit for this academy. I know that Gerard Neesham sees the potential.

As I said, there is a large Aboriginal population in Armadale, and this would be an opportunity to have a lot of these boys who do not attend school to attend school and in a meaningful way engage with the education system. As Gerard has said to me, many of these Indigenous boys have lost the pattern of sociable life. For example, their sleep pattern is totally out of kilter. They sleep most of the day, get up late in the afternoon and then are attracted to nefarious activities in the evenings and at night. If you can get them back into the proper sleep pattern of people who operate during the day, they can engage in meaningful work and education.

The member for Brand last night gave a number of case studies and successful examples of involvement in the lives of individuals in the academy. All the staff are passionate about the program and its success. These people vigorously apply for positions with the Clontarf Foundation, and why wouldn’t they when it has results like these? The Clontarf Foundation, since its inception 10 years ago, has consistently placed 75 per cent of year 12 leavers into employment within the first 12 months after leaving school—typically into traineeships and apprenticeships. At one stage in Western Australia, when the foundation had been going for just a few years, one in four year 12 boys of Indigenous origin was in Clontarf. Getting Indigenous boys to finish year 12 was a real problem and yet, with such a small operation, Clontarf had one in four in its program.

This program also supports a healthy lifestyle, reduces petty crime among Indigenous youths, encourages discipline, improves self-esteem and teaches general life skills. Student numbers completing school consistently increase each year that the program operates in any location. Student numbers are typically low in senior years in the first few years at the new location but they increase steadily. In 2009 there were 112 year 12 graduates across Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Clontarf’s school retention rates average over 90 per cent, compared to 2009 overall retention rates for Indigenous students of just 46 per cent. What a successful outcome. Over 75 per cent of year 12 graduates transition successfully to full-time employment within six months of graduating. That is one of the points that need to be made—that there is a pathway after school through this program, that people find apprenticeships and jobs through so many of the foundation’s sponsors.

Clontarf are quite clever in the way that they arrange their funding. They get federal funding, which we are talking about today; funding from the state governments that they are involved with and the Territory government, obviously; and corporate funding. I remember going to the opening of the Broome academy. They had Michael Chaney there on behalf of the National Australia Bank and a representative of Goldman Sachs. Corporate funding is very important as well so that you are not compromised by one source of funding. Having that diverse funding stream also allows you some sort of autonomy, because you are not reliant on just one group of people.

Projected year 12 graduates in 2010 are over 200, with close to 400 year 12 graduates expected by 2011. Clontarf has a development plan to expand the program significantly and reach even more corners of Australia. If Clontarf remained as it is now by 2012 it would have 2,500 students in Clontarf programs at schools and 400 students completing year 12. But they want to exceed this and the Prime Minister asked them to come up with a plan to do so. They did, and now it is up to the Prime Minister to make sure that this money flows. If this Clontarf plan was implemented the outcomes more than double to 5,730 students in Clontarf programs in 2012, skyrocketing to almost 10,000 students in 2014, with 1,600 of those Indigenous students completing year 12. Those are the projections that we would like to see. These are grand but very achievable plans with worthwhile results. But it all comes at a cost. To reach that level of expansion will take operating costs to $65 million in 2014 to be divided between the federal government, state governments and the private sector.

Historically Clontarf have always battled to secure funding. In 2003 I was pleased to be a part of the announcements when then Minister for Education, Science and Training, the Hon. Dr Brendan Nelson, granted the program $500,000. I recall Ross and Gerard flying from Perth on the midnight horror and turning up to Brendan’s office with me trying to convince the minister that was a good thing to fund. And he did. He continued to see the merits of this program and continued the funding such that in 2005 he announced federal funding of up to $1.92 million over four years. This was continued by the coalition government through the next minister, the Hon. Julie Bishop, the member for Curtin.

After ignoring non-recurrent items of a capital nature—buildings et cetera—the cost of doing this in 2009 was assessed at $17.75 million, an increase of $9 million over the previous year. But this needs to be put into context. This must be understood by not only governments but those in the community who say: ‘Why do we have a specific Aboriginal program? Why isn’t there a program for migrant kids or kids from disadvantaged backgrounds?’ It is because of the massive incarceration rate of Aboriginal men. The figures vary from state to state, but a recent figure from Western Australia suggested that the cost of keeping somebody in prison for 12 months was heading towards $200,000. When you look at that and then look at this program, which has so many young Aboriginal men in it whose lives are being focused rather than drifting, you can see why this is money well spent. We owe it to the next generation of Indigenous young men and their families. We have had what seems to have been a lost generation of Aboriginal direction. Now, programs like this are putting these boys in particular on a sound footing for the future, not only in terms of the education process which allows them to see a better way but in terms of their role in the community and in employment—in the workforce. This is money well spent.

I could go on about all the figures et cetera, but in my last minute I want to say that the federal government in the budget seems to have rolled over the recurrent funding. But, as I have outlined to you, this is a growing program. I know that Gerard and the whole Clontarf Foundation are very nervous about the future funding that is needed to expand this program all around Australia. The same is going to be asked of the corporate world and state governments. I know that the Prime Minister is supportive of this program, as is his minister. I ask that they ensure that the funding does flow for this very worthy program. Those of us on this side of the House support this initiative.

Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am not normally a fan of the contributions in this chamber from the member for Canning, but I will commend him on his contribution on this occasion. I too rise to speak in support of the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010. Before the Leader of the Opposition accuses me of formalism and tokenism, I would also like to proudly recognise the traditional owners and thank them for their continuing stewardship of this wonderful land of ours.

If we are to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children, school attendance rates in remote Indigenous communities must be improved. There is no other way forward. There are about 2,000 Indigenous children of compulsory school age in the Northern Territory who are not enrolled in school. That means that one in five Aboriginal children in remote communities in the Northern Territory is not even enrolled in school. A further 2,500 are not attending regularly. Furthermore, about 8,000 Indigenous children attend school only 60 per cent of the time on average—there are two in five days when they are not even at school. That is no way to get a continuous education and improve.

The Rudd government has already taken some measures to improve attendance for some families by linking Centrelink payments to school attendance. The Sporting Chance program takes a more innovative approach to encourage school attendance. It is more of a carrot than a stick. Through sport and recreation, this program helps Indigenous children from rural and remote areas engage in school. In Australia, there is nothing quite like sport with the power to knock down barriers and inspire pride. Some of the most effective programs for young Indigenous people are the ones linking sporting and education opportunities.

In March, Warren Mundine, the Chair of the Australian Indigenous Chamber of Commerce, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald:

To me developing indigenous sport is about capitalising on one of our top strengths—our sporting infrastructure and culture—to motivate individuals to go for it and to get the best out of life.

…            …            …

Sport is one way of helping to close the gap on indigenous disadvantage. The federal government’s Sporting Chance Program, which uses sport and recreation to lift the level of engagement of indigenous students to improve their educational outcomes, is one example where results are starting to show.

