Lucy Wicks (Robertson, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise in response to the 2016 Closing the gap statement delivered recently by the Prime Minister. In doing so, may I acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, who are the traditional custodians of the Canberra area, and also the Darkinjung people, who are the traditional custodians of my electorate of Robertson and of the Central Coast. May I pay my respects to the elders, past and present, of all Australia's Indigenous peoples.

I would first like to echo the line that the Prime Minister ended with: closing the gap is more than another government Indigenous policy. It speaks to all of us, and it speaks about all of us. It is our best selves—our deep, just, fair values given practical form. When we close the gap, we make ourselves more whole, more complete and more Australian.

I venture to say that few places exemplify this spirit and this challenge better than the Central Coast—in particular, in my electorate. In the Robertson electorate, our Indigenous population is supported by hardworking local organisations, many of which are linked through the Barang partnership. Barang is an agreement that includes service organisations such as Bara Barang, Bungree, Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council, The Glen, Mingaletta and the National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association, or NAISDA, dance academy. You can see NAISDA graduates right across the country, performing in all sorts of capacities. They are incredible, positive role models for Indigenous youth not just in my electorate, but right around our nation—indeed, around the world. In particular, I would like to commend NAISDA for their goal to develop opportunities, self-development and independence, and their commitment to encouraging students to maintain strong links to their cultural backgrounds. I also thank NAISDA chairperson, Dr Warren Mundine, and executive director, Kim Walker, for their inspiring leadership in this area and particularly with this dance college.

If the Closing the Gap initiative is more than just a policy statement, then how have we fared? As we have seen in the latest report, in the eight years since the Closing the Gap targets were set there has been mixed progress, and this year's report is no different. Importantly, the target to halve the gap in child mortality by 2018 is on track. Between 1998 and 2014, Indigenous child death rates declined by 33 per cent, and the gap narrowed by 34 per cent. Yet the life expectancy gap is still around 10 years. I join with the Prime Minister and much of the community's response in saying that this is an unacceptably wide gap. The target is not on track to be met by 2031.

The reading and numeracy target, which aims to see national minimum standards, was also mixed. Only half of the measurement points are on track. I am advised that the new target to close the gap in school attendance by the end of 2018 has also seen little change. However, on any given day, the vast majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students are believed to be attending school. This has assisted in keeping on track the target to halve the gap in year 12 attainment by 2020. More Indigenous young people are finishing high school and more of those young people are enrolling in tertiary education. This has seen a 70 per cent increase in the past decade—the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in higher education. This promotes not only further education skills and outcomes but also the environments where our future Indigenous leaders are being fostered.

I am known for telling the stories of people on the Central Coast. We have so many success stories to celebrate on the Central Coast. I would like to refer briefly to one that I found from the Aspiration Initiative website. It is a story of Aunty Kerrie Doyle. Aunty Kerrie Doyle is a Winninninni woman, who grew up in Darkinjung country, became a general nurse and worked for the Gosford District Hospital on the Central Coast of New South Wales. At 33, Aunty Kerrie enrolled in the University of New South Wales and became their first Indigenous psychology graduate. Attaining her undergraduate degree solidified Aunty Kerrie's interest in academia, and she went on to receive a Roberta Sykes Scholarship in 2012 and became the first Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander woman to obtain a postgraduate degree from Oxford University—an accolade which now sits nestled amongst an impressive and lengthy list of academic qualifications. And there are now more and more of these types of stories coming through from Indigenous people in my electorate.

We also need jobs. Sadly, as in previous years, the target to halve the gap in employment by 2018 is not on track. The 2016 Closing the Gap update is optimistic that factors such as gains in Indigenous education, economic growth and strong Indigenous business will have a positive impact on these results in coming years. I join this optimism, but I am also aware that much of this growth and opportunity must come from our direct engagement with Indigenous communities. We must listen to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people when they tell us what is working and what needs to change. Empowered communities are an important part of this dialogue. We also want to be able to see more opportunities for Indigenous business and to encourage Indigenous innovation and entrepreneurialism, particularly on the Central Coast. I understand that Indigenous businesses are 100 times more likely to hire Indigenous people. Because of this, supporting Indigenous enterprise is a way to boost employment while promoting the right approaches so that we can celebrate and promote Indigenous businesses we can be proud of and that also support and embrace local outcomes and services.

Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council, which I mentioned earlier, and its CEO, Sean Gordon, has engaged in this work recently through projects like its community mural in Terrigal. This two-kilometre work of art is about being able to address issues and promote awareness. Darkinjung has also launched initiatives with Barker College in Sydney's north. Together they established the Darkinjung Barker campus at Yarramalong, supporting and encouraging Indigenous students from kindergarten to year 6. In Gosford, Sean advised me of plans to engage with the state government and Lend Lease in a partnership related to the development of Gosford Hospital. This aims to create 30 Indigenous jobs over three years, based in Gosford. Sean's focus, and that of other Indigenous leaders in my electorate, is to keep working hard to get important measures delivered, including measures around security, housing, jobs and secure income. Perhaps other opportunities can also be explored: for example, how we can more strongly support Indigenous businesses and entrepreneurs on the Central Coast. We certainly have a great model further north, with the Mandurah Hunter Indigenous Business Chamber, which I understand already works closely with our stakeholders on the Central Coast. Its aim and mission, through CEO Debbie Barwick, is that it:

…strives to assist Aboriginal People to achieve control over their own destiny through the establishment and growth of viable enterprises which create wealth, employment and increased choices.

As we seek more innovation and more ideas across our country, let us also keep encouraging these businesses to explore their potential and collaborate.

When the Prime Minister hosted young Indigenous entrepreneurs from across the nation recently, there were many fantastic success stories. We heard about their imagination, their creativity and their resilience while embracing the opportunities of the future. Those young people will be making a contribution to their families, to our economy, to our society, to their nation, to their own people and to our future. They are also role models and will build on the strong partnerships that we need between government and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. One of these, who has worked and invested time and energy on the Central Coast, is Mayrah Sonter from 33 Creative. Mayrah has shaped a company mantra of 'engage inspire empower'. So while we look to shape policy, let us also make sure we connect with these ideas and help to close the gap on the Central Coast and right around Australia along with the many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations, leaders and elders on the Central Coast and around our nation who are working together to help close the gap. I commend this motion to the House.

Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I acknowledge the traditional owners, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, and I pay my respects to their elders, both past and present. There has been no greater failure in public life than the failure of governments—state and federal, Labor and Liberal—to ensure our first Australians enjoy the same quality of life as all other Australians. Lives are being ended far too soon and parents are not living long enough to see their grandchildren—due, more often than not, to health outcomes we would not tolerate in our wider community. That is why it is so important that until the gap is eliminated all of us here in this place are reminded every single year by this report of what we have achieved, where we have fallen short, what is working and where we need to do better. As the Leader of the Opposition said, it is about telling the truth, being honest about where we are and making sure that we continue to do that each year.

Again, this year we as a nation are falling short, with just two of the seven targets on track to be met, according to the 'closing the gap' report delivered to the parliament. There is just one target that Australians can be confident is on track to be met, and it is a very important target that we can be proud of: progress is being made in reducing infant mortality rates by more than 33 per cent. Long-term progress has also been made in narrowing the gap in year 12 attainment, with a significant boost in the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students completing secondary education, although it is less clear whether Australia remains on track to halve the gap in year 12 attainment.

But on the remaining targets the news is far from good. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids have lower rates of literacy and numeracy, greater rates of truancy, lower readings skills and are going to high school without the minimum requirements. The overall employment rate for Indigenous Australians actually fell between 2008 and 2013, with fewer than half of 15-to-64-year-olds holding down some form of job. Most shamefully of all, Indigenous adults are likely to die 10 years earlier than other Australians. If we are ever to close this gap it will require the best efforts of all of us, working with Aboriginal communities, to ensure all Australians enjoy the same quality of life and health care most of us take for granted.

We need to ensure that every child is given the best educational opportunities to succeed in later life. It is why the Gonski reforms are so critically important to not only this population group but other population groups. It is a matter of equity. We need to develop a justice target to prevent crime, improve community safety and tackle the unacceptably high levels of Indigenous incarceration and victimisation rates. And we need to tackle health outcomes that should be considered unacceptable in a First World nation for any of its people—outcomes such as the wholly preventable eye disease trachoma, which is still rife in Indigenous communities.

It is why I and my colleague the member for Blair were very proud to hear the Leader of the Opposition commit to investing an additional $9.5 million for additional optometry and ophthalmology services and prevention activities to close the gap in eye health and to eliminate trachoma and other eye diseases. Shockingly, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults are six times more likely to suffer from blindness. However, 94 per cent of this vision loss is either preventable or treatable. Addressing vision loss alone will account for around 11 per cent of the gap in health outcomes between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and other Australians.

Australia is the only developed nation where the infectious and wholly preventable eye disease trachoma still exists at endemic levels, and it only exists among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, where it is endemic in two out of three remote communities. Leaders such as the Vision 2020 alliance of health organisations, including the Fred Hollows Foundation and the Indigenous Eye Health Unit at the University of Melbourne, are making great progress in improving Indigenous eye health. However, there is a significant unmet need. Around 35 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults have never had an eye exam. Labor will deliver additional funding to increase visiting optometry services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to address this gap in general eye health. We will also increase funding for ophthalmology services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to address the gap in specialist eye healthcare service delivery. To continue to drive progress towards the elimination of trachoma in Australia, Labor will invest in trachoma prevention activities recommended by the World Health Organization. This is sensible reform. It is not a huge amount of money. I call on the government to match this funding and ensure that we eliminate trachoma from Australia by 2020 and we begin to turn the tide on this endemic health problem both with trachoma and, more broadly, with those preventable eye health issues that so deeply affect our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

I also call on the government to abandon its repeated attempts to make health care more expensive and its attack on bulk-billing through its four-year freeze on Medicare rebates and its move to scrap bulk-billing for pathology and to change it for diagnostic imaging. These attacks have one aim in mind: to make patients pay more for those services. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who already suffer far worse health outcomes than is acceptable in any First World nation, the consequences of that attack are disastrous. As the report of the Close the Gap Campaign Steering Committee—a report that is released prior to the parliamentary report each year and one which I think provides very important and challenging reading for all of us—said:

A further factor that could negatively impact the services offered by ACCHOs—

Aboriginal community controlled health organisations—

is the … freeze on GP and non-GP Medicare rebates continuing until July 2018, announced by the Australian Government … The freeze is continuing despite the fact health care costs continue to rise above the rate of inflation … A recent study has estimated that by 2017-18, the freeze would amount to a 7.1% reduction in GP rebate income compared with 2014-15. It is generally expected that GPs will pass increased costs onto patients, as many do already. But ACCHOs don't pass on such costs—to ensure their services remain affordable (and therefore economically accessible) to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. At worst then the freeze could result in staff or service cuts. Whatever its impact, it will be a disproportionate one on ACCHOs and the users of ACCHOs, who are predominantly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, over other primary health services and their clients.

It is an important point that they are making and one, I have to say, that the government has refused to deal with or respond to appropriately.

We already know that cost is a big barrier to health access for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, especially in remote areas. We know that one of the COAG Reform Council's later reports showed that cost is already a barrier to one in eight Indigenous people seeing a GP, for one in five visiting a dentist and for one-third filling a prescription. This situation will become worse as this freeze bites and the attack on bulk-billing takes hold. The COAG Reform Council also says that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are three times more likely to die of an avoidable cause, meaning that three-quarters of deaths of Indigenous people under 75 could have been avoided through early prevention or treatment. The cuts to Indigenous health and the Medicare freeze make early prevention and treatment a lot less likely. One of the most pernicious and short-sighted cuts, frankly, was the cut to smoking cessation programs that were beginning to work. It absolutely astounds me that the government would think a program that was working towards prevention on the ground should be cut in the way that it was.

