Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to lament the Queensland government's announced abolition of the Family Responsibilities Commission, an initiative originally of Jenny Macklin, the member for Jagajaga; Anna Bligh when she was premier of Queensland; and Noel Pearson, which has always enjoyed bipartisan support in this place and until very recently in the Queensland parliament, until what looks like an attempt from within the Queensland bureaucracy to sabotage it. The Family Responsibilities Commission has been associated with better school attendance, less alcohol-fuelled violence and stronger local leadership in all the communities where it has operated.

A fortnight ago I was in Aurukun to talk school attendance, but all the locals wanted to talk about was the imminent threat to the Family Responsibilities Commission and to ask me to do what I could to save their community from the booze-fuelled bloodshed that they feared would happen if the Family Responsibilities Commission was abolished. The leaders of the school, the leaders of the police, the elders of the community all wanted the Family Responsibilities Commission to stay—and why wouldn't they? The Family Responsibilities Commission was never imposed on them. It was never imposed on anyone. It only operated in communities where the local leadership had specifically requested it.

The Family Responsibilities Commission is not outsiders making decisions for Indigenous people. It is local elders, not white officials, talking to troubled families about how their welfare money might be better managed. And it is not taking anyone's money. The worst that can possibly happen under the FRC is that some of a person's welfare may be quarantined on the BasicsCard. So this is not a punishment agenda; it is quite clearly a responsibility agenda. It is actually empowering local people to take practical steps to improve their community. The Family Responsibilities Commission model should be extended to other communities that want it, certainly not abolished with no adequate substitute in the offing.

I know that the intellectual architect of the Family Responsibilities Commission, Noel Pearson, is not universally supported by Indigenous Australians, even though in my judgement he's been a modern-day prophet for our times. He has provided courageous and inspiring leadership on welfare reform and on educational reform not just for Aboriginal people but for the whole country. It would be a tragedy of the first order not just for Indigenous Australia but for Australia at large if petty jealousy were behind this decision to undo a decade of steady improvement in the wellbeing of Aurukun, Coen, Hope Vale, Mossman Gorge and, more recently, Doomadgee.

So, Mr Speaker, through you, I say to the Queensland government: please think again. Do not scrap something which is working, something which is working for the benefit of Indigenous people, something which Indigenous people themselves have devised, until you are confident that you have a replacement that works better. And please don't change something that works just because some people might be jealous of the achievements and the justified national stature of Mr Pearson. Please, Queensland government, don't ever use lack of federal funding as an excuse, because the federal government is prepared to continue its share of the funding of this program.

This is something good in a part of our country that really needs to be in charge of its own destiny, more in charge of its own destiny than it often is. How dare the Queensland government, in a fit of pique and misinformation, rip away from these good people something which has been doing so much for their wellbeing? They have a right to take responsibility. That is exactly what they have been doing. Let them keep it.