The aim of the Sporting Chance Program is to meet the COAG targets for closing the gap: to halve the gap in reading, writing and numeracy achievement for Indigenous children within a decade, and to halve the gap for Indigenous students in Year 12 attainment or equivalent by 2020.

Indigenous Australians—as I am sure you would well know, Deputy Speaker Scott, because of your electorate—have made a remarkable contribution to this country’s reputation as a sporting giant. They include people like Cathy Freeman; Nova Peris-Kneebone; Evonne Goolagong Cawley; Michael Long, former Essendon captain, two-time premiership player and two-time All Australian and AFL Hall of Fame inductee; Steve Renouf; Dale Shearer, who I will claim as a St George boy; Johnathan Thurston, Scott Prince, Mal Meninga, Artie Beetson and many others—all world beaters in their chosen sports.

It is no surprise then that when I was a kid growing up in St George in western Queensland it was not the pale-skin kids you feared on the sporting fields, it was the Murris. Deputy Speaker, with a little indulgence I will make a racist observation. Generally speaking, the Murris in St George were stronger, faster and better coordinated than the whitefellas. It strikes me that despite their superior skills and strength most of the Murri kids I grew up with did not go on to greatness in sport. The exceptions were Dale Shearer, who had an international career, and maybe two other guys: Robert Clements and Woopy Evans.

Most of them did not go on to sporting careers. However, with the proper support, resources and encouragement, I am sure that many of the Murri kids of today could achieve anything in sport, and in life for that matter. Obviously, if you are successful in sport you make other connections and you get other opportunities. With a little bit of guidance and support even front-rowers can go on to have post rugby league careers! But such was and is the nature of Indigenous disadvantage that many of the Murri kids that I grew up with, sadly, did not make it. Some of them did not really make it in life, as I detailed in my first speech, but I will not revisit that here; that is a bit too sad. It is the same with education—literacy and numeracy. The smart kids never received the tools that we need to access the workforce and the dignity that usually comes with being in the workforce.

With the right support, resources and encouragement we will see Indigenous students rise above disadvantage and close the gap in literacy, numeracy and employment outcomes. As Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly said, ‘From little things, bit things grow,’ and the Sporting Chance Program has already had much success to this end. The Clontarf Foundation school based sports academies, as detailed by the member for Canning, are achieving school attendance rates of nearly 80 per cent and now have 2,300 students enrolled in 36 schools. They give hope. They give opportunity. They change lives and they even save lives.

That is why the Rudd government is providing additional funds to expand the program—in total, $42 million over four years. This year the funding will support 22 organisations to deliver 59 projects including 54 school-based sports academies and five education engagement projects. These 59 projects have the potential to benefit 10,000 students.

This bill is a key part of the Rudd government’s efforts to halve the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in reading, writing and numeracy within a decade. Indigenous education, school attendance and school retention rates are simply not good enough and we must do more to support Indigenous communities to improve education. The Sporting Chance Program is part of a raft of measures to boost Indigenous education, including: an additional 200 teachers for the Northern Territory; three boarding facilities in the Northern Territory; the Indigenous Youth Mobility Program that was introduced by the opposition; and the Indigenous Youth Leadership Program.

This bill will appropriate $492 million for 2010 to 2012 so the Commonwealth can fund targeted and strategic projects to improve education outcomes for Indigenous people. It transfers funding for the Sporting Chance Program from the annual administered expense of DEEWR to the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000. In doing so this bill ensures the government can continue to provide national leadership and coordination of efforts to close the gap and improve outcomes for Indigenous Australians so that it too can save lives and change lives. I commend the bill to the House.

Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010 is legislation that obviously will be supported by all persons in the House. It recognises the practical aspects of assisting Indigenous or Aboriginal people. It recognises that they have inherent sporting skills. It recognises the professionalism of sport in this day and age—in other words sport is a respectable means of earning a living, which should always be the target of our education system.

My purpose originally is to draw to the attention of the House why these provisions have been recognised by the government and are eventually being acted upon. Most of this was proven originally by the one-time coach—I think the first—of the Fremantle Dockers, Gerard Neesham. He was a very capable footballer in his own right and someone who consequently gained the respect of young people whose focus on sporting heroes is well understood. The reality is that Gerard, at his own initiative, went down to the Clontarf Boys Home—where a school was established and where the school population was primarily Indigenous—and started a football team. There was a simple rule for those who wanted to play in that football team: they had to be at school at nine o’clock and participate until closing time. So it was not a compulsion but an incentive for those young people who wanted to play sport.

They knew and understood how other kids they knew had risen to the peak of sporting attainment, particularly—as it is in Western Australia and as it was with Neesham—in the Australian Football League. It is probably where Indigenous people, Aboriginals, excel, and I think that might be because there is a higher degree of skill required in AFL as compared to just brute strength or the ability to run fast enough in a straight line. As we see as we watch these games from time to time, the ability of those people to have the football on a string is amazing. They seem to be able to anticipate which way it is going to bounce and many other things, which gives them a very high degree of skill and excellence in those sports. The Neesham initiative has expanded and is now known as the Clontarf Foundation. It has activities throughout Western Australia and the Northern Territory, and probably in other parts of Australia.

This bill, as the second reading speech advises, amends the table in a subsection 14B(1) of the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000 to include additional funding for the Sporting Chance Program in order to bring it into the Commonwealth suite of targeted assistance measures and to adjust the 2010-12 appropriations agreed as part of the new federal financial relations network. That, as I said, is the initiative of government, and this will be money well spent.

It is a bit of a change because it is my observation, having been closely associated with Aboriginal people for 50 years, that much of the moneys that the Australian parliament has allocated since 1967 have not been to the benefit of Aboriginal people, particularly the youth. It has been a substantial benefit to people whom I refer to as the Aboriginal elite: those that got an education in mission schools to which they had been delivered—some say stolen—and were able to participate in the funding arrangements. Please remember that, prior to 1967, the Australian parliament was forbidden by the Constitution to make any provisions for Aboriginal people.

It is a great misfortune, considering the billions that have been allocated since, to look around and see the disadvantage that still exists with those people. I believe it has increased, not decreased, since that time. When I commenced my close association with the town of Carnarvon in 1958, where 37 per cent of the population were Aboriginal, they were all employed. They were employed because they were not even eligible for unemployment benefits under the peculiarities of the Constitution. They were wards of the state. They made a major contribution to the construction of the North West Coastal Highway between Northampton and Onslow, or in the vicinity of Onslow, during that period. They were skilled grader drivers and truck drivers. They had all those skills, and in fact the third-in-charge of that program was Aboriginal. He was highly regarded and frequently referred to rather than the two university-qualified engineers who held the positions above him. This bloke just knew how to build roads, and, I might add, in quite unusual circumstances. The usual forms of road base were not available throughout that road distance. The road base was a sand-clay mix—and it was very effective—mainly because the normal gravel deposits that we expect to find around Australia did not exist along that route.