The gap is already far too large and our efforts to close the gap are too slow for us, with these health cuts, to threaten the progress we have made. For the sake of the health of all Australians, and especially our First Australians, the government must abandon its attacks on Medicare and bulk-billing and instead commit to ensuring all Australians, not just those who can afford it, have the right to live a long and healthy life. In particular, I commend the work done by my predecessors on the national Indigenous health plan. I note that the government has since, after much time, worked on the national Indigenous health implementation plan. An implementation plan is only as good as the resources that you put into it to make it happen. We look forward to, and we will certainly be looking in the budget for, a very sound commitment to the Indigenous health implementation plan, because you cannot, as many have said in this place, cut your way to closing the gap. This is what the government has done. There are consequences for that. The Indigenous health implementation plan will need to be resourced seriously, and we will certainly be looking at the government to do so.

Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I acknowledge the Ngunawal and Ngambri people, the traditional custodians of the land upon which we are meeting, and pay respects to their elders past and present. I rise to speak on the eighth annual Prime Minister's Closing the Gap report. It is eight years on and the report on our progress as a nation into closing the gap in Indigenous disadvantage is both sombre and disturbing. We saw many respected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders express their understandable frustration with the pace of progress to reduce Indigenous inequality, but, most importantly, we heard their frustration at a process many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people feel they do not have a stake in. The lack of real and meaningful engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities puts at risk the long-term progress we have made. A co-chair of the National Congress of Australia's First Peoples, Dr Jackie Huggins, said there was:

… lack of engagement, not a general commitment to the needs and the aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in their community.

Dr Huggins went on to say that she could not remember such a 'low point' in our history. She was not alone in expressing such sentiment. The father of reconciliation, Professor Patrick Dodson, warned:

Closing the Gap hasn't got a buy-in from Indigenous communities.

…   …   …

Without Indigenous participation it's going to be doomed to fail.

This should trouble us all. It should make us very uncomfortable because what began eight years ago as a joint effort of governments, organisations and communities is failing to live up to the rightful expectation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples that they would be equal partners in this generational endeavour. We cannot close the gap unless Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are engaged as genuine partners in our national effort. One cannot happen without the other. Engagement has become somewhat of a buzzword for governments. While Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have heard the promises of 'a new relationship' and 'a resetting of relations', it does not reflect their lived experience. Genuine engagement is as simple as it is difficult. It is not lack of goodwill nor an absence of good intention from government.

Perhaps no government has done it exceptionally well, but there are tangible examples of what can be achieved when partnerships based on mutual respect and responsibility underpin and drive the process. The result is meaningful outcomes of which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have ownership—for example, the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Plan. It was developed under the previous Labor government in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health experts, organisations and communities. The plan produced a framework for the long-term future of Aboriginal health over the next 10 years. Last year we welcomed the implementation strategy that will put this plan into action. It can be done, and we await the government's commitment to funding the health plan. We hope they will do so in the budget.

The National Congress of Australia's First Peoples was established six years ago as a national representative body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Its members include more than 8,000 individuals and more than 180 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations. It is an important vehicle for communication in the national discussion about the aspirations of Australia's first peoples. This government had a choice: to support and engage with the national representative body, or not, and this government chose 'or not', ripping away $15 million from this peak representative body. In fact, it went one step further and completely defunded the congress. I am profoundly disappointed in the government's decision. As I have said time and time again, I urge it to change its position, and I urge it to refund the congress.

Another report was delivered in the same week as the Prime Minister's Closing the Gap address to parliament. Among its pages were illuminating and shocking statistics measuring our national progress towards reconciliation. The state of reconciliation in Australia report, from Reconciliation Australia, reveals that almost all Australians—86 per cent—believe the relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and other Australians is important, yet 33 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, one in three, had experienced verbal racial abuse in the six months before the survey. Shockingly, many Australians did not believe that past race based policies of governments and institutions have created today's disadvantage.

If we are to close the gap in Indigenous inequality, we must confront the truth of our history and acknowledge the unequal burden of that history borne by our First Australians. We must face up to the collective responsibilities of all of us and confront the scourge of racism where it exists in our communities. At the heart of our efforts must be respect. What is reconciliation without respect? What is recognition without respect? This is the platform from which we must all begin. Despite the best efforts of communities, organisations, businesses and governments, it remains a shameful fact that an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person is more likely to die earlier and to find it more difficult to get a job than another Australian.

The Prime Minister's report labels it a 'mixed result'. There are signs of modest long-term changes that ought to be acknowledged. Generational change takes time. We remain on track to halve the gap in infant mortality rates. It appears we are on track to halve the gap in year 12 attainment. These are important fundamental building blocks for future progress, but let us not sugar coat this. It is not a mixed result. It is not. Of the seven Close the Gap targets, we are on track to meet just two—maybe, just maybe, two. Without new data it is not entirely clear that we remain on track to meet the target to halve the gap in year 12 attainment.

One of the things this report makes so important is the need for accountability in relation to government policy. It is not to make ourselves feel better about our labours; it is about accountability. When progress is stalled in the key areas of health, education and employment, there must be candid and transparent reporting about what is true if we are going to achieve Closing the Gap targets. We will not make progress with pretty words. The Prime Minister's report was replete with words of encouragement, but it offered little in terms of evidence based analysis.

Nowhere was this more evident than in reporting against the employment target. We are not on track to halve the gap in employment by 2018. Shamefully, there has been no reported progress against this target. The report states that, although no progress has been made against the target since 2008, Indigenous employment rates are considerably lower now than they were in the 1990s—more than a decade before the Closing the Gap targets were agreed upon. There has been no new data that the government can report since 2012-13, though the minister for Aboriginal affairs assures us he has created 50 jobs a day for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This is not transparency. It is not accountability. It is not good government.

Under the 'Accelerating progress' heading the government lists the Indigenous Advancement Strategy as driving Indigenous employment. I am not sure how they can accelerate progress when they have gone backwards on this target. There was not a word about the many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community organisations that were defunded when the government ripped more than half a billion dollars away under their Indigenous Advancement Strategy—the jobs that were lost and services that were cut to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

These have real and devastating impacts on our ability to close the gap. The government seems to think it can cut its way to Closing the Gap. You cannot do so. There are things that we can do, and Labor has already outlined substantive policies that will improve outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. This need not be a partisan endeavour. There should be real and substantive change and recognition in the Constitution. I would be thrilled if the government would work with us to put policies, including constitutional change, into practice. There need to be justice targets. When three per cent of Australia population is Indigenous and yet 25 per cent of our prison population is Indigenous, that is a shame, a tragedy and a national disgrace.

Supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander girls to stay in school by partnering with the Stars Foundation to provide mentoring is critical, and I commend state governments who wish to undertake this. I urge the government to take up Labor's commitment in this regard: resourcing schools with additional funding to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and giving them the best educational opportunities in life. A hundred and ninety-five thousand Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander schoolchildren will benefit from Your Child, Our Future and Gonski funding of a Labor government. I urge the government to take up that commitment that Labor has made.

Developing a new justice target in Closing the Gap and changing the government's broken promise to recommit itself to a justice target is critical, as are investing in alternative approaches like justice reinvestment, which Labor will do; reducing incarceration rates and victimisation rates; improving community safety; supporting domestic violence services; and funding outreach optometry and ophthalmology services to close the gap in vision loss and eliminate trachoma. The test for the government is how they translate these fine words into practical and credible action. They cannot cut their way to Closing the Gap.

Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I acknowledge the Ngunnawal peoples and the Ngambri peoples, traditional owners of the land on which we meet, and I pay my respects to elders past and present.

In speaking in relation to the Closing the gap report I observe, as other speakers have, that only two of the seven targets are on track to be met. It is a very disappointing result for this country, which has for a long time been seeking to close the gap that Indigenous peoples face. I also want to note and agree with the previous speakers in this debate that there should, in addition to the existing Closing the Gap targets, be a target in relation to the justice system. I observe the significantly higher rates of incarceration amongst Aboriginal men, and I also observe the significantly higher and increasing rates of incarceration amongst Aboriginal women, including in my home state of Queensland. Those are issues which our whole nation should seek to address and about which we should all be concerned.

In supporting the Closing the Gap targets and the view that there ought to be justice targets as well, it is important to acknowledge that reducing violence against women and children must underpin and be a part of any work that this country does to address Indigenous disadvantage. So significant is this issue that there has been a significant amount of work and thought put into how, in fact, we could reduce violence against women and children for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women.

Under the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children, one of the national outcomes relates to Indigenous communities. The national outcome is that Indigenous communities are strengthened. Of course, the National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children is a 12-year plan that was initiated under the previous Labor government. It is presently in its second action plan, with a third action plan by the government no doubt underway. To give the parliament an idea of what that national plan requires in respect of Indigenous communities, I just want to read from the plan itself a couple of excerpts to give the flavour of what is required. As I said, the outcome is that Indigenous communities are strengthened, and that outcome:

… will be measured by reduction in the proportion of Indigenous women who consider that family violence, assault and sexual assault are problems for their communities and neighbourhoods; and increase in the proportion of Indigenous women who are able to have their say within their communities on important issues, including violence.

There are several strategies that underpin that national outcome. They are: 'to foster the leadership of Indigenous women within communities and broader Australian society, to build community capacity at the local level, and to improve access to appropriate services'. Those three strategies are very important means of addressing the issue of violence against women and their children, specifically for Indigenous women.

One of the wonderful things that has occurred under that national plan has been the establishment of Australia's National Research Organisation for Women's Safety to reduce violence against women and their children. It is a long name, but it is usually abbreviated to 'ANROWS'. ANROWS very recently—in January this year—published a paper called Existing knowledge, practice and responses to violence against women in Australian Indigenous communities: State of knowledge paper. Apart from raising some concerns about an absence of available evidence, the paper very helpfully canvassed the evidence as it stands at the moment. In so doing, it turns to the issue of the incidence of violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and their children. In respect of the latter, it notes that very little is actually known about the incidence of family violence in the Torres Strait, so most of the report focuses on mainland Aboriginal women and their children.

In seeking to canvass the rates of violence against Indigenous women, the report notes that there are significant issues of underreporting of violence with respect to Indigenous women. There are a few reasons for that. There is the fact that national surveys are often not designed to collect information specific to Indigenous women on family violence. There is also a lack of a consistent definition of family violence across jurisdictions, and that is an issue that permeates all of the work that is done to try to reduce and ultimately end family violence.

One of the issues that does contribute to the lack of clarity around the rates of violence for Indigenous women is underreporting. Some of the reasons for underreporting in Indigenous communities cited by the report include:

For all of those reasons there can be significant underreporting of family violence. On the reporting that we do have—it has been reported in the national plan to reduce violence against women and also in this recent paper to which I have referred—we know that Indigenous women are 35 times more likely to be hospitalised due to family violence related assaults than non-Indigenous women are. Probably an equally horrifying statistic is that hospital data from Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and Northern Territory showed that the rate of head injury due to assault was 21 times higher amongst Indigenous people compared to non-Indigenous people, and the head injury rate experienced by Indigenous women was 69 times higher than that experienced by non-Indigenous women.

Those statistics are bleak. Equally bleak is the statistic relating to mortality from violence. Despite representing just over three per cent of the total Australian population, Indigenous women accounted for 15 per cent of homicide victims in Australia when survey information was taken back in 2002-03. A 2006 report indicated that Indigenous women were nearly 11 per cent more likely to die due to assault than non-Indigenous women were.

So the incidence of violence against women and their children in Indigenous communities is significant and, in seeking to address that incidence, obviously it is important to talk about the causes of violence. I will not go through it in detail, but it is complex. There are many factors that contribute to violence, and they are listed in this report as breakdown of culture, normalisation of violence in some contemporary communities, policy and governance issues, sociodemographic stresses and alcohol, and there are ecological models which suggest that there is an interconnected and ecological set of circumstances that contribute to violence.

The report goes on to talk about what can be done, as does some of the work that has been done under the national action plan. It talks about the importance of community-led approaches. In seeking to reflect Indigenous voices and Indigenous opinions about what ought to be done to combat violence in Indigenous communities, the report lists a number of community-led approaches, such as: training an Indigenous workforce; distinguishing women's from men's business; using or developing Indigenous materials, such as visual images or artwork; developing culturally appropriate safe houses for women and children; developing more flexible appointments and program sessions; developing programs that include offenders as part of the healing process; developing community-led education about family violence; valuing elders as mentors, and support people playing central roles in programs and services, including women staff at services; developing antiviolence education campaigns to raise public consciousness; and providing community development opportunities to de-normalise violence—for example, promoting the value of women in the community; men supporting women; and increased knowledge that family violence is illegal and unacceptable.

