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

In the hope that our chair, the member for Murray, will be here shortly it gives me great pleasure to speak about our inquiry, which is the inquiry into educational opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. I want to thank the secretariat staff who are here this morning for the wonderful work they are doing.

In her absence, I want to thank Dr Stone for the way in which she has chaired this committee. She has done it with equanimity and style—and she is just walking into the parliament in a stylish way! I am pleased she is here! But I want to thank her for the way she has led this committee. She continues to work in a very collaborative, consultative way, and I want to applaud her for that.

This committee's inquiry is actually very important. It is something which we need to comprehend in a broader context other than just talking about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education. We need to talk about it in the context of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, families and, indeed, our national interest. Unless we get it right, we are condemning further generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids to low education attainment levels, few job opportunities and, ultimately, a shorter life. That is something which we all need to work against.

What is clear from this inquiry is that one size does not fit all. There are people of goodwill from all sides of the discussion in relation to this matter. There are those who argue that boarding schools are the panacea for Aboriginal education. I do not accept that, and I do not believe that the evidence we have received tells us that. We actually need to develop concentrating our minds around place-based student-centred approaches to educational opportunity. We need to be aware that things are different right across this country. They are different in Darwin from what they are in Alice Springs and Yuendumu, Papunya, Balgo, Perth, Broome and the Cape—they are all different. Anyone who believes that you have a one-size-fits-all approach is deluding themselves.

So I am mindful that there are schools in this country in urban environments where a majority of the families of those children are from a strongly Aboriginal-centred population. At one school I know of, where 95 per cent of the population are Aboriginal kids, about 70 per cent of the parents of those children have themselves not finished year 9, about 65 per cent are not in paid work and 60 per cent of those children are at different times in and out of care of the state. That creates an enormous dilemma.

Then there are those students who are of high need within the population. Many come traumatised because of the environment they live in and what they have observed of their family interaction. We know that FAS and FASD, which have been the subject of this committee's inquiries in the past, is now an important issue which needs to be addressed, yet in the Northern Territory there are simply not enough clinical staff to do the work of looking at the children and doing the diagnosis. So kids are starting in these schools from traumatised backgrounds, impoverished and suffering greatly from the circumstances in which they live, yet we do not have the tools available to us in the health department or in the education system to do the diagnosis properly required for the mental health issues and needs.

This inquiry is really very important. Instead of blaming people for not being high achievers at school, we need to understand the context of the education system in the schools they are in. We need to appreciate that non-attendance might be a matter of a whole range of factors. I know of kids who do not go home at night but turn up at school the next day. They do not go home at night not because they do not want to be at home but because home is not a safe place. These kids will roll up. They will be in trouble with the coppers and go back to school the next day. They are not fed. It is really very difficult. Yet we have a penchant in this place to blame those victims for having poor outcomes. We have got to be a whole lot better than that. We have got to do our utmost to make sure every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander child is treated as an individual within the school and community context and get the best possible outcome we can. We must not believe that one size fits all, because it does not.

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

I want to thank our deputy chair, the member for Lingiari, a very expert and concerned person who, of course, in a previous life was the Minister for Indigenous Affairs. He is right: we have a very bipartisan committee. We have been together a very long time, and our actual party affiliations do not matter when it comes to Indigenous affairs in this country. All of our governments have tried their very best, but the realities—and this is why we are undertaking this inquiry—are that, when it comes to educational outcomes for our Indigenous students, we still have a very long way to go.

We know that, currently, educational outcomes for Indigenous students fall way below those of non-Indigenous students. By 2020 the Australian education system will have an extra 100,000 Indigenous students enrolling for their first day at school, but that will not be sufficient to guarantee that that extra 100,000 young people arrive at school with their hearing intact, with their nutritional needs having already been well met from their birth or even prior to their birth, or with those students' languages attended to if they are coming to school with English as a second, third or fourth language. We are not sure that the teachers they will encounter in their schools will be respectful of traditional culture and understanding or of the parents' backgrounds. They are often in very remote parts of Australia. We are beginning to see more students enrolling. That is a very good thing. We need to see the outcomes of that enrolment, though, to be equal to any other student in Australia—in fact equal to world best.

The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Indigenous Affairs is inquiring into what educational options there are now, whether it is, as the member for Lingiari said, boarding school, out-of-community education, in-community, an all-Indigenous school environment or one of mixed student background. What works best? What data do we have? We are repeatedly reminded, as we were in Adelaide just on Friday, that there is little to no data in Australia about what works best. We have a lot of anecdotes and a lot of Indigenous and non-Indigenous opinions, but we need data so we can say: 'That's what works. That's what doesn't work. Let's get it straight and move on.'

We have a questionnaire, seeking the views and experiences of current students, former students, parents and teachers. It asks them, because we do not want this to be a desktop inquiry where we do not hear from the students themselves and their families. We want to hear from past students about their experiences at school. I am very pleased to say that nearly half of all the responses are from Indigenous people. We have had about 400 responses to this questionnaire and it is still open, so we hope people will get onto the website to give their views.

We also have already found some common threads of concern, for example, about access to ABSTUDY. ABSTUDY is a critical program—not for a minute do we ever hear that it is not of vital importance in helping fund students' education, particularly when they have to move from home. But what we do hear is that the forms that have to be filled in are too complex and too bureaucratic, especially for parents who are not literate themselves, perhaps, or where there is no computer access or the access online is very sporadic. And, of course, when it asks you for something like a birth certificate for your child or children and you do not have a birth certificate—a common situation in remote Australia—then it just goes from bad to farcical.

We also know that there is a potential for ABSTUDY to be used to fund people who take Indigenous kids in residence in some big towns or cities. Those—I will call them 'host families'—are not subjected to any scrutiny for their level of responsibility or accountability as foster parents, minders or carers of those students who are in their care, either in domestic homes or in homes that have been set up specially.

Communities have also expressed concern about the scholarships to elite schools in metropolitan areas and wonder if they are the best thing—when you hollow out the kids who have perhaps achieved the highest and the best in their community schools. They have been removed from their peers and the cohort of kids of the same age and have gone off to the city, perhaps never to return again. We have that same situation throughout Australia, of course, with non-Indigenous students—with the hollowing-out of the brightest and best from rural and regional communities, across the board. But for Indigenous households and communities this is a critical issue to deal with when it comes to trying to give students the best access to all that is available in mainstream society, without losing culture, their family identity and their connection with country. This is the overwhelming desire expressed by Indigenous parents—that their students achieve in mainstream Australian society but also remain proudly and distinctly aware of and capable and competent in their own culture.

So this is an important inquiry. When we have our report available, I commend that to the House. And I thank the deputy chair for making his preliminary remarks.