So these people could do all that. Of course, many of them chose to remain in their Aboriginals lands, which had become pastoral properties. For a variety of quite sensible reasons they tended to locate their living arrangements close to the pastoral homestead. As such, they were a highly skilled labour pool for the pastoralists. We have heard all the stories of how they were treated as slave labour and all those sorts of things. They were paid the award when they worked, and, whilst their circumstances were not what we understand today to be appropriate in terms of housing and things of that nature, theirs was a township, and they were frequently assisted by the pastoralists with additional food supplies and things of that nature—notwithstanding that they had a free run of the property to do the hunting and gathering that had been their practice prior to the arrival of the colonists, if you like.

All of these matters point to the fact that, when the Australian parliament became involved, with the best will in the world, it did not know what it was talking about and it encouraged these people to be mendicant. Today, we have a piece of legislation that recognizes the high sporting skills and capacity of these people and that sport is as good a form of employment as any other. But, without a basic education at the end, the funds they have accumulated during their relatively short period as elite athletes can be dissipated, and of course they can be subject to fraud and corruption. So the education component is equally important to developing these people’s skills so that they can reach the top in elite sport, and they do so with ease, and that is to the credit.

The point I wish to make in the first instance is that the fact this is termed the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act must never neglect the Neesham principle that if you want to be in the footy team you have to be at school for the full working day. There must be the opportunity to learn. There are adequate examples around the place of some of these young people having very successful careers after their period as elite sportsmen or sportswomen. One might refer to Cathy Freeman, a heroine in our society. Evonne Goolagong Cawley is another in the sport of tennis. The skills and natural skills across most sports are the same.

Having made these points and having welcomed this government initiative, I repeat how tragic the Australian parliament’s efforts and this government’s efforts have been in addressing the housing needs of people whom I fear should not be encouraged to stay on tribal lands in our modern society, because hunting and gathering is no longer accepted in the Australian context as being adequate for a person’s sustenance. We say to them—and I have an ironic anecdote I might refer to in a minute—‘These are your traditional lands, but if you don’t stay on them you might lose them.’ I do not know that they would, but by staying there they are left in an environment where there is no sport and no education of consequence because the kids do not go to the schooling that is offered. Their living standards deteriorate. The standard of the accommodation provided by the Australian government deteriorates and it deteriorates primarily because of the methods of construction. They are not suitable.

I was delighted to have a letter published by the Australian newspaper—it does not happen very often—the day after it ran a big article about another failure in a housing construction program for Indigenous people. There was a large coloured photograph of a house that was under construction. From the framework, it looked to have a single glass window, which would have been three or four metres wide and probably two or three metres high. Why should you not have that much glass in these sorts of houses? Firstly, glass is too fragile but, more importantly, it emits heat. We all know about the effects of a glasshouse on vegetables and crops. It is not a good idea. Secondly, the structure required expert tradesmen who can make a lot of money in the cities and want twice as much to go to remote areas and construct that sort of housing. Furthermore, once the house’s framing is up you put plasterboard type products on the walls. They are not durable. They are too easily damaged. I read with sadness the other day of a woman photographed in her house, which was a shambles, who advised that her house had been broken into and trashed while she had been away. She had gone somewhere, for whatever reason, and had come back to find that this had occurred to her house. It reflects on her as the tenant, and that is extremely sad, but one does not have to go very far to see the status of housing that was built with good intent.

Thirdly, the basic roof design of the house came from Europe. This is ideal when it is snowing for half the year, but it lacks natural flowthrough of air, which provides the best form of air conditioning. Houses which accommodate a semi-open space as the preferred means of living and where the benefits of a breeze can be utilised are not considered in their design.

I am pleased to say that Mr Kerry Stokes’s Wigmores business is prepared to assist me with some machinery. I have had an offer to build what I think is appropriate housing for these people—me personally, with a pick and shovel and a cement mixer to assist them build their own houses out of tilt-up concrete. Tilt-up concrete today is the preferred structural or cladding material for just about every commercial building in Australia, and I can point to some excellent houses that have been built in that fashion. The advantage is that a tractor suitable to handle a three-point linkage cement mixer and a front-end loader are virtually all the machinery needed to construct this sort of housing on site. That is assuming there is, as there typically is, a washed sand resource, which is usually found in even the smallest of creeks. The technology has been around for years. You pour the floor and then you pour the walls on the floor horizontally. You stand them up with a front-end loader and put a roof over them. The design that is required, and I have discussed this with many Aboriginal people, is for accommodation—that is, bedrooms, kitchens, ablutions et cetera—to be separated by a significant width of breeze block and probably with a facility therein for an open fire.

So you have a typical house which happens to be rectangular. It is robust, it has been built by the very people who are going to occupy it, it can be as long as you like and in hot weather, rather than rely on the broken-down air conditioner or the broken-down generator set that is needed for its functioning, you turn around and shift your bed out into the breezeway. But you are still under a roof if it rains, you have the other protections available and even the roofing can be constructed using manufactured trusses and things of that nature. The walls can be painted with the right colour and the right type of paint that allows for easy repair if graffiti or something else is applied to it. I now have to go off to the concrete construction people to see if they will provide sufficient cement and the other products needed. A mould is needed. It is very simple and can be reused over and over again.

In response to my letter to the editor on these matters, I received a letter from a charitable trust in, of all places, Tasmania. The trust has gone down this technology road and created a construction base to make these sorts of slabs with the purpose in mind of picking them up, putting them on a truck, taking them somewhere else and building a house. I find that a good idea but not really the answer you need when you are talking of seriously remote places.

The boundaries of my electorate, for example, have been changed dramatically. I am a Western Australian member, but I have an Aboriginal community that treats Alice Springs as its town centre. While I was speaking with members of that community on a phone hook-up the other day, their spokesman said to me: ‘You really think you could do that for us, Mr Tuckey? They have just come down here and built a house for $500,000, and nobody wants to live in it. It is too hot, the air conditioning breaks down and we really have not got the generating capacity to support too many of those. It is an absolute pain.’ Yet the community could be building its own housing which could be very durable and have all the necessities of a home. In simple practical terms, I would have all the piping and so on coming through the wall rather than under the building so that it would be easy to service. You can do all those sorts of things if you know anything about building.

You might wonder what I do in my spare time. I am rebuilding my own home. I am an owner-builder. My son and I recently laid out about 75 square metres of concrete in two one-hour sessions and then I trowelled it all off. I reckon it was good fun, and I would love to be able to take my skills out into the country and assist people to do things for themselves. In a sense, that is what this targeted policy is about: do something for yourself; learn at school and become an elite athlete. That is wonderful. But back there in the lands people need accommodation, and if they can build it for themselves there are no delays and there is no breakdown in the process. (Time expired)

Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too take the opportunity to speak on the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010. For several decades governments from both sides of politics have committed resources and adopted strategies aimed at reducing Indigenous disadvantage in Australia. It would be fair to say that over the years some progress has been made, but that, regrettably, there has not been nearly enough. In recognition of that, the Rudd government, on coming to office, signed a statement of intent with Indigenous people of Australia on 20 March 2008 outlining a vision for the future of Indigenous Australians and identifying core areas of focus. Those areas were life expectancy, educational achievements and employment opportunities. Key targets were set, and the Prime Minister committed to providing annual reports to parliament on the national efforts and progress being made on closing the gap. The first of these reports was presented on 26 February 2009 and the second on 11 February 2010.