I want to give an example, briefly, of a couple of such programs. One of them is Sisters Day Out, a very successful program that Aboriginal Family Violence Prevention and Legal Service Victoria runs. It is a one-day workshop that engages with Koori women—and, in particular, young Koori women—for the purpose of preventing family violence by facilitating community networks to reduce social isolation; raising awareness of family violence and its underlying causes and impacts; and by providing information to promote community safety. It is a one-day session. It is culturally appropriate. It is not threatening. There is relaxation. There is beauty therapy and beauty treatments. There are exercise activities. They put a lot of emphasis on self-care and wellbeing, and that is a really important mechanism that is out there working now.

Another one is the NO MORE Campaign, founded by Charlie King. I hope that many more sports codes and individual sports clubs will get on board with this men-focused primary prevention program that encourages sporting clubs and organisations to agree to a domestic violence prevention plan.

We have seen cuts from this government in relation to front-line services and family violence, and that is a great shame.

Andrew Leigh (Fraser, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I note at the outset that only two of the seven targets in Indigenous health, education and employment are on track to be met on time. Halving child mortality by 2018 is on track. As to ensuring 95 per cent of Indigenous four-year-olds are in preschool by 2025, that is not clear. Halving the gap in reading and numeracy by 2018 is classified as 'mixed'. Halving the gap in school attendance by 2018 is not on track. Halving the gap in year 12 attainment by 2020 is on track. Halving the employment gap by 2018 is not on track. And closing the gap in life expectancy by 2031 is not on track.

I turn to each of those targets in detail. On the issue of life expectancy, the report notes that meeting the goal of closing the life expectancy gap by 2030 remains 'a significant challenge'. The data is only available every five years, but the report found that between 2005-07 and 2010-12 the life expectancy gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians only shrank by 0.8 of a year for men and 0.1 of a year for women. Indigenous Australians still continue to die about 10 years earlier, on average. And, while Indigenous mortality rates have declined 16 per cent since 1998, this will not be enough to meet the target. Indigenous deaths resulting from cardiac disease have fallen, but deaths from cancer are, as the report notes, increasing.

The aim of closing the gap in mortality rates for Indigenous children under five within a decade is on track, the Indigenous child mortality rate having fallen 33 per cent since 1998. It is, however, the report notes, not clear whether progress has continued over the past eight years.

On the issue of education, year 12 attainment rates among Indigenous Australians have improved, but the number of Indigenous students finishing school is still relatively low: around 60 per cent compared with 85 per cent for non-Indigenous students. We know a great education is the best antipoverty vaccine we have yet devised, and so it is absolutely critical to close that gap. School attendance rates for Indigenous students barely moved between 2014 and 2015, with rates still below benchmarks. As the report notes:

Progress will need to accelerate from now on…

In terms of the particular question of attainment gaps, the report notes that this is close but not on track. Four areas—year 7 reading and years 5, 7 and 9 numeracy—are on track, but the rate of progress is not currently fast enough for year 3 numeracy and years 3, 5 and 9 literacy to meet the 2018 goal. In terms of increasing higher educational attainment, between 2004 and 2014 there was a 70 per cent increase in Indigenous students enrolling in higher education. Improving the share of low-SES Australians attending universities was a key focus of the previous Labor government, and the lack of focus under this government on making sure that our university population reflects the full diversity of the community is disappointing to me.

In terms of early childhood education, in 2013 just 67 per cent in major cities and 74 per cent in regional areas were enrolled in early education programs. There is a higher rate in remote communities but, since most Indigenous Australians live in urban and regional Australia, that still is not enough to get us there.

It is important to note that needs based funding is particularly critical for closing the gap. As my colleague the shadow minister for education, Kate Ellis, puts it:

This report is just more evidence that if Australia is to improve our education system and close the gap, our schools need investment, not Malcolm Turnbull's $30 billion cuts.

She points out that there are 195,476 students receiving the Indigenous loading under Labor's school funding agreements.

One thousand, seven hundred and sixty-eight of them are here in the ACT, but because the government has walked away from years five and six of the Gonski reforms those Indigenous loadings are under threat, and with them the potential for closing the education gaps.

The report notes that the progress on halving the gap in employment outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians within a decade is not on track. As the report puts it:

No progress has been made against the target since 2008.

It acknowledges that the Indigenous employment rate fell from 53.8 per cent in 2008 to 47.5 per cent in 2012-13. Over the same period, the overall employment rate fell only from 73.4 per cent to 72.1 per cent, resulting in an employment gap which has widened rather than narrowed.

Labor has argued for the inclusion of an incarceration target in the Closing the Gap targets. We understand that Indigenous Australians represent three per cent of the Australian population but 27 per cent of the prison population, and that Aboriginal men are 15 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Aboriginal men. The Prime Minister said on 10 February 2016:

It's certainly something we'll look at.

But, when asked the same question on the same day, Senator Scullion said:

So it's just a pretence to say, 'OK, let's have a justice target,' that's the end of that end of the story, that's the end of the effort.

As quickly as the Prime Minister offered bipartisanship on an incarceration target, Senator Scullion was quick to scuttle that bipartisanship. As the Close the Gap Campaign notes:

The Campaign remains particularly concerned about imprisonment rates and community safety (particularly family violence)—which are only getting worse. In 2013, the age-standardised imprisonment rate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was 13 times greater than for non-Indigenous Australians in 2015. The year 2016 marks a grim milestone in the numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people being held in custody. Under current projections, for the first time over 10,000 will be in custody on the night of the annual prison census, 30 June 2016.

We believe that incarceration must become one of the issues covered in the Closing the Gap reports. Here in the ACT, we have had a surge in the prison population. The Alexander Maconochie Centre population has risen from 322 a year ago to 413 in the latest numbers, with an increase in the Indigenous share of that population.

In the brief time remaining, I would like to acknowledge the work being done in the Wreck Bay community part of the electorate of Fraser. I recognise the importance of that community, which occupies 403 hectares in the Jervis Bay Territory. Looking out over the ocean, it is a part of the world which is as beautiful as any other you will visit. I acknowledge the board members who served in 2014—Craig Ardler, Annette Brown, Julie Freeman, Tony Carter, Joseph Brown-McLeod, Beverley Ardler, Leon Brown, George Brown Jr and Jeff McLeod; those who continued to serve in 2015—Craig Ardler, Annette Brown, Julie Freeman, Tony Carter, Beverley Ardler, George Brown Jr, Jeff McLeod, Justine Brown and Clive Freeman; and Mal Hansen, the CEO of WBACC. Their work is critical to making sure that that great community continues to do well.

I also want to acknowledge the work of the Indigenous Marathon Foundation, a terrific grassroots leadership program with which I had the pleasure to be involved last year. I ran the New York Marathon alongside 10 Indigenous Marathon Project participants: Daniel Lloyd from South Australia, Chris Guyula from the Northern Territory, Dwayne Jones from the Northern Territory, Aaron West from New South Wales, John Leha from New South Wales, Jessica Lovett-Murray from Victoria, Harriet David from Queensland, Jacinta Gurruwiwi from the Northern Territory, Alicia Sabatino from Queensland and Eileen Byers from New South Wales. I would love to spend more time talking about each of them, but I should acknowledge in particular Eileen Byers, the toughest woman I have met and an extraordinary inspiration to chat with; and John Leha, whose picture with an Aboriginal flag has literally made him the poster boy for the Indigenous Marathon Project. Coach Mick Rees and founder Rob de Castella are extraordinary Australians. It is three decades since Deek ran 2.07 in the Boston Marathon, and no Australian has yet run faster, but his greatest inspiration is what he is doing for Indigenous Australians in helping to close the gap.

Stephen Jones (Throsby, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Development and Infrastructure) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My electorate is on the land of the Dharawal and Gundungarra peoples and this parliament rises magnificently upon the lands of the Ngunawal people. I would like to acknowledge these people and pay my respects to elders past and present. This was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.

Closing the Gap is our annual report card—the assessment of how we are going as a nation in reducing inequality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Of course, we know that inequality as a whole is growing within Australia—between rich and poor, between town and country and between black and white. When inequality grows, those who are already at the greatest disadvantage are left even further behind.

I want to focus on life expectancy for a moment. We are not on track to close the gap in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians within a generation—that is, by 2031. There is currently a 10-year gap in life expectancy. The average Aboriginal male will not make it to 70 and the average Aboriginal woman will not make it to 74. We have come a long way since 1901, when the life expectancy for the general population was 55 years for men and 58 years for women. Today, it is 83 years for women and 80 for men. We are, in fact, ranked second in the world, behind Japan, for life expectancy. But, if we were to rank Aboriginal Australians on that same list, men would be ranked 95th in the world and women 113th. I will say that again: if we rank Australia as a whole, we are number two, behind Japan, for life expectancy; but, if we were to rank Australian in terms of Aboriginal life expectancy, we would be 95th for men and 113th for women. In life expectancy, Indigenous men are on a par with Vanuatu, Nicaragua and Samoa and rank behind the life expectancy of men in Tonga, Palau, Jordan and Albania. Indigenous women are on a par with Egypt and Iraq but rank below the life expectancy of women within Cambodia. I think most Australians would be surprised to learn of this league table.

Increases in life expectancy since the turn of the last century have occurred because of significant improvements in infectious disease control, infant mortality, motor vehicle accidents and, of course, reducing the rate of deaths through coronary heart disease. When we look at all of these great accelerators for increasing life expectancy, we know that they do not apply evenly across all Australian groups. Take coronary heart disease as an example. We know that this is a great cause of the difference in life expectancy between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.

I look at the smoking rates. Forty-two per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people smoke, compared with just 16 per cent of non-Indigenous Australians. I argue that one of the most significant things that we could do to ensure that we close that gap is reducing that rate. There have been some good programs. Regrettably, some of those programs were put on hold during the first two years of the coalition government's time in office. I believe that the Tackling Indigenous Smoking program had started to reduce and was an important program for reducing Aboriginal Australians' rates of smoking. The Liberal government has cut it—very significant cuts. Over $130 million over five years was cut by this government from the program tackling Indigenous health. This budget measure was one of the worst of the 2014-15 budget.

Another significant cause of the gap in life expectancy and health outcomes not only between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians but between Indigenous Australians living in urban settings and those who live in remote Australia is access to decent quality food. For Indigenous health to improve, we must be able to address food security. We saw the Australian National Audit Office report from last year highlight the difficulty that remote Aboriginal communities face in getting reasonable and ongoing access to a range of food, drink and grocery items. I have experienced this myself in my own trips to outback Australia, where it is far easier to get access to deep-fried foods or high-sugar-content foods than it is to get access to fresh fruit. I pause to ask: if we are seriously contemplating that in my children's lifetime we could send a manned spacecraft to Mars, why can't we get fresh apples and fresh produce on the shelves of a community store at an affordable price in rural and remote Australia? We can do better as a nation.

I want to talk a bit about eye health. I was very proud to sit behind the Leader of the Opposition when he gave his reply, on behalf of the Labor Party, to the Closing the Gap statement. He gave some emphasis to the importance of eye health to the overall health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. He committed that a Labor government would fund $9.5 million to close the gap in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander vision loss. I think it is an indictment upon all of us that a disease such as trachoma, a disease that is associated with Third World nations and that has been eradicated in most nations that we like to compare ourselves with, is still afflicting people in remote communities throughout Australia. It is curable. It is beatable. It is something that can be done within two years if we apply the right programs and the right resources to it.

My friend the member for Fraser has talked about the importance of education to closing the gap. There has been some progress in this area but sadly not enough. Attendance rates and completion rates in higher education between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians are still lagging at a rate of about 10 per cent. We can do much better. That is why Labor is committed to putting in place specialist programs and providing schools—blind to the variety of school systems throughout the country—additional resources to assist in specialist programs which will help the completion rate, help the gaps in literacy and numeracy and ensure that we have culturally specific and appropriate education, particularly in some of those remote communities.

