Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

With the ramming through the parliament this week of what are arguably the biggest changes to the nature of our social security system, combined with a major transformation of our relationship with our first peoples that effectively winds the clock back to the days when the mission bosses oversaw every aspect of their day and their lives as wards of the state, this chamber and our democratic traditions have, I believe, reached a new and historic low point. History will not look kindly on these events, nor will the international community. This government are yet again riding roughshod over our democratic institutions. They are shamelessly manipulating the very serious and distressing issue of child sexual abuse and using and abusing the Little children are sacred report, which is the latest in a long line of reports on this issue which have put forward numerous positive solutions—only to gather dust on the ministers’ shelves during a decade of inaction and funding cuts. They are using this report in an election year as an excuse to declare a crisis and ram through a series of sweeping and unrelated changes to land tenure, the permit system and the welfare system. They are making ideological changes that it has not been proven will have outcomes on the issue we care about, which is child abuse.

I would like to quote one of the authors of the Little children are sacred report, Pat Anderson. She said:

There’s not a single action that the Commonwealth has taken so far that … corresponds with a single recommendation. There is no relationship between these emergency powers and what’s in our report.

So please, let us not keep using the excuse of this report to justify what the government is doing.

These bills represent the most significant changes to the relationship between government and Indigenous peoples since the 1967 referendum. They are a deliberate and calculating move away from our efforts to build the capacity of Indigenous communities and return to complete central government control over every aspect of their lives. The amendments to the social security legislation taken together with the Welfare to Work legislation are reshaping the very basis of our welfare system, moving to a punitive and paternalistic system which is based much more on ideology than it is on any kind of evidence based policy of what we know helps people to turn their lives around, to get a job and an education and to lift themselves out of the poverty trap.

These three bills are clearly racist and discriminatory. The government explicitly seek to exempt these three bills from part II of the Racial Discrimination Act. The government also portray these measures as special measures under the act—but, if they are not, they have the get-out clause of: ‘If they do not happen to be seen as special measures under the act then we will exempt everything in these acts from the Racial Discrimination Act anyway.’ It is not enough to merely assert that the provisions of these bills should be regarded as special measures, which is the same mistake, I might add, that the ALP seem to be making in their amendments to the act. To be special measures it needs to be demonstrated that these measures will clearly benefit Aboriginal people by materially tackling the problem of child abuse, that their sole purpose is for the advancement of Aboriginal people and the tackling of child abuse, that these measures are absolutely necessary to ensure the advancement of Aboriginal people and to protect Aboriginal children, and that these discriminatory measures will cease once their purpose has been achieved and the inequality in health, housing, education and child protection has been dealt with.

I do not believe that the government can prove that these measures are special measures. I do not believe that the Australian community will believe it and I certainly do not believe that the international community will believe it. I do not believe that they can prove that these measures are for the advancement of Aboriginal people. I cannot see how taking away Aboriginal people’s rights and their control of land and expenditure and enforcing this punitive welfare reform system on them is advancing Aboriginal people in Australia. Really, what does it matter? The government have given themselves an out clause by exempting everything in the act from the Racial Discrimination Act.

There is no empirical link between the government’s proposed measures in overturning communal land tenure, scrapping the permit system and instituting a paternalistic and punitive welfare system and any real-life experience in reducing the levels of child abuse. There is not a single case study anywhere in the world where one of these measures has been shown to be even moderately effective in improving child protection or improving the plight of indigenous peoples who are suffering from systemic poverty. These three bills do nothing to implement practical and proven measures that are known to be effective in tackling child abuse. Indigenous communities have been neglected by governments for years, and this government is one of the worst offenders. This neglect has played its part in developing and maintaining the circumstances of poverty, overcrowding, lack of meaningful work and substance abuse, which are all contributors to an environment where children are not safe in the ways outlined in the Little children are sacred report. As a nation we must work to address the problems facing Indigenous communities, remote and urban, in the Northern Territory and around Australia. We must work to protect children from abuse and neglect but above all we must work to do this in ways that are proven to be effective.

The Australian Greens are strongly of the view that the government’s top-down approach is fundamentally flawed. We are critical of the Howard-Brough crisis plan, which comes after 11 years of inaction and numerous reports, and attempts to superficially tackle complex issues in an election environment. To succeed in the long term it is absolutely essential to have genuine community engagement and ownership of programs and initiatives addressing child abuse and the causes of child abuse. Community consultation is the first recommendation of the Little children are sacred report. One of the key criticisms of the approach taken by the federal government is that they have failed to consult and failed to learn from the past. We want to see a more considered and comprehensive response and an evidence based policy that builds on existing knowledge of successful programs to deliver long-term solutions that strengthen and empower communities. We would willingly be part of an effort to develop and implement such a considered comprehensive response, which is why we are frustrated that the government is rushing these measures through with no consultation, and which is why we have been working closely with Aboriginal organisations to support the plan by the Combined Aboriginal Organisations of the Northern Territory to tackle issues of child protection and poverty and to build real opportunities for individual and community development.

There already exist clear guidelines as to what governments, state and federal, should be doing to address child abuse in Indigenous communities. In the past few years there have been a large number of reports from across the country in addition to the Little children are sacred report which outline practical and proven measures to tackle this issue. The federal government’s response ignores all of these recommendations.