This bill is fundamental to the government’s Closing the Gap strategy. It is an administrative bill which essentially transfers funding for the 2009-10 budget measures Closing the Gap Sporting Chance Program from the annual administered expense of the minister’s department—Appropriation Act (No. 1) 2009-2010—to the Indigenous Education Targeted Assistance Act 2000. This bill is required because funding under the Indigenous Education Targeted Assistance Act did not include the additional appropriation for the Closing the Gap Sporting Chance Program announced in the 2009-10 budget. The Sporting Chance Program is one of the innovative measures aimed at closing the gap and is funded through the act to support improvements in Indigenous education outcomes.

As I have said on many other occasions in this House, I believe that education is critical to overcoming disadvantage and securing the future security and prosperity of both individuals and the nation. Achieving the education goals of halving the gap in literacy and numeracy achievement, halving gaps in Year 12 or equivalent attainment and seeing that every Indigenous four-year-old in remote communities has the opportunity to access an early learning program is a key objective in achieving employment targets and overcoming Indigenous disadvantage.

Over the years I have taken considerable interest in the plight of Indigenous Australians. My view is that one of the reasons why we have had only limited success in overcoming Indigenous disadvantage is that we have not taken sufficient account of the diversity of Indigenous communities around the country and the diversity of the situations that they find themselves in. Not surprisingly, there is a diversity of views on what is needed among Indigenous people themselves. I am sure that all of us in this place could quote Indigenous leaders over the years who have made different suggestions about what governments can and cannot do and should and should not do if they want to help Indigenous people overcome disadvantage. I am aware that governments over the years have in good faith listened to and taken advice from those Indigenous leaders.

In my own experience, however, the reality is that those Indigenous leaders, as well intentioned as they are, often only represent one aspect of the views of Indigenous people. Certainly in the area of Adelaide that I come from, which is home to a significant number of Indigenous people, when talking to Indigenous leaders I have come across these problems. I hear a diversity of views about what should be done to assist them—in fact, I hear them disagreeing amongst themselves about what is best. This highlights to me that it is not necessarily the case that anybody is wrong; it is more likely the case that each of them is right, but right because they understand well the people they represent. The reality for their own people is not necessarily the same as it is for others. When one looks around the country one comes to understand that there will be differences not only because of diverse Indigenous tribal backgrounds but also because each part of Australia undoubtedly finds itself in a unique circumstance. One starts to understand why there is no one single program that will address and overcome all of the issues that Indigenous people are confronted with.

It is absolutely the case that, because there are different circumstances and individuals among different communities, we need individual responses and relevant programs if we are to meet the needs of Indigenous people around Australia—and we need a diversity of responses and programs. That is why I support this bill. The bill supports a range of measures associated with Indigenous programs, allowing flexibility for those making the decisions to tap into the most suitable programs for their community.

I want to focus my remarks in particular on the Sporting Chance Program, and I note that a number of other speakers in this debate have done so already. The Sporting Chance Program is resulting in some very good outcomes, with data collected from projects in 2009 indicating that the average attendance rate for academy students was 79 per cent. That is a remarkable achievement. The average rate for all Indigenous students in the schools where the projects were in place was 73 per cent—again, an outstanding achievement. More than half of the academy students were reported by the schools to be improving their school performance and many were also reported to have made significant gains in their self-esteem and behaviour. I am not surprised at all by those results.

The Sporting Chance Program uses sport and recreation as a hook to better engage Indigenous boys and girls in their schooling, to improve education and employment outcomes. There were 42 Sporting Chance projects in 2009, comprising 37 school based sports academies and five engagement strategies supporting about 9,000 students. In 2010 an additional 17 sports academies will commence across Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Victoria, supporting about 1,000 students, which will bring the total number of students supported under the program to 10,000. Ten of these new academies will be for girls and funded as part of the $10 million expansion of the program. I must say it is heartening to see that this program is as much for girls as it is for boys—so it should be.

If there is one area of Australian life where over the years Indigenous Australians have excelled, it is sport. Over the years, Indigenous Australians, regardless of where they originated from, regardless of the support they had and regardless of their level of disadvantage, have shown that if they apply themselves they can succeed in sport, and many of them have—in fact, they have succeeded against all odds and overcome barriers that many others might not face. Importantly, when they have succeeded they have been embraced by the whole Australian community. That is one of the fundamental aspects of sport and this program. If we are ever going to overcome Indigenous disadvantage, it is critical that Indigenous people be embraced and accepted by the rest of society. We all know in this place that Australians love their sport and nothing unites Australians, regardless of their backgrounds, more than their sporting heroes. Sport can be a terrific pathway for Indigenous people to make the most of their unique skills and improve their own lives and the lives of those who, in turn, are inspired by them.

A number of speakers in the course of this debate have mentioned different Indigenous people who have succeeded in sports. Without a doubt, all of us could name some very successful athletes and sportspeople from an Indigenous background. I will not focus on that in particular, but I do say this: over the years an incredible number of Indigenous people have excelled in sport. As a result of their successes, they have without doubt inspired other Indigenous people, from all over this country, to also have a go. The wonderful thing about sport is that it offers an opportunity for people who do not necessarily have academic skills but have skills in other areas. Furthermore, sport offers an opportunity to just about everyone because of the diverse range of sporting activities available to the community.

For that reason, I have always been a strong advocate and supporter of children being able to participate in a sport of their choice, regardless of whether they aspire to become an elite sportsperson. Apart from the obvious health benefits, sporting participation builds characteristics which serve individuals well in whatever else they do in life. This applies to all young Australians, whether they are Indigenous young people or non-Indigenous young people. The characteristics that are built through sport include discipline, responsibility, hard work and team building—and one could go on. These skills are all developed if a person commits themselves to their sport.

But sport can in fact transform a person’s life, much more so than just that. And there have been many sportspeople in this country who, through their sport and nothing else, have gone on to make a career that otherwise might not been open to them if it had not been for their sports performance. And while I accept that sport and education need to be linked, and in this case the objective is to get young people into education, sport in its own right can be a pathway to a career. In that respect, one of the high schools in my electorate, Banksia Park International High School, as recently as last year included sport as a curriculum activity within the school—not sport per se to just play in team sports and compete against others, but sport as an industry sector because of the opportunities that arise through sports participation and sports involvement. Whether you are a participant, whether you are a coach, whether you are an official, whether you are a journalist, whether you are a commentator or whether you are an administrator: there is a whole industry attached to sport. So getting young people involved in sport is not only one way of ensuring that they stay at school, but in fact it also opens the doors for them in so many other ways. Again, I have seen that with so many sportspeople, and in particular with Indigenous sportspeople.