In the time that I have left, I want to say something about Labor's announcement for ensuring that we have justice targets in the annual Closing the gap report. It has been said in previous contributions that 25 out of 100 Australian prison inmates are Aboriginal Australians, compared to only three out of every 100 Australians. Indigenous Australians comprise three per cent of the population and 25 per cent of the prison population. In 2012, the rate of imprisonment of the non-Indigenous community was 124 per 100,000. The Indigenous offender rate is 19 times that at 2,302 per 100,000 people. We know the impact that incarceration can have over a lifetime on health, on learning, on family, on employment, on recidivism, on lifestyle and on the children of those who are incarcerated. I believe, and Labor values dictate, that we must have a justice target that aims to reduce the rate of Aboriginal imprisonment.

Having a target will focus our minds on diversion, on rehabilitation, on early intervention programs, on proper and decent schooling, on languages and on much more. There is much more that can be done, and the member for Fraser has pointed out that right across our prison populations, in every state in the country, we have seen an explosion in prison numbers. It is true; it is doubly true for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander programs. When we have people who are being locked up for seemingly petty—I do not say significant, but for relatively petty—crimes and we look at the cost of that incarceration we have to ask ourselves whether this is the best spend of Australian taxpayers' money. I would argue that it most certainly is not.

It is in the nation's interest that we review our approach—this 'tough on law and order' approach to so many of our social maladies—and start thinking about whether a better approach is needed. The campaign in New South Wales that has been run against bail laws is an example. Much more can be done, and I have not spoken about the importance of constitutional recognition. We are going to have a referendum next year, apparently, if the government is returned. I suspect many of us would be arguing that a referendum on constitutional recognition would be a far better spend of taxpayers' money.

Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I acknowledge the traditional owners of this land and pay my respects to elders, both past and present, and also indicate that the electorate of Chifley sits within the land of the Darug people. This area is one of the largest urban populations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, of any electorate in the country, and we are proud of that fact. Closing the gap acknowledges that improving opportunities for Indigenous Australians requires intensive and sustained effort from all levels of government, communities and individuals. It is an important framework that builds on the foundation of respect and unity provided by the 2008 national apology to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Earlier this month we marked the anniversary of this apology made by former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. These words are proudly hung in my electorate office in Mount Druitt. This significant speech was the first concrete step that moved the goal posts in the national conversation on reconciliation and closing the gap, but we always recognise there is much more work to be done to ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have the same simple rights and opportunities as any other Australian. The apology states:

A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.

The day we see this equality is the day we will finally close the gap. An Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander life deserves to be as healthy and prosperous as any other and deserves to be recognised in our nation's founding political and legal document. These words were echoed by the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, in his address to the House of Representatives, where he said:

Equality in our Constitution must be twinned with a real world of equal opportunity in housing, health, employment, education, justice and, perhaps the most basic right of all, empowering our First Australians with the right to grow old.

I am always appalled to hear that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people can expect to live up to 17 years less than a non-Indigenous Australian an d that they can experience high rates of preventable illness , such as heart disease, kidney disease and diabetes. This is not simply not right or just , especially in a country as prosperous and modern as Australia. The s e are huge concern s in the area I represent , along with the increase in out - of - home care , adult mortality , unemployment and incarceration , especially with females ; this is something that the local community has noticed more and more of.

This year's Closing the gap report saw little improvement. Although we saw positives s uch as child death rates declining by 33 per cent , again a lot more needs to be done. The life expectancy gap is still around 10 years . It is unacceptably wide and it is not on track . E ach year at least one new study , survey or report confirms that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are imprisoned at higher rates than any other racial or ethnic community in the developed world . While Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults only make up 2.3 per cent of the population , they account for nearly a third of all prisoners . F ederal Labor is committed to reaching the targets involved in C losing the G ap by closing the life expectancy gap within a generation , by 2031 ; halving the gap i n mortality rates for Indigenous children under five within a decade , by 2018 ; halv ing the gap in reading , writing and numer acy achievements for children within a decade ; h alv ing the gap for Indigenous students in year 12 attainment rates ; and halv ing the gap in employment outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians within a decade .

I share the disappointment felt by members of the Aboriginal community in my area that the f irst people remain fundamentally separated from our nation's c ore document. The Australian Constitution underpins our federal laws and system of government . W ritten over a century ago , it was shaped by the values and beliefs of that time. I cannot fathom a period in which respect for our land ' s f irst p eople would not be recognised. The nation's pre-eminent legal foundation stone should absolutely recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the f irst p eoples of Australia's lands and waters . W e are committed to constitutional recognition on this side of the H ouse . Labor will incorporate community consultation and recognition . T hat will be a process that will ensure we get these things done together.

The federal government needs to ensure that all services , support and funding are accessible to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities . Wh ile this C losing the G ap speech indicates the work that is being done , I certainly urge that more be done. In particular , when I think in this contribution of what needs to be done , I a m particularly mindful of the fact that , where we had tried to reform and revolutionise the method of school funding in this country , we thought very much , within the report that was brought down by David Gonski and his colleagues , of breaking down clusters of disadvantage and the way in which they entrench disadvantage , particularly in neighbourhoods in the e lectorate I represent. We tried to fundamentally rewrite school funding by focusing on need and , in particular, the need that would be experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and especially the Aboriginal communities in my area. The fact of the matter is that the Chifley electorate , as a result of th e failure of this government to honour the full funding of the Gonski plan , would have been $270 million worse of f. This failure would , in particular , have denied those communities of need in my area , particularly Aboriginal communities , the targeted support required to ensure a much more so lid foundation of education.

I stand here to say that one of the proudest moments I ha ve had in this term of parliament is to see the federal L e ader of the Opposition announce that we wou ld fund, in full, the Gonski r eforms. That single decision will ensure that , in particular , Aboriginal communities in my area , as with other students of great need in an education context , would receive the support and resources to ensu re that their full potential could be reached through an educational pathway that supports them. You cannot close the gap if you cannot tackle some of the fundamental flaws that exist in the way that school funding denies the ability of our schools to particularly focus and target support to students in need, especially Aboriginal students in our area. I have seen, time and again, that they have a lot of potential sitting there, but they need this to be expanded and to be brought out fully through a greater level of support.

If we are concerned about incarceration of Aboriginal people, we cannot have a situation where the legal aid that can be extended to people in need is cut. We have seen constant threats during this term of parliament by this government to legal aid funding in this country. We had to fight hard to ensure the restoration of funding to the Mount Druitt community legal aid service, in our area. How can you ensure that you will reduce incarceration if people in need are denied the legal support that might prevent them being incarcerated in the first place?

There are a lot of groups in our area that are working hard to ensure, particularly for Aboriginal communities within the electorate of Chifley, that they perform and live their lives to the fullest and best. I want to mention some, though I do not have the time to mention all. I think of the Butucarbin group; the Aboriginal Catholic Services Aboriginal Resource Centre, in Emerton; Marrin Weejali; the Baabayn Aboriginal Corporation; and the Mount Druitt and District Reconciliation Group. They are all, in their own ways, looking at the economic, social and cultural needs of communities in our area. I want to thank that small selection of groups for what they do in our area to make Aboriginal communities, particularly, better and fuller and for making a greater contribution more broadly.

I think it is important that, when we look at closing the gap, the targets that I have mentioned and the other ways in which we can support groups in our area be explored to their fullest. I certainly hope, and I think it is the sincere wish of many, that we see a greater improvement in these targets in years to come.

Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Closing the Gap report always delivers a feeling of disappointment to me and many members in this House. When I was first elected to this parliament, the first inquiry on a committee that I was involved in was into Indigenous health in Australia. It identified that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were sicker; they died earlier; and their access to health services and support in their communities was second to that of the rest of Australia. No matter where an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander lived in Australia, they were sicker than their counterparts and they died earlier than their counterparts. As much as I hate to say it, that is still the same. There have been some improvements in relation to infant mortality. There have been some improvements around the edge, but it is really sad to say that Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders are still sicker and have poorer access to the health care that other Australians have. That is one area where I think we are not delivering on the targets and the priorities that we should as a government and as a nation.

The proudest day that I have spent in this parliament was the day of the apology. It was a time when I felt that there was going to be renewed hope, and it was very, very special. Many members of this parliament had walked across the Harbour Bridge on Sorry Day, and it had culminated a little later in a different parliament with the apology to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. I saw that as a starting point: from there, maybe the recommendations of the report that the then Standing Committee on Family and Community Affairs had brought down, and some of the issues that it identified, would be acted upon, and maybe there would be real change. Unfortunately, it has not happened.

It is hard, and I will acknowledge that you cannot make changes overnight. But you can make some changes, and you can address systemic problems—and there are so many systemic problems in this area.

Bringing down a nice glossy report, looking at that report and trying to put the best possible spin on it is not really going to solve the problems, because Indigenous Australians are sicker; they have less money; they have a poorer level of education. The access to the things that other Australians take for granted is not available to them. They have a higher rate of imprisonment—and I was pleased to hear the Prime Minister mention that as something that needed to be addressed. The previous Prime Minister did not come to terms with that or did not address that or did not accept that as something that was of significance and importance. But we need to see what action takes place in that space. We need to hear more than words. We need to see some action.

It is true that there will only be real change when there are real partnerships and everybody is addressing the issue together and with a common goal. It is true that we need to do it in partnership with Indigenous Australians. We do not need to do it to them or for them; we need to do it with them. Some of the words that the Prime Minister used indicated an inclusiveness and a partnership, but we need more than words.

We need action, and we need to make sure that the referendum on Indigenous recognition actually happens. Labor is committed to the referendum in the first year of taking office, and I want to see some action by the Prime Minister. I want to see what he and his government are going to do in that space.

As to education, the member for Chifley's contribution around education generally was outstanding, but especially the point he made about the Leader of the Opposition committing to fully fund Gonski in the next term of parliament if elected. Prior to Christmas, I, like most members of parliament, visited my schools, and the one thing that every school emphasised to me was how important the funding has been—particularly in disadvantaged schools—and how important it had been in those schools in the Shortland electorate that have a high number of Indigenous students enrolled. If we are serious about addressing educational disadvantage in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and allowing them to enjoy equal access to and equity in education, then Gonski is a must. Without Gonski, they are not going to be offered the assistance and the extra programs that are needed to address that imbalance and inequity that exists.

The Closing the gap report is all about addressing inequity, injustice and inequality. It is about saying to Indigenous Australians, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, that they are important and that we believe the entrenched disadvantage that exists in our community needs to be addressed. It is much more than fine words. Words are good, but actions are better. The high imprisonment rate of Indigenous Australians cannot be considered in isolation from disadvantage and the lack of education—for instance, the number of people in our jails who have poor literacy skills is somewhere around the 80 per cent mark. Access to legal aid and legal assistance is also part of the pie. The one thing that the government can do straight away is restore funding so that Aboriginal legal services can provide the services they need to provide and go some way to addressing that inequity and injustice. Without proper legal representation, a person is much more likely to end up in jail.

The final thing I would like to touch on is that we need to address the fact that racism exists in our society. We need to recognise it, we need to address it and we need to make sure that our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are not subject to that racism. One of the ways we can address that is by joining together, working together and trying to close the gap that exists. It is not easy, it takes real effort and it takes actual funding, action and a government that is committed to doing it.

Andrew Giles (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Like other speakers, I acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people as the traditional owners of the land on which we are gathered now, and I pay my respects to elders past and present. I have been reflecting over the past few minutes that this is my third opportunity to participate in this debate on the closing the gap statements. It has been important to me to reflect on the purpose of this debate as part of our parliament and as a driver of progress towards equality and reconciliation in Australia. It has been a great privilege to sit in the parliament and be part of what are very significant setpiece debates involving what have been moving speeches from the Prime Minister and the opposition leader. They have been great setpieces of hope, reflecting a bipartisan commitment to closing the gap.

