Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I've been the member for Grey for 17 years—well, it will be 17 years in November. I have announced my retirement, so I won't be coming back after the next election, whenever that might be.

I appreciate your concern. Thank you, member for McEwen. I've worked hard with my electorate, to stay in touch. Grey is not an easy electorate. Many say, 'How do you manage the travel?' It's difficult. I think the range of subject matter is a more difficult issue; it's enormous across an electorate like Grey.

I've worked particularly hard to try and stay in touch with my Indigenous community. Around 7½ per cent of Grey is Indigenous. By my estimate, about 40 per cent of those live in remote Indigenous communities. It is there that I see the biggest gap, as it were. Generally, in urban areas Indigenous people are going okay, with some exceeding and others failing but a great number who are well adjusted, employed, raising families and participating in mainstream Australia. There's still a gap, but we're closing that gap.

But this is why I visited the APY Lands. I try to get up there about twice a year, and it's quite an effort to do so. I tell people it's a thousand kilometres from my gate to the turn-off, without going out of the electorate, and then it's another eight hours through to the Western Australian border. So, when I go, it takes me a week. I try to always drive. I could fly, because the taxpayers are good enough to fund charter flights for you, but when I land there the first thing I need is a car. I need to travel from community to community; find the leaders, the people, the workers and the programs; and see how it's going on the ground. I tend to go unannounced.

The census says there are about 2,400 people living on the Lands. I think there are more than that, and it's not surprising that the census may not be completely accurate up there. By the 2022 figures—I can't find anything more recent—there are 568 enrolled in school. It's difficult to pin down, but the general estimate is that we think somewhere between $250 million and $350 million is spent by the taxpayer each year in maintaining that population. That's enormous, but I don't begrudge that money, because nowhere is that gap between Indigenous Australia and mainstream Australia so obvious as in places like the APY Lands and some other remote Indigenous settlements that I have.

But I think the bigger question is: what do we get for our money? We have better housing, even though I was just up there two weeks ago and I regret to inform the House that there are currently seven burnt-out million-dollar-plus houses up there. We are getting three new police stations again, and I think that'll take it up to about eight under construction at the moment. They are about $5 million a throw. There are health centres, and they're very good health centres. I take my hat off to those people who work there and bring great services to that area. There is investment in shops. In my time, there have been new shops in Fregon and Amata. There are swimming pools—a new swimming pool was just built at Ernabella—and a youth centre, which I estimate to be worth about $6 million. Sadly, I have to report—and this is the story of the APY Lands—that the youth centre is closed due to vandalism. The toilets have been destroyed. The swimming pool supervisor has left. The swimming pool has never been used, and it's full of rocks and has gone green. We put $106 million into turning the main access road on the APY Lands into all-weather. Some of that's bitumen. We fund the Indigenous rangers. We fund art centres. It goes on and on.

After 17 years, I would say the place is physically in far better shape but the outcomes are worse. That's a tragedy, and it's something that really upsets me. We spend more than half a billion dollars a year there, and it's getting worse. So, clearly, something's not working. Everywhere we have government workers, NGOs and charities, and when I speak to them they all try to convince me of what a great job they're doing: 'This program is really making a difference.' They all tell me that. I think, 'Oh, that sounds pretty good,' but I challenge them back and say, 'If your program's doing such a good job, why is the place getting worse?' You can almost see the blood run from their faces. No-one's ever thought of that question before.

So my conclusion is that the model is failing. I struggle to think of a program where maintaining and even expanding a population in a remote area, with no natural economy to support them, could be more guaranteed to destroy a culture than what we're doing. For the men, especially, everything they did traditionally is now superfluous to their living. It is replaced by the government. It's no wonder that there's no respect for the elders anymore. It's no wonder that young people are bored and they turn to drugs and alcohol. Unfortunately the next outcome of that is violence, including domestic violence, and abuse of children. There are horrific stories. We have heard Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price tell those stories in the other place. There has been a debasement of traditional values. For instance—sounds good—we have sorry camp. I have been to a sorry camp that had been going for two months. During sorry camp, they vacate the houses. They live down in a creek bed or wherever amongst the flies, with babies crawling around, no sanitation. It is not possible to believe that traditionally they did not bury their dead within two days. It is a hot part of the world; there would be nothing left after two weeks. Yet now they go for weeks. They disrupt school. They disrupt the whole community.

I have a good friend who has been through business who says it's getting more and more violent and he doesn't like what's happening. I said, 'Why do you do it?' He said, 'I go along to try and moderate.' I asked: 'Would you like your children to go?' He said, 'Absolutely not.' Old people—the tjilpis, the minas—speak to me almost crying, telling me what has become of their families from the domestic violence, crime, child abuse, children in kinship care, which is failing; it is overloaded. It cannot continue indefinitely.

I'm going to have to round this up; I'm running out of time. I said to the member as we came in, 'We need longer speeches in this place to put down more important stories.' But the do-gooders in the city think they're doing a good job in these remote lands. I regret to inform this place: they are not; we are on the wrong track. Senator Nampijinpa Price has called for an audit of all these programs and I fully support it. It is absolutely what needs to happen. There are a whole lot of programs not doing any good. The people on them believe they are doing good, and I don't blame them personally, but it is not cutting the mustard.

We need to bring back mutual responsibility. We had a work for the dole program, the community development program. There is no longer any compunction to work. We had, in Ceduna at least and a few other places, the cashless debit card. It made an enormous difference. It needs to be rolled out over a much wider footprint. There needs to be mutual responsibility. We need to make people—parents—responsible for sending their children to school. The problem is, when the government moves in, it then becomes the government's job to get the children to school. I know we need to children well fed to think and function in school, but once the school takes over the breakfast program and then the lunch program, guess who owns it? It becomes the school's job to feed the kids and those same kids will go hungry in school holidays and on weekends. It's not the answer.

The answer is we need to build responsibility. Noel Pearson says we need these people to be able to walk in two worlds, and I fully support that. We need the schools to function at a level that will enable children to go away, to participate in the wider world where there is an economy, where there's a chance to get a job, where they can join their urban cousins, which I talked about at the beginning of the speech, and actually have a chance of success in life. Because when I see a three-, four-, five- or six-year-old up there, I just think, 'You poor bugger. How are you ever going to get out of this?' We send them away to school for a while. Parents will let them to go down to a school in Adelaide but, by and large, they want them to come home. You can understand why people want their kids to come home, but home isn't a place where they can thrive; home is a place of disaster. It is going the wrong way. It is one of my great sorrows, the fact that I'm winding up a 17-year career and I have not made a significant difference in that area. I have tried but I feel that, at the end of it, we are actually worse off than when I began.

Andrew Wilkie (Clark, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Grey for sharing his insights.