Many of the Indigenous sportspeople who became stars, like so many others in their community, were not terribly well educated. But, as a result of being able to apply their sporting skills and becoming elite sportspeople, they were later on offered opportunities in life which would never have existed for them. In turn, and importantly, they have also gone on to inspire many others from their communities, and that is wonderful to see.

A number of those sportspeople who have been successful have originated from the parts of Adelaide that I have come from and I have known many of them personally. And while I will not go through each and every one of them, I will take a moment to pay tribute to Travis Dodd. Travis Dodd is the captain of Adelaide United soccer team. They played a Korean team last night; unfortunately, in time-on they were not able to win. He is a person I know well. He is a young person who has grown up through the grassroots sports clubs in the area and has gone on to be, in my view, one of the best soccer players we have in Australia. He serves as an inspiration to so many other children in the region, and I have seen him at various community and school functions addressing young people and speaking to them about the opportunities available to them. Again, a role model, a person who inspires others and an idol, he is certainly someone who does Australia proud. He is someone who has been embraced by the entire soccer community, and I would say the broader community of Adelaide, because of what he has been able to achieve.

It is people like that who ultimately will play a big role in ensuring that this kind of program is successful because it is people like that who will in fact give hope to Indigenous children, wherever they might be in Australia, that they too might one day be able to achieve the same goals as people like Travis. And so this program, which is using sport as a hook to get kids involved—because we all know that most Indigenous children, like other Australian children, do love their sport and we know that most of them have special skills and they see that there is a real opportunity for them—is a terrific way of, in turn, getting them to school. Undoubtedly, once they are at school, if they can focus on their schoolwork as well, that will add to building the opportunities for them that will come about through a better education. It is a terrific program. I commend all involved who over the years have been associated with it. I certainly commend the minister for allocating the additional resources to it, and I look forward to getting more reports about just how effective the program has been. I commend this bill to the House.

Peter Lindsay (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The bill that we are discussing in the parliament today, the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010, amends the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000, which was introduced by the former government. It provides an additional $10.93 million for the Sporting Chance Program, which was announced in the 2009-10 budget. It is a great program. It engages Indigenous children in school and education through sporting programs. It was first announced in the 2006-07 budget by the previous coalition government, and since being implemented has proved to be so successful. I am pleased that members of the current government have recognised just how successful this program has been.

In 2010, 22 groups will provide 59 projects for nearly 5,000 Indigenous students. It is very important to my electorate. I have some 8,000 Indigenous Australians on the electoral roll in Herbert, a number of them being on Palm Island. There are Indigenous students throughout the schooling system in Townsville, and certainly they understand and the schools understand the benefits of the Sporting Chance Program. I am proud to say I have a football team in my electorate, which is not doing quite as well as we would all like it to do at the moment. It is called the Cowboys in the NRL competition. The point I want to make is that many of the Cowboys are Indigenous players, and we are very proud of that. We are very proud of the development programs that the Cowboys run for up-and-coming players and the way that they take Indigenous Australians into that program. It underlines just how successful the involvement of Indigenous Australians in sporting programs can be. They love their sport.

In an editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald in March, Warren Mundine, the Chairman of the Australian Indigenous Chamber of Commerce, spoke about the positive way in which sporting programs can help disadvantaged young Indigenous Australians. He talked about the Indigenous Football Festival that was held in Townsville. More than 180 Indigenous kids participated in 2009 and it was a wonderful experience for many of these teenagers, some of whom had never seen the ocean until that week—remarkable. I have no doubt that the 2010 festival will be equally as successful, and I am proud of Townsville’s participation in such an important event.

There are many opportunities for Indigenous young people to do better and to involve themselves in the community. Indigenous children are just as capable as any other child of succeeding in our community. I have always promoted the need to make Indigenous families aware of how their children can become involved in a local sporting club and of the benefits of doing so. In Townsville there are just so many sporting opportunities, and we should be doing everything we can to involve Indigenous youths in one of their passions, sport. Too often Indigenous youths are involved in antisocial behaviour. That seems to occur across Australia; it certainly occurs in Townsville. It is probably because they do not get the proper parental direction, or they have nothing meaningful to do with their lives, or they just do not know how to be involved in the wider community.

There are avenues other than sport, and one that comes to mind is participation in the Australian Defence Force Cadets. Those young Indigenous men and women who do join cadet units have the time of their lives. I encourage Indigenous youth to participate. In Townsville we have cadet units representing all three services, and Indigenous cadets have risen through to the highest ranks of these services. It is a mark of what can be achieved. As the parliament will know, in the last government I had ministerial responsibility for cadets, and I never failed to be impressed with the young men and women in the cadet forces. They are future leaders of our country.

At times I was equally unimpressed with the bureaucratic nature of the head office system than ran the cadets. Just last month I was talking to one wing of the Australian Air Force Cadets, which runs a squadron at RAAF Townsville. These conversations often include horror stories about the bureaucracy in cadets. They reveal the stupid decisions that are made in the so-called interests of workplace health and safety, and they serve to demonstrate that there is a lack of common sense in the cadet system. They also reinforce the cadet culture of being risk averse—it is easier to say no than to say yes. Roadblocks are the order of the day, rather than a can-do attitude. One of those roadblocks seems to be Squadron Leader Robert Tandy, who appears to have a reputation among the staff of being a bureaucrat who so typifies the defence attitude that it is easier to be inflexible and just say no. I appeal to all officers in cadet branch to rethink how they exercise their command responsibilities and decisions, and to change their culture to one of can do rather than cannot do. The Australian Defence Force Cadets is a wonderful organisation and it should be given every support.

Everyone in this parliament is committed to Indigenous programs. The Rudd Labor government has made a lot of promises under their Closing the Gap initiative, for example; however, we need more than just words. Indigenous Australians are counting on the Prime Minister to deliver real action and real results in education, housing and health care, and of course in sporting opportunities. Unfortunately Mr Rudd is all talk. The bill today provides more funding for a successful coalition government program. This is highly commendable and I thank the government for supporting the coalition initiative that has been developed over so many years. The previous coalition government was committed to Indigenous programs, and in 2007-08 we spent $4 billion on Indigenous programs and services. There was a 67 per cent real increase on the amount that had be spent by the Keating Labor government in 1995-96. The coalition government was particularly committed to Indigenous education through initiatives such as the Sporting Chance Program. From 1998 to 2005, the participation of Indigenous students in year 12 increased from 32 to 40 per cent. Participation in year 11 increased from 52 to 62 per cent. But we can do better, and we must do better. Certainly education is one of the ways of the future for Indigenous Australians. These are just some of the projects and outcomes of the previous coalition government. The Rudd Labor government has professed the same commitment, but we are yet to see any real action. There is a long way to go in Indigenous education, and on such an important issue the Rudd government needs to do more than just expand coalition initiatives.