This bipartisanship is important if we are to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, but it is not something that we should prioritise over getting the policy settings right about really engaging with the problems and challenges before us. Similarly, I see this closing the gap process that we are participating in now, this debate on the Prime Minister's report, is necessary and important, but we should not regard it as a sufficient driver of change in marking our progress towards closing the various gaps and, indeed, in highlighting those areas where we have failed to make progress.

I will touch very briefly on the Aboriginal population of the electorate of Scullin, which has been small but is growing. It reflects changes in the distribution of Aboriginal people in Melbourne as people are moving more to the suburbs—in particular, to the northern suburbs. These changes have not yet been adequately in access to services and to community facilities. I take this opportunity to draw the attention of the House to the critical importance of ensuring that Aboriginal people right around Australia have access to community facilities that are not only owned and governed by community but also readily accessible to community members. This is important in our major cities, where the population has often been dispersed but where health centres and early childhood education centres have traditionally been located in the inner city.

In this regard, the significance of the Bubup Wilam children and family centre is absolutely critical to the Aboriginal communities that I am proud to represent in this place. This centre, unfortunately, has been under enormous pressure with the federal government's failure to carry on the national partnership which led to its foundation. That a centre such as this, which has been achieving extraordinary outcomes for Aboriginal young people and families, is under threat causes me great distress and is a great shame for all of us in Melbourne's northern suburbs. We have seen the impact of the programs led by community, driven by community and formed by culture have been making in the increasing school attendance, which is obviously a critical new Close The Gap target under this government. To see that at risk would be a terrible, terrible shame. I again take the opportunity to implore the government and the minister to reconsider their attitude to that national partnership.

I was pleased to be in the House for the contributions of the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition in the last sittings. I noted with pride and interest the Prime Minister's respectful use of language. Deputy Speaker Claydon, you will forgive me for not seeking to emulate the Prime Minister's linguistic talents in this place. I was concerned though by some aspects of his contribution to this debate. I am concerned in particular that the Prime Minister moves far too quickly when he speaks critically of closing the gap as being 'described as a problem to be solved—but more than anything it is an opportunity.' This is characteristic language of our Prime Minister, but in this case, in this context, it is far too glib, far too dismissive, of the challenges that face Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia today, challenges highlighted by the report he was speaking to and which I am addressing today. It was just too glib in tone. Of course we must celebrate successes, we must deliver and strive for hope through our contributions in this place, but we must also squarely acknowledge our failures—there are many. I will turn briefly to some elements of the report in this regard, shortly.

I will touch on the contribution in the main chamber of the Leader of the Opposition, who in a tremendous speech built on what I thought was a very significant contribution to some of these debates at the University of Melbourne some months ago, when he spoke on some of the great challenges of Indigenous justice, challenges which this report highlights. Indeed, the statistics are terribly shocking and bear repeating. If you are an Aboriginal man you are 15 times more likely to be imprisoned than a non-Aboriginal man. Half of all Aboriginal prisoners in custody are under the age of 30. The re-imprisonment rate for Aboriginal young people is higher than the school retention rate. In the last decade, while we have focused our attention on closing the gap, imprisonment rates have more than doubled, grown considerably faster than the crime rate, which goes to some of the complexities and challenges in our justice system. We see for Aboriginal women very, very troubling large increases in the prison rate. They make up one-third of our female prison population, despite being slightly into three per cent of the overall population. These are shocking and unacceptable statistics, and I commend the contribution of the Leader of the Opposition in this regard. I also draw attention to two other aspects of his speech, which I think he made very powerfully and which bear reflecting upon: his contributions on health and his call for us to focus on closing the political gap as a critical component of addressing the wider challenges of closing the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.

One other matter which should be mentioned but which has perhaps not got the attention it needs to, and was touched on by the member for Griffith earlier, is that of the great challenges in family and domestic violence, violence against women in Aboriginal communities, urban and regional. This is another area where we have failed to make the progress that people, women and children in particular, deserve.

On the whole, the 2016 Closing the gap report shows that we are failing on too many key indicators. Eight years after the first report we are on target to meet only two of the targets. This is unacceptable. The life expectancy gap is too wide. It is a challenge that we in this place, working with professionals and working with community, must face head-on.

I note and acknowledge that the report does show that we are on track in two important areas: child mortality to be halved by 2018, and to improve year 12 completion by 2020. However, while we are on target with the latter achievement, we are looking at only 60 per cent of Indigenous children finishing high school. In this regard, we can and must do much better.

The rate of Indigenous employment has fallen significantly. As we on the Labor side of politics can attest, having a job is the key for most of us having dignity. It is shameful that Indigenous employment today is lower than it was in the 1990s.

Responses on literacy and numeracy goals for children are also mixed. In this regard, it is important to reflect on Labor's policy alternative, the Your Child, Our Future policies. Needs-based funding clearly is the best way to address this gap. When this government took half a billion dollars out of the social services budget, clearly this has made these targets harder to meet. It is simply the case that we cannot cut our way to Closing the Gap.

This should be an area for bipartisanship but, again, bipartisanship is not a goal in and of itself; it is a driver to enduring progress. The targets of Closing the Gap, bipartisan targets, are ambitious, but without having ambitious targets we have no prospects of reaching parity. In order to continue the progress that we have made, we need to better engage in partnership with Indigenous communities. This involves listening to hard truths without flinching.

What we must do—going back to the contribution of the Leader of the Opposition—is to commit to a target to lower Indigenous incarceration. We know that any incarceration leads to increased likelihood of recidivism. In a time when Indigenous people make up 26 per cent of the prison population, this is an unacceptable statistic.

I am very proud of Labor's commitment to invest $9 million to close the gap in Indigenous vision loss. I note that Indigenous Australians are six times more likely to experience vision loss in cases that are treatable or preventable. This is a tiny investment for a very significant outcome.

Finally, as others have spoken about, we do need to recognise the first Australians in our Constitution. This is important symbolically and practically. Prime Minister Rudd began the process of healing when he apologised to the stolen generations. This is the next step. It is the chance to continue the process of eliminating racism in Australia and to complete our Constitution—the one three-word slogan of the former Prime Minister I agree with and echo in closing my contribution on responding to the great challenge posed by this Closing the gap report. I hope that next year we will have more progress based on sounder policies and greater investments to show for our efforts.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I was on a government committee and it went up to the Torres Strait, and I did not want to go back there, because I had seen paradise and knew what I was going to see afterwards would be less than what I witnessed in those days. The meetings up there started with the singing of a hymn and the acknowledgement of the coming of the light—the coming of Christianity, which was brought by bike priests in the Anglican Church. Coming out of Vanuatu, they brought Christianity to the Torres Strait.

I think the best way is to quote the late Joey Mosby—who was not a fan of mine when I was minister. He was very much looked after by the department before I came along and introduced democracy, for the sake of a better word, and private ownership, and he was very hostile because he was getting a dream run before that. But Joey got up and he said, 'Bobby'—I do not think he had ever called me that before—'they are murdering our people.' He screamed at the top of his voice, 'They are murdering our people.' Every person in this place: when you go to bed tonight and you examine your conscience and you speak to the good Lord, ask yourself what you have contributed to stop what is going on in the Torres Strait. They have put 60 full-time employees in to close down all of the market gardens. I exaggerate; there are market gardens still up there. But the argument is, 'Oh, we have to close down all these farms because otherwise disease will get into the mainland.' Oh, so, we starve to death in the Torres Strait—I identify as a first Australian, so please excuse me for saying 'we'—because disease might get into Australia.'

To those ignoramuses who run this country: for heaven's bloody sake! The canoes have been going backwards and forwards, from New Guinea to islands to the mainland and back, for 40,000 years. Any disease that was going to come in would have come in over that 40,000 year period. There are good reasons why disease will not be carried that way. To the same people that did that we said, 'There are only two ways in from New Guinea into the Torres Strait through to Australia, and they are the Horn Island Airport and the Jardine Ferry. Put an inspector at Horn Island and the Jardine Ferry.' But they did not put an inspector at Horn Island and the Jardine Ferry. They had 60 full-time employees go out there and close down the market gardens.

As the minister I was probably up there at least once, or maybe twice, a month for a period of something like seven years, and I cannot remember ever having a meal up there that was not totally local produce: taros, yams, bananas, mangoes—whatever was in season. And, of course, most of all, there was seafood: dugongs, turtles, fish and crayfish—crayfish mainly. They were magnificent meals—all local produce and all fresh fruit and vegetables. With the closing of the market gardens, one-seventh of the space in one of the supermarkets—and I measured it; I paced it out—was rice. This is a third-world country. These people are dying of malnutrition. Their diabetes rates are 100 times higher than the average for Australia. What are we doing about it?

Mabo was supposed to have delivered private ownership to us, but we cannot get a title deed. There is no such thing as a title deed. If you want the answers as to why—and I have heard some grovelling drivel about being sorry and having treaties and everything else—why don't you just simply give the people the right to own a piece of land? Give to us the right to own a piece of land.

I will give a very specific example. I will not use the gentleman's name without his permission, but I will just say his name is Tony. He is an outstanding footballer and a bloke I know really well. He dropped in to see me. He said, 'Bob, I've got one of those 50,000 acre blocks.' I said, 'How's it going, mate?' He said, 'I can't get any money to get cattle.' I said, 'Have you been to see the banks?' He said, 'Of course I have.' He has trucks working with one of the mines. He had a reasonable quid rolling in. His complexion is very dark. He is very much 100 per cent an Aboriginal person—a First Australian. I said, 'Have you been to the banks?' and he said, 'Yep. They need security. They want a mortgage.' I said, 'Have you been to see the lands department?' He said, 'Of course I've been to see the lands department.' I said, 'What did they say?' He said, 'There is no such thing as title deed on blackfella land,' which there is not. He said, 'What about your legislation?' I said, 'That was overturned and abolished by the incoming Labor government in 1991.' It was abolished on a promise that, 'We will give you even better title deeds.' That was 1991. It is now the year of our lord 2016.

When the Liberals went in they said, 'We're going to give you good title deeds. We're going to overthrow the Labor legislation and we're going to give you good title deeds.' Everyone was telling us that they were going to give us good title deeds.

There were nearly 800 title deeds issued by the great and famous Eric Laws and the late Lester Rosendale—two blokes of First Australian descent from community areas themselves. They issued something like 800 title deeds in the space of 3½ to four years. In the 25 years or so since 1991, I doubt whether there have been a dozen title deeds issued.

You cannot get any money to have a service station. You cannot get any money to have a supermarket. You cannot get any money to have a takeaway food place. You cannot get any money to do anything, because you have not got title deed. It is the building block of an economy, and we—the First Australians—are told we are supposed to own 20 per cent of Australia. We do not own anything. We cannot get a title deed to an acre of land.

Each government has come up with some sort of process. The process is so complicated that no-one could possibly fulfil it in a lifetime, and consequently no-one has. So there were 800 in the space of about 3½ years when us blackfellas were running the thing. There were 800 title deeds that went out. When the white fellas—you people—were running the thing, you could not get two dozen out in the space of 25 years, because you do not care about us. You do not care that the diabetes rates are 100 times higher than the average for Australia. The last speaker went through the other horrific statistics.

I tell you: if the rest of the world find out what is going on here, there will be shock, horror and revulsion by the rest of the world. I am not hesitating to say these things, and I would like to speak a lot more strongly. But some of the damage to my country could be colossal if what is really going on here gets out. No-one on earth now is deprived of the right to have a title deed. In China, you can get a title deed. You can go in and apply for a title deed.

I left university at 23 years of age—or whatever it was—to float my own mining company. I took out 23 leases and I floated a company. I was in the process of floating a company when the mining collapse came. I would get $6 million for those leases. I will tell you how complicated it was to take out a lease: you got a block of wood, you carved your initials on it—'RCK,' in my case—you put it on the ground, got out a compass, and said, 'In that direction, 200 metres; in that direction, 400 metres; in that direction, 200 metres,' and you went in and filled out a form which took you about 20 minutes at the local magistrate's office, which also doubled as the mining warden's court. It took me about 20 minutes and it cost me 40 bucks per lease. Why can't that be done here? Six million dollars worth of value could be created by me going in, filling out a form and putting a peg in the ground, which was exactly the same as BHP did to take a mining lease up. Whether it was little tiny nobody Bobby Katter or a big great giant, it did not matter. Millions of dollars were created by simply putting a peg in the ground. For those of you who know the history of Australia, we are from goldmining. All of us that were here before the war are from goldminers, convicts or First Australians in our background. That was the way it was done all the way up until about 25 years ago.

