Bob Katter (Kennedy, Katter's Australian Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

PM, in Cloncurry, my brother-cousins on their homelands cannot secure a freehold title deed or a pastoral lease, yet both are available to every whitefella. Wouldn't Monash professor Sarah Maddison's The Colonial Fantasy and WTO economists' history of capital provide powerful arguments for issuing title deeds and explaining why the life expectancy of homeland First Australians is just 56? Why is the government ignoring First Australians, labelled parliament wasters, but blocking Gazan refugees, yet ignoring a similar blocking by Egypt, Jordan and Iran?

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There was a lot in there. The Prime Minister has the call.

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Kennedy for his question. One of my first experiences in this parliament as a very young fellow at the time was to appear on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs committee with the member for Kennedy. We travelled to his electorate extensively. There I saw the relationship that he had with First Nations people in his community. I know that he is very genuine about that commitment and about the need to close the gap and to provide economic opportunities.

When it comes to pastoral leases and the interaction with native title, that is something that occurs at the state level rather than something that the Commonwealth has the capacity to change. But he is right to talk about the life expectancy of First Australians being so much lower than that of non-Indigenous Australians. That's a tragedy. That's something that's unacceptable. That's something that everyone in this parliament across governments, current and past, have to accept responsibility for. That's why we certainly need to do better.

That's why we have measures that I'm sure that the member would support, such as the changes that the former Indigenous affairs minister put in place to turn what is essentially a make-work program into real jobs with real training and real skills for Indigenous Australians. I've met with First Nations people from the member's electorate, just north of the Curry, very recently in some of those remote communities and heard from them firsthand about their desire to seek a better future for not just themselves but their children. That's why as well education and TAFE and providing those opportunities and skills is so important as we move forward.

I am certainly willing to continue to work with the member for Kennedy on these issues not just in his electorate but throughout the whole nation and how we deal with these challenges. It shouldn't be the case that anyone should be able to determine someone's opportunities and where they will end up in life by the postcode in which they were born or the circumstances in which they were born. That's not the Australian way. Unfortunately, that gap remains far too great. I will continue to engage constructively with the member for Kennedy, and I thank him for his question.