Sam Lim (Tangney, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Aged Care. Why is an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice critical to improving the health of First Nations people?

Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Tangney for his question. As we've heard quite a lot this question time, later this year Australians will get the chance to vote to change their Constitution and recognise the place of First Nations Australians—more than 30 years after the High Court first swept aside that longstanding legal fiction that this was somehow vacant land when Europeans arrived.

They'll also get the chance to give shape to that recognition through a voice to parliament—listening to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to achieve better outcomes. I can't think of a more important area in which to start listening again to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people than in health. Let's be honest, Mr Speaker, with the best of intentions on both sides of parliament, with substantial investment, the current approach simply isn't working. In those few areas of health policy where it is working, it's simply not working fast enough.

Year after year, this parliament is confronted with the yawning gap in health outcomes reported in the Closing the gap report, the yawning gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Some health challenges for Indigenous kids, for example, are essentially unknown to non-Indigenous Australia—like rheumatic heart disease, which was eradicated from developed countries 50 or 60 years ago. It's a disease of grinding poverty likely never seen by doctors who are working today in our major cities but a disease that sees rates in remote Aboriginal communities among the highest in the world, higher even than in sub-Saharan Africa. These health gaps, and so many more, are riddled right through our system. In some areas, frankly, they're getting worse. In the last decade, for example, cancer death rates across Australia plummeted by 10 per cent, but for Indigenous Australians they actually went up by 12 per cent. The gap actually got bigger.

None of this is news to anyone in this parliament, and all of us have worked hard over the years with the best of intentions to make a difference and to close the gap. But we need a new approach. Just like a good doctor listens to their patients, listening to the voice of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people about the root causes of these endemic yawning health gaps and listening about better, practical and more effective ways to make a real difference is the offer that's being made to the Australian people by Indigenous leaders in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. That is the chance to help Aboriginal Australians lead longer, healthier and happier lives.