Let me be more specific still. At Pormpuraaw, a brilliant young bloke called Lindsay Kimber went in there. He did no work himself; it was all First Australians. He provided profit incentive, ownership incentive, title deeds et cetera. We mustered 263 head of cattle, the most ever to muster down there. Lindsay Kimber and his team there, Jackson Shortjoe and Eddie Holroyd—I have a big picture of them on my wall in my office—mustered 6,000 in 2½ years. So you provide the incentive of private ownership and commercial operations, and these people can get the cattle in—don't you worry about that. Put them in a saddle, and they know what they are doing. Put them in a yard, and they know what they are doing. We can do that job. There were 12,500 on Aurukun, the community area north of Pormpuraaw, and 12,000 south.

Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Member for Kennedy, your time is running out.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

So $30 million a year should have been coming in. It is not coming in. There are virtually no cattle there now at all.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to speak on this very important issue before the House. I suggest that each year, as we annually hear the report on the Closing the Gap progress—or, sadly, lack of progress in too many of the targets—it is an opportunity for each of us to take our responsibility up and to participate in this chamber on those matters. I want to recognise firstly, in my contribution, the original inhabitants and custodians of the land on which we meet today and to pay my respects to their elders past and present, to pay my great respect to the resilience of our first people and to also acknowledge the great contribution that they make to the Closing the gap report and to the consideration of it as we go forward.

I want to cover just three areas of this year's Closing the gap report. There are many significant issues for us to confront in it, but I would like to particularly focus, firstly, on education and employment—obviously, with my shadow portfolio of vocational education, it is an issue that I watch closely and take a great interest in—secondly, on the issue of constitutional recognition and, thirdly, on the issue of the justice system and incarceration rates.

The Closing the gap: Prime Minister's report 2016 makes it very clear that postsecondary education—in fact all the stages of education, but postsecondary education in particular—is intrinsically linked with Indigenous opportunities for employment. In fact, the report tells us that Indigenous graduates have strong employment outcomes. In 2014, around 77 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander graduates were in full-time employment following completion of their award, compared with 68.1 per cent of all graduates, so there is an even stronger link for Indigenous people between completing a postsecondary qualification and achieving employment. In particular, I want to draw the House's attention to the fact that in 2014, 55 per cent of all higher education students in Australia were female, but among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, 66 per cent were female. This contrasts with the Indigenous participation in vocational education and training, where the majority of Indigenous students were male—that is, 55 per cent.

That comes from the NCVER report. If we look at that report in some more detail—if people are interested, it is Equity groups in total VET students and courses 2014, their most recent publication—it tells us that in 2014, there were 146,500 Indigenous students. They made of 3.7 per cent of all students. That has been an improving outcome. It had a slight dip in 2013, but over the years the participation rate of Indigenous students in vocational education and training has sustained. There is a worry in the figures. The success rate, if you like, which is called the 'subject load pass rate', was 83.4 per cent for all students in the sector. However, for Indigenous students it was 74.4 per cent. That in particular indicates, I have to report to the House, the lowest completion rate. Students with a disability were slightly higher at 74.6 per cent. Students from a non-English-speaking background were 80.7, and students from rural and remote localities were 85.6. So whilst we have sustained the participation rates, we really need to focus on improving the success and completion rates for Indigenous students.

The reason for that is clear from the 'closing the gap' report itself—that that would directly indicate the success and opportunity for Indigenous Australians to get employment, and we all know that employment is one of the key factors for addressing broader disadvantage, including many other areas such as health. The higher a person's educational attainment, the greater their connection to the workforce, then all the other factors show improvements as well, so it is an area where I think we have to give a great deal of focus and attention. I do want to just mention the factors many of you in this place would know. Sadly, there were quite a number of media reports last year about some of the less-ethical private providers in the vocational sector who were out in Indigenous communities particularly targeting Indigenous people to sign up for diploma-level courses that were inappropriate to their needs and left them with very large debts. They were using really unscrupulous inducements to get people to sign up. I am pleased that significant changes have been made by the government in their requirements for those sorts of courses, and we have been happy to support them. But we have to remain vigilant, because these sorts of sharks find a new way to swim around the new regulations, and they target the most disadvantaged.

I also wanted to acknowledge the significant importance of constitutional recognition. There is a chapter in the report on that. It makes it very clear that part of the 'closing the gap' effort has to be achieving constitutional recognition for our first Australians. As the Leader of the Opposition said:

Including the first members of our Australian family on our national birth certificate should be the shared goal of all Australians.

Indeed it is. I think that it is very important. I commend the proposal first put forward by former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, which Labor supports, that May 2017, being the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum, would be a very appropriate time in which to hold the referendum for a national vote of recognition. I am pleased that Bill Shorten, the leader of the Labor Party, has indicated that, if elected, a Labor government would deliver a referendum in that time frame. It is a really important step that we should also pursue.

Finally, in the few minutes left to me, I want to make the point that there is a continuing tragic story in the justice system for Indigenous people. To be honest, I first became deeply aware of it when I worked in the juvenile justice system in New South Wales with an alternate program, which was the Youth Justice Group Conferencing Program. We had a lot of Indigenous young people go through that program. It remains the case, as the Australian Institute of Criminology points out, that Indigenous Australians experience contact with all levels of the criminal justice system as both offenders and victims at much higher rates than non-Indigenous Australians. They are very overrepresented in prison populations. The imprisonment rate is around 12 times that of the rest of the Australian population. Despite making up less than three per cent of the overall Australian population, our Indigenous brothers and sisters make up 40 per cent of those imprisoned for assault offences. Rates of overrepresentation are even higher in juvenile detention. A 10- to 17-year-old Indigenous person is 24 times more likely to be in detention than a non-Indigenous young person of the same age. That is a tragedy. We know that, as people become more caught up in the justice system, their opportunities for breaking out of that cycle become much more difficult.

Bill Shorten, in his contribution, made an important commitment for Labor in terms of addressing this issue. He made the point that, at the first COAG meeting under a Labor government, the first item on the agenda will be setting new targets to close the gap in justice—tackling the appalling incarceration rate amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and focusing on preventing crime, reducing violence and victimisation, and boosting community safety, not just in remote communities but in our cities, our suburbs and our regional towns. The scourge of violence is something that is on all our minds when we look at all of our communities, but Indigenous people being caught as either perpetrators or victims has become a cycle that must be broken. It should be taken up, as the Leader of the Opposition has indicated, with specific targets and specific efforts to address it, in particular to save another generation of young people from either suffering from violence or being part of the cycle of violence. I commend the Closing the Gap report to everybody for good and close examination.

Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mick Gooda was being extremely kind when he commented, 'We are heading in the right direction.' In a country where in 1875 Inspector Foelsche could speak of 'going out on nigger hunts' and in South Australia the Premier's policy in 1878 until 1910 was to shoot Indigenous Australians rather than to arrest them and try them, it is understandable that we have a long way to go. I certainly recognise some of the positive stories in this year's Closing the Gap report: Aboriginal health workers in northern Queensland with the Baby One Program, Jericka Mungatopi from the Tiwi Islands, Ryan D'Souza in Western Australia with his completion of certificate III in civil construction et cetera. There are certainly indications of individuals who are succeeding and, on some fronts, such as attendance at school, there are positive signs. However, overall, one must be alarmed at the failure to really make decisive progress. For all the apologies in the world, there needs to be, as the report indicated, a national commitment and a resolve across Indigenous, Pacific and mainstream programs.

I will go to some of the figures without reciting the whole document. There is the proportion of babies born to Indigenous mothers. The low birth rate has remained around 12 per cent over the period of 2003 to 2013. Regarding the situation over the long term, there have been improvements in the apparent retention rates of year 12, but with the unemployment situation, whilst there has been a decline nationally in employment for everyone, the decline for the Indigenous community has been disastrous.

Today I want to specifically concentrate on incarceration. The situation in this country is quite alarming: Indigenous Australians constituted 28 per cent of prisoners in the nation in 2015; 30 per cent of all incarcerated women in Australia were Aboriginals in 2010; 48 per cent of juveniles in custody are Indigenous; and 58.6 per cent is the percentage by which imprisonment rates increased for Aboriginal women between 2000 and 2010. In the Northern Territory we are seeing some of the realities as to why people are incarcerated, get a record and then face the obvious outcomes of incarceration with regard to mental health, isolation from community, health issues et cetera. In large parts of the Northern Territory you cannot locally get a driver's licence. Trainers are very scarce. The language tests are in a language which is not very available in the community. So we get into a situation where unlicensed people are driving uninsured and unregistered cars—the trifecta on court lists—and people do end up in jail.

There are mandatory sentences. We have a situation where legal representation is abysmal, and this government stands indicted with regard to the actual retraction of the right of representation. We read about this in the United States, where people are on capital charges and facing death because of very poor legal representation, with legal representatives sleeping in the courts, totally unable to handle their cases. This is happening in our country. We have a situation where there is no attempt to warn people or to basically understand that in many of these outgoing settlements the dangers of actual accidents et cetera are extremely minimal.

We also have a situation in the Northern Territory where the government is increasingly moving towards contributions from residents of very poor communities to keep programs going. The Northern Territory is an outcome of this. We have a situation where it is costing $100,000 to keep people in jail and yet the government thinks the solutions to the world's problems are to construct a 1,400-person prison in Darwin, to expedite the construction of the Alice Springs prison for 500, and to institute a work camp at Tennant Creek. There is no training and no rehabilitation.

Is it any wonder that on the national front we have these figures where, even compared to the internationally acknowledged problems of black Americans, the actual overall rate is alarming? The figures here show that in Western Australia, for instance, the rate of Indigenous incarceration is 3,700 per 100,000. In Australia as a whole it is 1,900 per 100,000. In the Northern Territory it is 843 per 100,000. That compares with, for instance, the United States overall rate of 716. New Zealand, on our door, is 192, and the United Kingdom is 148. So this is a situation where those rates are, by any international comparison, of grave concern.

We must face up to the interrelationship of these outcomes with other situations in this country. We have the issue of police behaviour. People are thrown into prison basically because of the use of the f-word or the c-word, and if you look at the rates in which people are convicted for those offences there is a very stark race difference with regard to the way those offences are utilised.

As I said, a lack of language skills is an issue: Aboriginal people are sentenced to jail without fully understanding the court processes. In this country, this multicultural society, we even have an interpreting service for a language spoken by approximately 200 people in New Caledonia, and yet we cannot ensure that Indigenous Australians have the same right in the court system.

Regarding reoffending, across Australia about 70 per cent of prisoners—Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal—are reoffenders and 38 per cent are back in prison in two years. With that actual first charging over minimal matters—often, as I say, in the areas of car offences, driving licences et cetera—we have to ask ourselves whether that is really of any value to the society in the long term.

Of course it is not only the very serious matter of the incarceration rates; it goes across a broad plethora of issues. School attendance rates, despite improvements, are still an alarming difference. The 33 per cent decline in infant mortality from 1998 to 2014 has not been balanced in real gains in life expectancy. In actual fact the gain for men was only 0.8 years from 2006 and for women only 0.1. We are not on track to close the gap by 2031.

Speaking of the incarceration rate and the very serious problems there, I refer to the document A brighter tomorrow by Amnesty International. This details the need for action on many fronts: take immediate steps to become a party to the Third Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child; ensure that ongoing funding is made available so that the managing and coordinating role played by the NATSILS can continue; work with state and territory governments to quantify the level of unmet legal need currently experienced by Indigenous young people and their families; immediately withdraw the reservation to article 37(c) on the Convention on the Rights of the Child; and ratify the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture. All of these are matters that need to be dealt with in moving against this very serious problem.