Late last year I travelled the Plenty Highway, driving from Alice Springs through to Winton—600 kilometres of dirt across the centre of Australia. In the middle of the drive we stopped at an Indigenous community. I though to myself that this was a community that was different. I have seen a lot of Indigenous communities across Australia. It was almost like Warburton, which is a very remote community in your state, Deputy Speaker Moylan. There was a new feel about this community. I went to the takeaway for breakfast. It was all clean and tidy, with an Indigenous workforce resplendent in their freshly ironed uniforms. All in the middle of nowhere. I asked to see the manager, who turned out to be a white woman. She had lived in Indigenous communities all her life, and she was fiercely proud, and so were the staff, of this takeaway. I said to this woman that, as members of parliament, we struggle to know what to do best for Indigenous Australia, because the more we do the more things do not seem to change. She said, with classic country logic, ‘Forget about the current generation; you will never change them. All you have to do is make sure the kids go to school. If they get a good education, Indigenous Australia will change forever, for the best.’ There we go. The Sporting Chance Program is one of the programs that can keep kids at school, and we as a parliament should be very mindful of those very simple but very powerful thoughts from the middle of the Northern Territory. I thank the House.

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

I strongly support much of what the member for Herbert said about education. In fact it was Noel Pearson who said, and I hope I am quoting him correctly, that there is no self-esteem and self-worth without capability, and there is no road to capability without education. I am immensely frustrated after 2½ years of this government because in that time we have seen Central Australia frozen under an intervention that has not be reformed or improved. I find it quite galling that we waste time in this chamber in 2010 talking about a $10 million appropriation when we have a billion-dollar tragedy rolling out in Central Australia. After 2½ years, this government are almost frozen in the headlights of the Indigenous intervention. They do not know where to go and they do not know how to reform it. They are like a government walking on a Martian landscape, unable to step off and say, ‘This can be improved, this can be changed and these people can actually benefit from the lessons that have been learnt since 2007.’ Within the first six to nine months you could see the intervention was succeeding. Albeit with some barnacles on the edges and some minor reforms needed, it was succeeding. We have had a series of almost endless reports, investigations, inquiries and reviews into what is going on in Central Australia.

Let me tell you, one person has broken through, and that is Noel Pearson with his work in Cape York, through the Cape York Institute and Cape York Partnerships. The government does not deserve Noel Pearson; it does not deserve the outcomes that we are going to see out of the review by KPMG next month. The government does not know what to do when there is an obvious solution, which is breaking the cycle of destruction in remote and Indigenous Australia and replacing it with a series of positive social norms. That is the lesson that Pearson taught us and that is what was effectively implemented in Central Australia. But there is enormous frustration that the Rudd government is simply without ideas. We have had 2½ years of its rolling off figures about Indigenous disadvantage. It really annoys me. It may want to set a ‘closing the gap’ figure for 2020, long after the Prime Minister is gone and unable to account for his lack of action. The Prime Minister is quite happy to apologise for the actions of others, generations ago, but is unable to face up to his own inaction and apologise for that.

I am really frustrated because there are huge numbers of kids who do not go to school, and we should be finding a solution. That is not just to be done in this chamber; I speak about my own state and an appalling education department that has been slack on attendance at school. For too long, since the seventies, it has been a matter of: ‘You don’t have to go to school if you really don’t feel like it.’ Also: ‘You deserve your welfare—that’s unconditional—but, if you’re going to beat up your kids, drink all night, sleep all day and not send the kids to school, we’re not going to even touch your welfare.’ That was Labor’s socialist attitude that persisted for decades. It was only broken by Mal Brough in 2007. After three years, we finally have a chance to break the paternalistic way of thinking about Central Australia, and the government is not improving the situation. The government is not acting at all. The government gives us the absolutely insulting waste of time to talk about a $10 million sports grant that keeps all the pollies busy in Canberra.

I love the program; it is a great program. It barely deserves to be a piece of legislation. It should be a tick-off bit of regulation done by the departments to keep the great program going. But is anyone on that side going to talk about the kids who still do not go to school in those communities? No. What they do on the Labor side of politics is take urban Indigenous Australia and remote Indigenous Australia, put all the figures together and say, ‘Forty-seven per cent of kids go to school.’ The figures show that 80 per cent of kids in the city go to school and still only 20 per cent in Indigenous and remote Australia go to school. That is the tragedy. The tragedy is that the eye has been taken off the ball in remote Australia. As you travel around that area you will find—outside of where Pearson has intervened—that between 20 and 30 per cent turn up at school. They are all ticked off in the morning and they disappear by lunchtime. Nothing happens in many remote schools after lunch. I am not going to tell people how to run their lives, but, as far as I know, going to school is the law of this land. I do not think that should be compromised in any way, shape or form.

You have heard all the nice, warm accolades about the program and the importance of education, but we as a body, we as a corpus, do nothing to ensure that parents are encouraged to send their kids to school, and we pay a price when they do not. We are sitting around and watching an evolving train wreck that has been going on for three decades. If you pay a parent who is beating up their kids, exposing them to pornography or sleeping in all morning and not sending their kids to school the same welfare as a grandmother who picks up the pieces, what kind of white message does that send to Indigenous Australia? ‘You’re all worth the same’—that is the message it sends. So, forget about trying to break the destructive cycles in communities—‘You are all paid the same because, under white Australia since 1974, you are all worth the same.’ There is no reward for sending your kids to school.

Of course, what is the point of going to school if there are no jobs and no genuine, well-formed belief that employment is at the other end of education? Let’s never forget that many of us in mainstream Australia go to school because we can see the rewards in earnings, opportunities, approbation, degrees and licensure, but none of that is available in Indigenous Australia. There is no hope of that kind of reward at the end of attending school. In a way I can understand why turning up to play sport is perhaps the only thing left for Aboriginal kids, but I see a day when sport is part of an appropriate balance in Indigenous Australia, not the only thing they can ever hope for. That has continued under this government which wastes legislative time on an absolutely paltry movement of money when billion-dollar disasters are evolving around us.

What can we do? There is a KPMG report coming out about Cape York next month and in it will be compelling statistics about Aurukun, where school attendance has gone from 40 per cent to closer to 70 per cent. In Hope Vale and Mossman Gorge there are drops in violence to the point where I believe they have had to change employment levels in hospitals. There simply is not the queue of trauma as a result of alcohol fuelled violence in those communities anymore. When the doors open at the hospital on Monday morning, there are fewer people waiting to have bones fixed and wounds sewn up. That is what can be achieved. We can break this senseless cycle of destruction.

But it will not happen, as I have pointed out before, as long as we do not enforce school attendance, as long as education departments palm responsibility off to school principals. How can a school principal in a remote community enforce attendance without support from authorities? It has to come from departments and political leaders. And when students all clear out of school at lunchtime there has to be a way of bringing them back. Education departments need to ask themselves that introspective question: what are we doing in the classrooms that is failing to engage Indigenous kids, the kids who cannot even hear the teacher because we have not rigged up the audiology assistance devices that could make teachers heard more easily? We have got education departments that are effectively saying, ‘Take our syllabus or leave it.’ Teachers are highly inexperienced and incredibly compassionate and committed, but they stay there one or two years and move on in many cases. We have not found a way to get security of tenure and longstanding teachers in many of these communities. That remains a challenge too.

