Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Standing Committee on Indigenous Affairs, I present the committee's report entitled Alcohol, hurting people and harming communities, together with the minutes of the proceedings.

Report made a parliamentary paper in accordance with standing order 39(e).

by leave—I also mention that the deputy chair of this group will also ask leave to speak after my remarks.

Brett Whiteley (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If he must.

Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is a very significant report. I have to say that it is a tragedy, a part of Australia's great shame, that the drinking culture which affects all Australians, of course, in particular affects the Indigenous communities. It is a fact that some Indigenous Australians are less likely than others to drink at all, but, when Indigenous Australians—Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders—do drink, it is more likely that they will drink at highly harmful levels.

This has extraordinary impacts on their communities. We know that, if you are drinking at a harmful level, there are incredibly serious health impacts. It is well known what the impacts of drinking over a period of time at extremely harmful levels will be. But of course it also impacts on the violence that ensues when you are under the influence of alcohol. Your children, if their parents are both afflicted by or under the influence of alcohol, are neglected. There is a serious situation where a lot of Australian Indigenous fathers but more often, more commonly, even mothers are incarcerated as a result of crimes associated with the abuse of alcohol. When the children's parents are incarcerated, that is a tragedy. You have lost that parenting and that experience of a child growing up with the mother and father in their home.

One of the key recommendations of this inquiry, in that it costs nearly half a million dollars to keep an Indigenous youth in prison for a year, is that we have a justice reinvestment strategy. We understand that it is the states which mostly have the responsibility for building and maintaining prisons and detention centres in Australia, but we are arguing that, through the COAG process, our minister should lead a discussion to look at the introduction of justice reinvestment, where, instead of just building more prisons, spending more effort to incarcerate Indigenous Australians, associated with alcohol abuse and other abuses of illicit substances, we put that funding into some of what we found to be the socioeconomic determinants of alcohol abuse. These are the homelessness, the lack of employment, the disrupted education and the hearing loss that accompanies chronic infections with young children.

When we undertook this inquiry, we were determined not to simply, yet again, do a report on how to curtail access to alcohol in Indigenous communities. There have been so many reports written like that. We also wanted to address: how do we reduce demand? How do we have Indigenous people not reaching for the grog in the ways that they do right now? An important term of reference for us was: what are the socioeconomic determinants of alcohol abuse in Australia? As I have just mentioned, we found that it was about the sense of powerlessness and about unemployment. So many of our young Indigenous Australians in remote Australia do not speak English anymore, so they are locked out of the broader Australian society and certainly out of the economy. We found that even racism had an impact on Indigenous communities—their sense of powerlessness and hurt, the legacy of colonisation in Australia.

We also found that there is a strong peer pressure to drink to harmful levels in many Indigenous communities. Given the communalism of an Indigenous community, when someone has something like some funds or indeed some alcohol, there is a pressure to share. Even if you have decided not to drink so much, the pressure is for you to join your others—your brothers, your sisters, your cousins, your family in that community—and to drink as you have before.

In this report we have made numbers of recommendations to address access to alcohol and the pricing of alcohol. We talk about the need for a minimum alcohol price in Australia, and also we look at the recommendations of previous tax inquiries which refer to numbers of recommendations including looking at a volumetric tax. We argue that too often, where we have had treatments—millions of dollars have been spent on looking at treatments in Indigenous communities for addiction to alcohol and alcohol harm—these programs have been very short term, just six months or 12 months. A sobering-up shelter is not of great value if every night you show up at the sobering-up shelter and there is no follow-up to support you if you want to be detoxified and you want long-term counselling and support so you can give up the need to drink at high-risk levels.

Another key term of reference in this report that the minister particularly required us to consider was: what is the impact of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder and foetal alcohol syndrome not being designated officially in Australia as a disability? We found that tragically, in Australia, with the few incidence studies that have now been done, some of the highest levels of FAS and FASD in the world are found in some Indigenous communities. FAS and FASD can occur when the mother drinks while she is pregnant. Babies are brain damaged at birth, which is incurable. It is a lifelong affliction. Of course, it is 100 per cent preventable if the mother simply does not drink alcohol.

You will not be surprised that our recommendation was that the lack of a formal recognition of FAS and FASD is a serious problem in terms of proper funding or resourcing for diagnostic centres and for treatment of the children born with this condition—because treatment will ameliorate some of the secondary impacts of this condition. We therefore strongly recommend that we must have these two conditions immediately put onto the official list of disabilities, especially with the NDIS coming through. Already in the trials around Geelong we are finding that Indigenous families who have FAS or FASD children are not getting appropriate support.