The overall picture is indeed of some grave concern. In summary, we can each year come back and say that on one or two criteria there was a minimal gain, that there has been improvement, but overall it is extremely depressing. We know that some of the goals have had to be abandoned on the education front over this period of time. I certainly endorse the recognition that has been called for by the opposition but certainly on a broader front this does require, as we said, a national effort. In a society which has historically been very much at the forefront of marginalisation of First Nation peoples much remains to be done.

Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution to this year's closing the gap report, which was presented to the Australian parliament by the Prime Minister about two weeks ago. Australia can never be the country it wants to be—a strong country, a truly multicultural country, a cohesive country—until we address this extraordinary national shame of the gap in life chances between Indigenous Australians and the rest of this country. It is simply not possible for us ever to reach that goal that so many Australians have for this country.

It is great to make a contribution to closing the gap because this policy itself—just the very act of saying that we are not going to stand still and we are not going to allow these gaps to continue—is a really important thing that the Australian government has done. It is absolutely extraordinary to think that before Kevin Rudd was Prime Minister that no Australian Prime Minister had stood up before and said we must close this gap, we are going to set targets and we are going to measure our progress so we can keep ourselves honest on this. I want to say to the Abbott and Turnbull governments: for all of the faults and flaws in their Indigenous policy, I am very grateful that they have maintained these closing the gap targets because, without them, this debate would not be happening in the chamber right now, Australians would not have the information that we have today about the direness of some of the statistics that came through in this report and, most importantly, the parliament would not be coming together to discuss this.

One thing that really bothers me as a member of parliament is that, despite the professed keenness and interest from many members of parliament from all sides of politics on this issue, it is something we hardly ever discuss in the national parliament. It is a real source of pride for me to see that the closing the gap statement just of itself requires the Prime Minister of this country and the opposition leader of this country to stand before the Australian people and to take some ownership and responsibility of the many problems we have in this area.

What we learnt in the close the gap speech for this year was sobering again, and it has been sobering every year that these targets have been in place. I want to start by talking about some of the things that are positive in the report and then some of the policy issues here because too much in Indigenous policy we dwell on what a terrible problem this is without talking about the things that we can do about it—and there are lots of things we can do about it.

Firstly, it was really terrific to see that Australia is on track to meet two of the seven major Closing the Gap targets. The first of those is child mortality—such an important one. All we are saying here is that Indigenous babies should have the same chance of getting to their first birthday as babies who were born of families of different origin. It is a pretty straightforward thing and I am so pleased to see that we are progressing on that gap. In year 12 attainment, we see the same thing. We are seeing slow progress, for sure, but we are making gains there.

But that is really the best of it because, when we look to the other areas of Indigenous disadvantage, we see that we are just not making progress towards those targets. Some may describe them as ambitious; I would not. Halving the gap in life expectancy between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians should not be too much to ask, but it seems that is too much to ask of our policy environment today. When we look at really fundamental things—the access Indigenous children have to early learning; the access that Indigenous people have to the health services that they need to maintain a good life expectancy—one thing that I know is quite important to all sides of politics is that we are not making the progress we want in Indigenous employment. I think that most people agree that the pathway to a lot of other improvements in the lives of Indigenous people is to make sure that Indigenous Australians have equal access to jobs—and today we are failing on that.

One of the things that Labor has tried to highlight in the Closing the Gap speeches over the last two years has been the importance of including a justice target in the Closing the Gap targets. What that really means is that we see shocking differences in the rates of incarceration of Indigenous Australians and non-Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians represent around three per cent of the Australian population, but they represent 27 per cent of our prison population. It gets even more gutting because half of those Indigenous people who are in jail today are under the age of 30. This is shocking, and it is related to every other of these indicators. How can we get the life expectancy outcomes that we want when there are so many Indigenous young people wasting years of their lives in jail? It is simply not good enough. One of the things that Labor has proposed in response to this very clear need for us to introduce a new target is just to say, 'Let's include it in Closing the Gap so it's something that we can track and monitor with the same vigilance that we look at these other key areas like life expectancy and child mortality.'

There are some other really important things that Labor wants to do in this area. One of the things I was really proud to hear Bill Shorten, the Leader of the Opposition, announce during the Closing the Gap speeches was that there will be an additional $9 million committed to trachoma treatment for Indigenous Australians. We know that Indigenous people, on top of all these other issues, are six times more likely to be blind than Australians who come from other backgrounds. It is not good enough, and treatment for eye disease needs money—it is actually that fundamental. We need doctors to be funded to go out to these communities and help Indigenous people get the eye services that they need. Something else that I was really proud of was to hear the opposition leader announce that Labor has set down a target date for the referendum which will consider whether there should be constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians. I am hugely in favour of this. I have spent some time living in north-east Arnhem Land and quite a lot of time working in Indigenous communities, and, despite seeing the very practical nature of the problems faced by people in those communities, I do believe that these big-picture reconciliation things really matter. We cannot fix more than 200 years of violence and dispossession just through improvements to government services. There is a deep wound at the heart of this relationship and it is not going to be fixed unless we see some real giving on the part of other Australians and some real sympathy and empathy in how we talk about Indigenous people and how we acknowledge them as our First Australians. So I am really pleased to see that the opposition leader is putting his money where his mouth is, in a sense, and saying that we are going to work towards a date here, because we have been talking about constitutional recognition in this country for a long time and it is time to do something about it.

I want to move away from Labor policy a little and just talk about some of the things that I think are really important in this area and that I hope to work on in the time that I am a member of parliament. One of the things I really believe, having worked with Indigenous communities, is that we must help Indigenous Australians have their own voice in this national conversation. One of the things that really devastate me is the fact that ATSIC—Indigenous self-government—was shut down quite a long time ago, and nothing has been built in its place. What we have now is three, four or five per cent of our population who are dispersed with such different interests and such different life experiences all over the country but who have no voice. What we see happening as a result is that politicians can pick Indigenous leaders who are saying the things that they want to hear and anoint them as Indigenous leaders. That is not good enough. I think that Indigenous people need their own voice and have a right to their own democracy, and I believe that means creating a structure that is similar to ATSIC.

We see problems with democracy in lots of other parts of our country. Mr Deputy Speaker Conroy, I know that in your state of New South Wales we have seen a few issues over recent years. But we do not shut down democracy. We do not take away people's right to be represented. I am really shocked that that has been allowed to happen to Indigenous Australians. We cannot solve this problem without them being our true partners in this discussion.

I want to briefly mention the important role of Indigenous girls and women in this discussion. One of the things that are guiding principles of our international development policy is that we invest in women and girls overseas because women and girls are shown to use the additional resources they have to invest in the health and welfare of their children, and that grows their own community in a really positive way. Yet we have not done the same thing for Indigenous women and girls. This is an obvious place for us to improve. I am pleased to see that Labor is supporting the Stars Foundation program, which is effectively like the Clontarf program but is for women and girls. It is doing great things up in Darwin, and I really want to see that rolled out more across the country.

I want to say one more thing to ordinary Australians about this problem: government is not going to solve this problem unless you work with us to express your outrage and your utter unwillingness to accept the situation as it is today. Sometimes people in this parliament say: 'Don't politicise Aboriginal issues. Don't politicise Indigenous issues.' Well, that is just ridiculous. This is a political problem. This is about who has power and resources in our community. Until the majority of Australians are willing to stand up with one voice and say, 'We have to do better; we must do better,' this problem is not going to get resolved. I want to encourage Australians to say, with me, that this is not good enough. I hope to see something better in next year's Closing the Gap speech.

Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Manufacturing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I begin my remarks on this statement by acknowledging a person who devoted her life to closing the gap for Indigenous Australians. I refer to Josephine Marjorie Agius, who passed away on 30 December 2015, aged 81. More widely known as Auntie Josie, she devoted almost all of her life to closing the gap by lifting health and education standards amongst Aboriginal people throughout South Australia and the Northern Territory. She worked in schools across the Adelaide metropolitan area, teaching the Kaurna language and Indigenous culture. She also worked in the health sector. In more recent years, she was quite often the smiling face that welcomed people to country at community events. Auntie Josie was farewelled by what I estimated to be thousands of people who came from across South Australia and gathered at the Port Adelaide Football Club to show their respects when she was farewelled at the service held for her. I think that was a fitting tribute to a person who not only was a much loved South Australian and a wonderful person in her own right but had done so much to close the gap, the very issue that we are talking about today. I knew Auntie Josie well. She attended many functions which I hosted when I was the Mayor of the City of Salisbury, and I know just how passionate she was in working for the people of her own heritage and culture.

It seems almost contradictory that, in such an advanced nation with one of the highest life expectancies, one of the best health systems and one of the best education systems, we can simultaneously have, after decades of effort, so much disadvantage across one sector of this country. Whether it is education, employment, health, crime rates, incarceration or drug and alcohol abuse, and perhaps other measurable statistics, there is no question at all that we have failed as a nation when it comes to the Indigenous people of Australia.

I also accept that when we look at all those statistics, quite often if we could address one—if we could resolve one—then it would have an important flow-on effect to many of the others. By fixing one problem we can perhaps fix a whole range of them. Again, we have not had that much success. I have quite often asked the question, 'why?' I ask that as someone who actually understands the Indigenous people pretty well. I have come up with some conclusions which I think need to be considered when we look at what the solutions are, what the strategies are that we need to adopt. I accept that many Indigenous people live in outlying, remote, rural areas, but I also accept that there are non-Indigenous people who live in those same regions who do not suffer the same level of disadvantage. I also accept that there are a lot of Indigenous people who live in metropolitan parts of Australia who equally suffer much greater disadvantage to their non-Indigenous counterparts. It is not just a question of remoteness, and being isolated and the like.

I have come up with some views which I think need to be factored in. Firstly, I note that the injustice that was perpetrated against the Indigenous people for almost 200 years—right through to 1967, and even beyond, until land rights in 1992—much of that injustice still causes resentment within many Indigenous people and we need to find a way of overcoming that. Secondly, I also accept that there are vast cultural differences between Indigenous and Western cultures. We cannot expect that people of one culture will necessarily and automatically embrace the values of another culture. That will take time and needs to be considered. Thirdly, I have noticed what I call 'the manifestation of political correctness', which I believe at times inhibits open and honest conversation about the problems, their causes and possible solutions. Maybe we need to be a bit more honest and truthful about what needs to be done and what the real problems are.

When it comes to values, I also note that we have a society driven by what I call 'the worship of wealth', which is in stark contrast to the values of the Indigenous people, where ownership of material wealth was not an issue at all—it was non-existent. Fifthly, there are unique characteristics between the Indigenous people right across this country, just as there are unique differences in the cultures of people in India, Italy and in most countries of Europe if you travel across the nation. So too, is the case with the Indigenous people. There is not one solution that fits all of the Indigenous cultures either and we need to understand that. Sixthly, what I see as one of the most difficult problems—and it has been for years—is this relationship between state and federal governments and the responsibility as to who is responsible for what services, what programs and so on.

It is not surprising that we have seen little progress in closing the gap. In fact, I sometimes wonder whether the progress that has been made would not have equally been made with or without a particular policy—simply through the passing of time and the changes that we see in society in a more general way. I do not know—none of us ever will—but it seems that the progress we have made has not been sufficient and commensurate with the effort that has been put in for many, many years. I can well recall in the 70s, when the Whitlam government came to office, Indigenous issues were elevated in terms of their importance and commitments were made in a way that they had never been made before—and we are now talking 40-odd years ago. We still have so much to do, given the efforts that have been committed to over those last 40 years.

It is my view that the best solutions and the most effective solutions will come from the Indigenous people themselves. When I look back at the history and I look at people like William Cooper, who in 1934 led the Aboriginal people in the formation of the Australian Aborigines' League. That movement exists today and we recognise it each year as NAIDOC Week. William Cooper was a standout Indigenous person of the time. We then go to Vincent Lingiari and the Wave Hill Station walk-off. Again, initiated by an Indigenous person. Later, when Vincent Lingiari had the red sand poured into his hand by Gough Whitlam, it was another wrong being undone and the recognition of ownership of country by the Indigenous people. That was later upheld by the High Court, in 1992, with the Mabo decision. Again, Eddie Mabo drove that. The point I am making is that the Indigenous people have very capable leaders amongst them, and we need to listen to what they have to say.