I conclude what I say about state education departments with this simple comment. Our curriculum cannot be take it or leave it. We need an Indigenous focused curriculum with changes made to engage kids to stay after lunch and not disappear off home. But at the moment our appalling attendance records for schools are far worse than they even look, because we know for sure that schools are ticking these kids off at nine o’clock and they are disappearing at 10. We need to find a better way of doing it. It was Pearson who described that cycle of dysfunction that begins with nocturnal activities in crowded, inadequate housing, leading to people going to bed at two or three in the morning and not waking up until midday, kids not being sent to school and not being given a decent breakfast. Once you fall away from education, we have got that there. As you go through grades 3, 5, 7 and 9, levels of Indigenous reading literacy fall from 75 per cent to 66 per cent. We know it is the same for Indigenous writing, falling from 79 to 70 and ultimately to 60 per cent by grade 9. The numeracy levels are a little more stable, around 75 per cent all the way through grades 3, 5, 7 and 9. But don’t be fooled, because they include urban, regional and remote Australia. When you tease them out, we have a massive tragedy unfolding in Central Australia.

I put a simple challenge to this government: step out from the headlights. You are doing nothing in Central Australia as a government to improve this intervention. How can it be justified, after Mal Brough introduced the intervention in July 2007 and this government took over by November, that we have that Indigenous intervention in those prescribed communities still unreformed three years later? That is a national tragedy, to be quarantining the income of well-meaning families doing the right thing and sending their kids to school. We are going to see from Cape York a far more effective result by making it not so much optional but running through a family commission system, through a different structure. How many years do we have to wait before we will reform what is happening in Central Australia? It is utterly appalling that entire communities like Timber Creek, Lajamanu, Kakarindji and Yuendumu all live on quarantine regardless of whether you are complying or not, regardless of whether you are actually getting rid of the grog, sending your kids to school, paying your rent. These families should be rewarded, not punished. At what point did it occur to the Labor federal government to actually start to reward people doing the right thing? They stood around and watched it, frozen on the sidelines, half not wanting to change the intervention for fear of losing votes in the mainstream but the other half not actually knowing how to change it. It is so foreign to the genetic makeup of the Labor Party, they really do not know where to go to next. Every time I see the Indigenous minister stand up I pray hard, saying, ‘Do not just sit and look at that intervention like some kind of spectator in a grandstand. Let’s get it right.’

When the Prime Minister threw across a challenge to the then opposition leader to be bipartisan about this, there was a one-off statement at the time of the apology and of course nothing since. All those promises to go and visit Indigenous Australia, to report each year on the outcomes, have fallen away until, of course, the opposition had to remind the Prime Minister. The greatest tragedy here is a Prime Minister who is all tetchiness and all promises but the actual outcomes are so far away we will never be able to measure this individual as Prime Minister because all the goals are 2020. All I ask for in a Prime Minister is someone to be accountable for what he or she does right now, this year. I tell you what the record of this Prime Minister is: no reform of this intervention, no way of acknowledging the great parents doing great things. We know from Pearson’s work that if you take an average Indigenous community about half of them will eventually have some form of notification for abuse of tenancy, of alcohol, of education attendance or safety for kids or a magistrate’s court order. And when they go before a commission a number of them are quarantined. But we know one thing. Of the people who go into a 12-month quarantine the majority of them come out of it improving. We know another thing. After 12 months only about 10 to 15 per cent of a community ends up on quarantine for a longer period of time. They are the non-responsive segment of a community, about 10 to 15 per cent. And for the first time in Australia’s Indigenous history we can focus on a group that needs help most. Up until 2007, utter chaos reigned through the entire community. It was almost impossible for a single mum or grandmother to stick her head up to stick up for kids without having it knocked off.

Pearson has proved we can break that cycle, but this government has not lived up to the expectation that it would act on his recommendations. Here we are tragically midway through 2010 with simply no action at all in this area. It is the greatest tragedy of all. Two years ago we should have been helping the 50 per cent of Indigenous remote Australians who made the decision to break that social nexus and do the right thing for their kids. Two years ago we should have been helping the 10 per cent of Indigenous Australia who refused to look after their kids. But nothing has happened. Kids still flee starving to their grandmothers. They watch on as there is alcohol fuelled violence in those households. Why? Because no matter how you quarantine their income they still keep doing it. My challenge to this Prime Minister is: what are you going to do about that? What are you going to do about the hard cases who say, ‘Quarantine my income, couldn’t care less. I’ll humbug relatives, I’ll be okay.’ How do you deal with that defiance? This government has no answer. Communities are asking for a solution, they are asking for the government to stand up, but it is not. This Labor government has sat around and watched as a spectator the intervention and left it completely unreformed, and I think it is a great tragedy to impose that on well-meaning people.

I personally believe that our Prime Minister wants to leave it like this for as long as he can to make life under the intervention as tough as possible in the hope of getting Indigenous Australia to hate the intervention. It is time to learn from it. Pearson has given us the formula; the results will be released in a few weeks. We will then learn the importance of education—of truly attending. We will learn the importance of having Indigenous-specific and relevant education that keeps Indigenous Australians at school, and the importance of addressing hearing. Not only do hearing problems lead to poor educational outcomes but also, when Indigenous Australians first run into police, the fact that in many cases they cannot hear, let alone understand, the police leads to a sudden escalation of trouble and often to their being incarcerated when otherwise they might not be.

We have still seen no law reform on the other side. These kids who have no education build a criminal resume faster than they build a capability resume. They end up, after maybe getting one verbal warning if they are lucky, being hauled before white courts. They are lucky to even have someone to be able to translate the charges into their own language. They are lucky to even have an Indigenous elder there to act as an amicus. They are lucky to even have a sympathetic magistrate who considers diversion. Until we can have a mature Indigenous Australia that can actually sanction, incarcerate and rehabilitate its own people, what is the point of having white courts that continue to fail Indigenous Australia? How long does this federal government have to look at the problem and do nothing? That other side is full of Labor lawyers. You would think that maybe in their quiet moments, when they had little to do, they would look at reforming Indigenous law. But they are not bringing Indigenous culture into our white mainstream courts, which are still horribly painful foreign places to be. These young Indigenous people simply know no other way, and jail becomes a warmer place with a warmer embrace than their own community. That is a tragedy that this Prime Minister should have picked up on long ago, but we are just now debating $10 million for Indigenous sport in the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010. All I say is what a ridiculous waste of legislative time for a great program when we could be addressing the really big challenges.