There are numbers of recommendations in this report which are extremely important. We looked at the processes or programs which have worked. For example, in Groote Eylandt and Fitzroy Crossing we were in awe of the courage of those communities, often led in the first instance by their women, who took it upon themselves to say: 'Enough is enough. We are not going to continue to live in fear of our lives, seeing our children abused and neglected, because of the alcohol consumption levels.' In both those two communities, for example, the women-led restrictions on alcohol consumption led to a complete change in the numbers of violent episodes and health impacts of harmful risks of alcohol drinking.

We also saw a lot of communities with their alcohol management plans held up for too long. They had put a lot of effort into those plans. They had been put into the system and some of them have been sitting there for several years. That must be addressed.

So, this is a very important document. I want to commend the secretariat, which as always was highly supportive, but also my committee. I would like to now leave sufficient time for the deputy chair to make his remarks. He is, of course, the member for Lingiari, and as a Northern Territorian he knows very well the impacts—the harm to people and communities—that occur with alcohol abuse. I commend the report to the House.

Brett Whiteley (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is leave granted for the member for Lingiari to make a statement?

Leave granted.

Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Can I say how pleased I am to be able to speak to the tabling of the report Alcohol, hurting people and harming communities. I thank the chair, the member for Murray, for her leadership of the committee. I thank the other members of the committee for their forbearance—I hope there was not too much of that, but there may have been a bit!—and the convivial way in which we worked together, the collaborative way in which we discussed the issues and the way in which we were able to come together to have a unanimous report with recommendations.

I also thank our secretariat, who are sitting here in the advisers gallery, for their wonderful work. They showed a great appreciation of the issues which were of concern to us and were of great assistance to us in coming to our deliberations.

I want to thank all of those who gave evidence for the report. It is well-informed and canvasses a wide range of issues and highlights, as the chair has said, the tragic impact alcohol is having on communities across Australia. The committee was able to interrogate the issues closely despite, in some cases, a lack of cooperation from some. In particular, I note the lack of cooperation from the Northern Territory government, who refused to allow us to speak with those with the most knowledge as witnesses to the committee. That included the health professionals at the Alice Springs Hospital, who had firsthand and ongoing daily experience of the impacts of alcohol on the health of the community and on violence because of alcohol misuse.

Significantly, the committee was able to assess what should be done to address the misuse of alcohol and the impact of alcohol in families and communities. The report considers under a number of headings the social and economic determinants of harmful alcohol use, health and alcohol related harm, best practice strategies to minimise alcohol misuse and alcohol related harm, best practice alcohol abuse treatments and support, FAS and FASD, and determining patterns of supply and demand. As a result of those deliberations around those headings, a number of very important recommendations have been made. I want to highlight just a number of them, because they will be contentious. There is no question that there will be people in the community who will be opposed to what we are recommending. Nevertheless, we believe that these recommendations are vitally important. Recommendation 6, for example, goes to the question of advertising and suggests that the Commonwealth take steps to establish a nationally consistent and coordinated approach to alcohol advertising, including banning alcohol advertising during times and in forms of media which may influence children and, significantly—and I think probably most contentiously—banning alcohol sponsorship of sporting teams and sporting events, including but not limited to those in which children participate or may be involved. There is another aspect of that, which is included, and people may want to refer to that themselves.

The recommendation which I think is going to be of most use to us, in terms of harm, goes to the issue of a minimum floor price and the introduction of a volumetric tax. The report speaks significantly about these things and talks of the evidence. It gives the recommendation of the introduction of a national minimum floor price for alcohol and that prompt consideration be given to the recommendation on the Henry review of volumetric tax.

Lastly, knowing that my time is limited, I want to refer to recommendation 8, which is that the Northern Territory government do something which was successful in the past. They need to reintroduce the banned drinkers register and set up a comprehensive data collection and evaluation program which monitors criminal justice, hospital and health data. That, I believe, is self-evident. We also recommend, at 9, that the Commonwealth re-establish the National Indigenous Drug and Alcohol Committee—very, very important. And in other parts we talk about the need for justice reinvestment and other preventative measures.

I commend the report. I thank all of those who have made a contribution to it and most particularly my colleagues on the committee.

Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the House take note of the report.

Brett Whiteley (Braddon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The debate is adjourned. The resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.