In fact, when I look at some of the standout Indigenous people of this country, over the last couple of hundred years, the list is endless. They have excelled not just in sport, which quite often people talk about, but also in politics, the professions, business and the arts. We need to recognise their abilities and understanding of their own culture and take note of what it is they believe we ought to do.

The other point I want to quickly make is this: I have noticed that over the years there have been programs initiated and, then, they have stopped. We have just heard about the council that was abandoned by the previous government or one of the earlier governments. We cannot ever be in a position to properly evaluate a program if we do not give it a chance to run its full length. This idea of making programs and funding available and, then, cutting them serves no purpose whatsoever and, quite frankly, wastes resources. We need to allow programs to run their course. We also need to ensure that programs are carried out and developed in consultation with the Indigenous community that will be directly affected by them. Some of those programs need to be tailor-made for the particular communities we are trying to deal with.

We have, effectively, overcome—in the last 50 years, in particular—previous legal discriminations and barriers. I accept that. But we still have to overcome the most difficult barrier: the change in mindset required, by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, for working towards solutions to the problems we read about in the Closing the gap reports each year. Each report is important—if nothing else, it keeps the focus and discussion going—but is, in itself, not the answer. The answer is to work with the Indigenous communities of Australia and see how we can as a nation best address the problems that should not exist.

Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would certainly like to begin tonight by acknowledging the traditional owners of this place, the Ngambri and Ngunnawal peoples, and pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and to their future leaders. I also want to acknowledge the traditional owners of my hometown, Newcastle, and the wider electorate, the Awabakal, Worimi and Wonnarua peoples, and pay tribute to their extraordinary resilience in the face of more than 200 years of dispossession and injustice.

The annual Prime Minister's report on closing the gap and the Australian parliament's acknowledgement of our progress is, as many speakers have pointed out, a symbolic yet extremely important reminder, in this parliament, of the collective effort and shared responsibility that is required if we are to seriously redress the entrenched inequality faced by Australia's first peoples.

There are a number of achievements worth noting, and I will do so in this speech, but it is important at the outset to acknowledge that there are serious challenges requiring our sustained commitment and resources—if this parliament is serious about making inroads into closing the gap. This year's Closing the gap report provided an updated snapshot of the inequality that remains for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. There were some bright spots in the report, as has been noticed, but it is clear that we really do have a long way to go in so many of the targets we have set ourselves as important markers for closing the gap.

The report shows some progress in the target, for example, to halve the gap in child mortality by 2018. We are on track to meet that target. Since 1998 Indigenous child mortality rates have declined and the gap is narrowing. In part, this is due to the greater proportion of Indigenous mothers attending antenatal care and to reduced rates of smoking during pregnancy. To continue to make progress, however, and meet that target, we must continue to ensure that the high-quality prenatal and postnatal care and education programs that have been available to parents and carers continue to be in existence. That will help those families and those kids to thrive.

The target to halve the gap for Indigenous Australians aged 20 to 24 in year 12 attainment or equivalent by 2020 is also on track to be met. The attainment rate was improved from the 32 per cent in the late 1990s—a truly appalling rate—to 60 per cent in 2014. New data is due to be released in April this year, which will give a greater and more accurate indication of the progress that has been made in this area.

However, of the seven Closing the Gap targets, these are the only two targets that are on track to being met. I think it is worth reminding ourselves in this House that meeting those targets or being on track to meeting those targets does not mean that we have addressed social inequality. What it means is that we have managed to reduce its occurrence by half. The targets, when eventually reached, are really about us only getting to the halfway point. We still have an enormous road to travel, even meeting these targets.

As I said earlier, the report really does highlight the many other areas of challenges that remain. We have made little progress in really key areas like education, life expectancy and employment outcomes. On the target to halve the gap in reading and numeracy for Indigenous students by 2018, across eight measurable areas in years 3, 5, 7 and 9, just four have had national standards being met. The increase in school attendance rates has now stagnated, with just a 0.2 per cent increase from 2014 to 2015, with the current rate of 83.7 per cent still well below the non-Indigenous student attendance rate of 93.1 per cent.

In regard to life expectancy, we are not on track to meet the target in any way, shape or form. The gap of 10.6 years for males and 9.5 years for females still exists, and accelerated progress is absolutely essential if we are to go anywhere near meeting this target that we have set for ourselves.

Finally, when it comes to those employment outcomes, no improvement has been made towards those targets since 2008. That is utterly shameful. Those of us on this side of the House understand fully the dignity that is afforded to people through work, and it is shameful that as a nation we cannot meet those targets for employment for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

The brutal reality is that in Australia today an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person is still likely to die younger, receive less education and indeed, as I said, find it much more difficult to find work. Clearly, greater effort is required for us to improve this situation. As many speakers before me have noted with distress, we have failed to meet these targets year after year after year. I utterly concur with the comments of the member for Hotham earlier when she said we cannot underestimate the power of insisting that our Prime Minister and our Leader of the Opposition—whoever might occupy those jobs at the time—and indeed this parliament, each and every year, must have this discussion. Certainly there is no more sweeping under the carpet that we have failed to meet even our own very modest aspirations in these areas. What is abundantly clear is that for many, many years, whilst not meeting those targets, we have been able to spend a little bit of time reflecting on why that might be. I would like to quote Dr Tom Calma, who I think has really nailed the point, over consecutive years I have to say. He stresses:

… governments can’t make progress in Indigenous affairs unless done “with and by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people”.

“It's about mutual respect and having the faith and confidence—

to work together. Indeed, this remains one of our nation's greatest challenges. There is so much unfinished business in our relationships with Indigenous peoples in Australia that is yet to be seriously addressed by not only parliaments but the whole of our community.

I welcome the commitment by the Leader of the Opposition and Labor to adding new targets in to the reporting mechanisms of this parliament. I absolutely agree that nothing could be more important than adding a justice target into the reporting mechanisms of this parliament. I am sure I am not alone in recollections of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody back in the 1980s and the frustration that many of those recommendations have not been implemented. We have failed really to adequately address those issues that are now decades-old and that we have seen played out again here in Australia with the obscenely high incarceration rates for Indigenous peoples in Australia. It is a national disgrace. I do not know how the government thinks it is going to meet these targets when at the same time it enables cuts of $3.6 million from family violence and protection legal services just last year alone and has of abandoned its bipartisanship that we had previously to reduce Indigenous incarceration rates and improve community safety.

There is much work to be done. There can be no more important social, economic and cultural commitment than closing the gap that this parliament and indeed our nation can make to address the gross entrenched inequality that continues to exist in Australia today.

Cathy McGowan (Indi, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of this land on which we meet and pay my respect to the elders past and present, and I extend this respect to all the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are present today and to those traditional owners and custodians of country within the electorate that I have the privilege and honour to serve of IndI.

Every year brings continued challenges for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island communities, including those in my electorate. We have heard about many of them today and they are outlined in the 2016 Closing the gap report. Each year also brings a new generation into our communities and takes another generation from us. Babies are born accompanied by great joy and with the same hope that all families have for their children for a happy, healthy and purposeful life. But every year, we also record with deep sorrow the passing of the elders that new generations will only know through the continuation of community connection, crafting and sustaining of contacts within country and maintaining a relationship with culture and heritage. There have been many good leaders that I have had the privilege to know during my time as the member for Indi, and I acknowledge them.

During the 2½ years that I have held this honoured position I have been very proud and excited to know many elders and Indi community groups, the Gadhaba, Dirriwarra, Duduroa and Wodonga Aboriginal networks, the Taungurung, the Bunurung and the Bangerang people, and I have had the opportunity to be a guest at the Mungabareena Aboriginal Corporation during the wonderful visit by the Governor-General and Lady Cosgrove. I have had the pleasure of meeting and learning from the Koori First Steps Pre-School in Wodonga about the many health activities taking place.

It has been a time of great achievement. I was so proud to come into this place and make an apology on behalf of the stolen generations. I was really pleased to meet up with the various advisory groups right across the electorate, particularly to work with them on mental health, jobs and education. I was really pleased to meet with the Hon. Ken Wyatt when he was chair of the committee for constitutional recognition and to talk to him about the issues facing the people of north-east Victoria. I have been pleased to be part of the many celebrations of NAIDOC Week and to meet the many communities involved during that very important time. I have been pleased to welcome to this place, Parliament House, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups, particularly some of the women's leadership groups that are taking their place in leading their communities. I have been very pleased to be part of the local Indigenous network movement around Victoria and to have opportunities to meet with the workers, staff and community groups that are linked in those networks.

I was very pleased recently to have the privilege of going to the Burraja Indigenous Cultural and Environmental Discovery Centre on the causeway between Albury and Wodonga, juxtaposed between our two cities. The Burraja centre offers educational and general interest programs that focus on Aboriginal culture, heritage and environment, particularly for visitors and tourists. It acknowledges the role that Aboriginal people have played in this really important part of the country, on the banks of the Murray River, for so many years. At Albury-Wodonga, the two big rivers the Kiewa and the Murray come together, and just east of us the Murray and the Mitta come together, so these are major fertile places that Aboriginal people have clearly inhabited for a very, very long time. So it is fantastic to be part of the Burraja community and see how life perhaps was lived then. I would particularly like to acknowledge the support and guidance of Alicia Wheatley in showing me around this centre and giving me the time to understand how it worked.

The centre was set up in 2002 with funding from the philanthropic group the Ian Potter Foundation, and it was supported by the Community Development Employment Program, the CDEP, and also in partnership with Parklands Albury Wodonga. It operated really well for a while but now is being supported by volunteers and is not nearly reaching its potential. Nevertheless, the partnerships still exist with the North East CMA, Gateway Community Health and the SEED Project, and there are relationships with the Cape York Natural Resource Management Board, Landcare groups, Albury Wodonga Aboriginal Health Service and Murray Wildlife. So they continue to work to hold this space between the two rivers as a place where visitors like me can go and learn about the rich culture.

So, over this period of time, I have been blessed with the opportunities to gain an improved understanding of the importance and value and the commonality of past, present and future with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I am very grateful to them for their patience and their tolerance in bringing me with them on the journey. But there is still really important work to do, as we know from the Closing the gap report.

There is one particular project that I would like to bring before this House, and it is supported by the elders and others in Indi. It remains to be completed, and the area that we are looking at is central north-east Victoria. The aim, the cry, the interest and the want, I think, is to establish a gathering place which has accessible reach right around the central area of north-east Victoria. Elders and other community leaders have long recognised that connection, community, culture and country all work together to secure happier, healthier and more purposeful living. We understand that the central north-east of Victoria has a gap: it is missing this gathering place that can provide a wide range of cultural, educational and health-related services and activities which other regions enjoy, such as what I have talked about in Albury-Wodonga.

Sitting somewhere between Shepparton and Albury-Wodonga, Wangaratta and district is a significant gap that more than 300 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have commenced a journey to close. The strength of the invitation in having access to such a gathering place, which would provide cultural, health and education resources needed to close this gap, is undoubted. People talk about having a place where we can eat good food, exercise together, be healthy and happily be together but also welcome others into our midst.

Initial scoping has been done, and funding is now being sought via local government and Victorian state programs for the necessary detailed feasibility studies. In the longer term, with confidence that the viability and need of a gathering place will be recognised, I invite the community to approach the office of the federal member for Indi to seek my support in obtaining funding that will also be required to complete the vision of the elders and the many others who share this goal of a local gathering place.

In bringing my comments to a close, beyond the importance and the rich reality of being able to stand here and say, 'Sorry,' and to acknowledge the history and the hurt, it is now time to build a place to draw the past into the here and now, to dream and to create a place that can close the gap in the central area of north-east Victoria. Thank you to the people who have helped me to prepare for today. Thank you to the many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who have undertaken this journey with me. I look forward to being your representative when this parliament returns and in the years to come. Thank you.

Debate adjourned.