Mal Brough (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to support the comments by Adam Giles, the Chief Minister of the Northern Territory. He was speaking in the Northern Territory parliament about the alleged despicable act of a crime against a seven-year-old in the town camp of Hidden Valley in Alice Springs where it is alleged that this seven-year-old was taken away and raped. The Chief Minister made the comment that he felt that if this had been a blue-eyed, blond-haired child that there would be much greater outrage in the Australian community. And I could not agree with him more.

Can I take you back to my time as Indigenous affairs minister, when the then federal local member up there Dave Tollner took me to a home in a suburb of Darwin where we met with an Aboriginal woman. At the same time as the incident that I am about to relay occurred there was a child left on a church step in Melbourne, which made international news. She lamented and she was confused as to why when she had had a baby brought to her wrapped in black plastic by other Aboriginal men to be buried—and I will not go into all the details, but it involved the police et cetera—that this did not make the news. She said, 'I don't understand why we value one child differently to another.' Why is it? How many people of the 150 MPs who sit across this chamber recognise that 13 adult males—I will not name the town—in a remote Western Australian town have all, in a similar period of time, been charged and convicted with crimes against children who have been—and here are those words—'sexually penetrated against their will'? I have looked into the eyes of these young children and it is something that deeply disturbs you forever. And yet I stand by what Adam Giles has said: if these were children in the suburbs of Mooloolaba, Alexandra Headland, Maroochydore or any of the electorates of the members who sit before me in this chamber right now there would be outrage. It would be on the front pages of every paper. So instead of now picking holes in what clearly has deeply affected the Northern Territory Chief Minister, let us look at ourselves. Let us value every child. Let us recognise that, even though you live in a remote part of Australia, your life is just as important. Our duty to them is equally significant as our duty to those children who live in our suburbs. I do not throw spears here at the media or the police; I do it at us, as a community as a whole. What is it that we are afraid of that we do not lift the ugly scab of these awful crimes and deal with them equally, no matter where the sin and the crime are committed?