In the end we know that when you go away to jail there are three square meals a day and, if you are an Indigenous Australian, many of your mates are there. When people come home to a community, some of them say, out of bravado, ‘It was a great place to go and I can’t wait to get back.’ But I know most of them must hate it there because of the loss of connection to their land, which means so much to remote Australians. So why have we not come to a point where we help the elders to support these young people? I have made the point before: this government since the intervention still pays these great people who are committed to Indigenous culture the same amount of money as paid to parents who are abusing their kids. This government found no way through that, no way to reward Indigenous Australians who support the court process. You do not pay them anything, apart from a bit of transport, to actually support a court process. You do not pay Indigenous elders to go and rehabilitate these young people. You are not even looking for solutions—for example, incarcerating these young Indigenous Australians, if we have to, closer to their communities, where they can retain a connection with their elders. What is happening? We are simply sending them off via white courts into white jails and letting them rot. That is the reality. In fact, if they are there for less than a year, they do not even have access to rehabilitation programs—they have to be long-term offenders. So what do they do? They offend again, at twice the rate as for non-Indigenous Australia, and get themselves a long sentence. Then they finally get some access to rehabilitation.

This might sound in many ways like a directionless rant about the challenges that face us. But I could not let this debate go without saying that what we are legislating for here today is not where the game is at. There are no Indigenous Australians here in this chamber to talk about this. But grasp the nettle and do the serious stuff in remote Indigenous Australia. Get a hint from what Pearson is doing and let us fix this intervention and make it work for 2010. That intervention was okay for 2007, but reform is long overdue for those local communities out there. The Rudd government over there are quite prepared to make billion dollar promises on anything that will win them a vote. Let us see this Labor government under Kevin Rudd do something for Indigenous Australia that gets these young families back on track and keeps young people out of incarceration. As we have all noted in this debate, it starts by keeping them at school.

Peter Slipper (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will not delay the House long, but I wish to address the House on the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010. The opposition does in fact support this bill as drafted, but I think all of us in Australia are entirely unhappy about the level of performance, or success, of Indigenous students. We do not believe that enough assistance has been given to Indigenous students to enable them to compete with other Australians. I think all of us are in favour of equality of opportunity so that Indigenous students are in fact able to perform along with non-Indigenous students.

As a country we have a lot to not be proud of with respect to Indigenous affairs. It is a scandal that Indigenous Australians live for a substantially shorter time than non-Indigenous Australians. All of us are very keen, wherever possible, to try to redress Indigenous disadvantage. Thus I said at the outset that we are not happy with the level of success of Indigenous students. If it is possible to give them an extra push along, an extra hand to help them to achieve at the levels of other Australians, then this is an important initiative and an important principle that all of us on both sides of the chamber would support.

This bill is a step in the right direction. While the opposition strongly supports the principle of equality for Indigenous Australians, I must say that the government’s rhetoric on Indigenous Australians has been long and loud but their performance has been completely inadequate. I think that many people voted for the Rudd Labor government in the 2007 election with an expectation that there would be an increased focus on Indigenous disadvantage. The people who voted on that basis would, of course, be sincerely disappointed. They believed that the Rudd Labor government would place a greater emphasis on redressing Indigenous disadvantage but, sadly, this has been another area where the Rudd Labor government has let down the Australian people.

I think it is important also to look at what the Liberal-National government did when we were in office prior to the 2007 election, in particular the initiative taken in the Northern Territory. It is important at times to think beyond the square and to look at failed systems which have not been assisting Indigenous Australians. Where those failed systems continue to fail, at great cost to the Australian community, it is important—and in fact it is a responsibility of governments—to think about how we can achieve successful outcomes in a better way. That was the approach taken by the Howard government prior to the election in 2007. It was a policy which was strongly supported by many in the Indigenous community.

We are all about practical reconciliation. We want to bring about a situation where Indigenous Australians are equal with non-Indigenous Australians in all areas. We want to see them achieve to the same level as non-Indigenous Australians. We want to see them in schools and universities. We want to see them filling the ranks of all the professions in our country. We want Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians to achieve successfully at a high level. That is one of the reasons why the former Howard government was prepared to take a course of action which was criticised by some people—because we felt that the tired old solution of the past, of simply throwing money at the problem, was not achieving what it was intended to achieve.

The Leader of the Opposition has taken a particular interest in Indigenous affairs. Prior to his election as leader, he was a shadow minister in this area. We are very fortunate to have the honourable member for Warringah as the Leader of the Opposition because, in him, we have someone who understands what the former Howard government did and understands the shortcomings of the Rudd Labor government in the area of Indigenous affairs.

This bill amends the funding tables in the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000 to include the additional $10.93 million allocated to the Sporting Chance Program announced in the 2009-10 budget. There is no additional appropriation in this bill. It transfers the amount of money—almost $11 million—from the Appropriation Act (No. 1) to the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000 from 1 January 2010. The appropriation was considered as part of the 2009-10 budget process.

Honourable members would be aware that the Sporting Chance Program was a conception of the former Liberal-National government. It was announced many years ago—in the budget of 2006-07, I think. This program is an initiative which is actually achieving its desired outcomes in engaging Indigenous boys and girls in school through involvement with sport. If children can be encouraged to play sport—for fitness but also to play the sport to achieve excellent levels—then this is one way of redressing disadvantage.

I think all Australians felt a great sense of pride when we saw Cathy Freeman achieving what she achieved. And there have been so many other Indigenous sports men and women who have carried the flag of Australia, who have stood up and been counted. They are used as role models for other Indigenous and, I suspect, non-Indigenous Australians. That is a really important step. That is why the Sporting Chance Program of the former Howard government has been really successful.

The government has made promises to Indigenous Australians through Closing the Gap, yet has failed to deliver any new programs or to deliver any improvements in Indigenous education outcomes. The only successes being achieved by the Rudd Labor government in this area are through the programs of the former Howard government.

There is so much more to be done in the area of redressing Indigenous disadvantage. I do not think as a country we can hold our heads high or be proud of how we have collectively, over the last 200 years, handled the issue of Indigenous affairs. I think all of us have as an aspiration the redressing of Indigenous disadvantage so that Indigenous Australians are able to achieve to the same level as non-Indigenous Australians. Unfortunately the government has talked a lot—there has been a tremendous amount of rhetoric—but in this area, as in so many other areas, the government has been short on achievement. That compares not very favourably with many of the excellent outcomes achieved by the former Howard government.

Having said that, more should be done. This bill is a step in the right direction and I hope that the government does seriously seek to redress Aboriginal disadvantage. It has to get beyond tokenism. It has to get beyond the idea that, by throwing money at the problem, it is going to solve the problem. Indigenous Australians deserve objective attention to the problem. They need a bipartisan approach so that we are able ultimately to see Indigenous Australians achieving at the same level as other Australians. I commend the bill to the House.

Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Employment) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

in reply—I thank the members who participated in this debate. The Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2010 makes minor adjustments to the appropriations under the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Act 2000, the IE(TA) Act, to include additional appropriations announced in the 2009-10 budget for the Sporting Chance Program. Appropriations transferred from Appropriation Act (No. 1) to the act total $10.93 million. This will make an important contribution to closing the gap between the education outcomes of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. I commend the bill to the House.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Message from the Governor-General recommending appropriation announced.