We support the emergency response and development plan to protect Aboriginal children put forward by the Combined Aboriginal Organisations of the Northern Territory on 10 July 2007, which outlines a comprehensive two-phase approach. The Australian Greens have been calling on the federal government to reconsider its current intervention strategy and enter into partnership and dialogue with Aboriginal communities to deliver a comprehensive and considered proposal. Strategies and programs to address this issue must ensure child protection through safer communities, through adequate and appropriate policing and through more resources to support safe housing, night patrols, Aboriginal community police and community based family violence programs.

Obviously we need to address the most startling health statistics facing Aboriginal communities. Healthy kids and healthy families through increased resources and infrastructure and providing primary health and wellbeing services is the way to go. Urgent investment to reduce the gap in life expectancy and the rates of chronic disease within a generation as part of a national Indigenous health strategy, with a commitment of $500 million per year, is needed urgently and has been called for for years. Significant investment in programs to reduce alcohol and other substance abuse, which includes education and demand reduction strategies as well as rehabilitation and counselling services, are needed as part of a national strategy. Housing and infrastructure are essential. Sufficient housing to reduce overcrowding and increase child health and safety are essential. It has been estimated that in Australia $2 billion to $3 billion is needed to address this issue. Genuine employment opportunities providing community based health, education and welfare services as well as housing and infrastructure maintenance and construction are required.

We need to address health, education and training with the delivery of quality education for all Aboriginal children with a focus on early childhood development and with school attendance strategies that encourage family engagement. It is estimated, for example, that $295 million is required for infrastructure, plus $79 million a year, for all Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory to attend school. We need a partnership and governance approach to the way these issues are tackled and a human rights approach to partnering with communities and developing policies and programs to deliver safer communities as well as all the other issues that I have been talking about. We need financial management education and services and support for voluntary community based financial management initiatives, such as Tangentyere council’s successful Centrepay scheme. The community has been asking for all these programs for years and it is a common-sense approach to tackling these issues. These are matters that the government is not addressing and which are vital to protecting children and ensuring viable, functional communities.

The bills that we are addressing and considering today are so complex that, unfortunately, I can only touch on some of the issues that come out of them. One of the cornerstones of the government’s approach is the compulsory acquisition of land through five-year leases. This is a blatant land grab with no direct relationship to protecting children. The government is legally and morally obliged to pay just compensation for acquiring Indigenous interests in land, yet the compensation provisions in the bills are confusing to say the least. I would hope the government is not attempting to pay anything less than just compensation, although it looks to me like it would rather be forcing Aboriginal people into courts to get what is rightfully theirs. The government has wanted control of Aboriginal land for a long time. Its agenda has been very clear with the changes last year to the Northern Territory land rights act. It is also, I believe, very annoyed that Tangentyere council has rejected its offer twice when it tried to bribe those communities with funding to give up their control of their land. The government does not like to be told no, and it did not like to be told no by Tangentyere. They won hard fought control over their land and they did not want to give it up. The government is being driven by an ideological agenda, not by an agenda of evidence based policy that shows that by taking control of that land it can deliver on addressing child abuse.

Similarly, the partial dismantling of the permit system contradicts the aims of this intervention. The police acknowledge that the permit system assists both them and the communities to enforce alcohol bans and regulates visitation to communities by outsiders. What is more, the permit system has a real economic benefit to communities, as was demonstrated in the Senate committee inquiry into Indigenous art. How will dismantling the permit system help to keep out the grog runners, the carpetbaggers and the porn or stop outsiders coming in to abuse children? The return to paternalism is summed up in the provisions relating to the management of communities and the government’s ownership of infrastructure. Again, the comprehensive way in which the government can take control of communities is extraordinary and the provisions allowing the minister to appoint observers to spy on communities are, I believe, obscene. We are also concerned that a law and order approach to banning alcohol in Aboriginal communities will prove ineffective and could increase the levels of violence and abuse, particularly if it is not backed up by comprehensive rehabilitation and counselling programs and is not part of a strategy that also tackles the problems in larger regional centres.

The prohibition on courts taking into consideration customary law in bail and sentencing is a denial of justice to Indigenous people and it imposes limits on relevant matters for the courts to consider. This is another example of the contempt this government shows not only to Indigenous people and their culture but also to our legal system. Along with the Welfare to Work legislation and the proposed income management regime, the Howard government years have seen a fundamental reordering of our welfare system away from a social rights and responsibilities model that aims to increase the capacity of those in receipt of welfare, to a punitive and disciplinary approach. There is compelling evidence that punitive approaches do not work.

The application of this scheme in the Northern Territory is blatantly racist. Not only is this scheme abhorrent to those of us who believe in the dignity of individuals but also we are concerned about how it will actually work and its unintended consequences. At the same time that the government is introducing these compulsory measures it has failed to support community schemes to voluntarily set aside welfare moneys, like Tangentyere council’s Centrepay scheme, which continues to cost the community hundreds of thousands of dollars to operate.

The social security changes for the broader community are also of deep concern to the Australian Greens. Apart from our opposition to the punitive welfare measures that strip dignity from vulnerable people, we are also concerned about the massive amount of resources that will be necessary to administer this scheme. When I asked how much this was going to cost, the government was not able to provide me with those answers yesterday. I am hoping during the debate that that will become clear, but I know, for example, that running Tangentyere’s program in Alice Springs is costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. These resources would be more effectively used to address the systematic issues in our society that cause people to require welfare and to put in place a more effective child protection and welfare system.

Unfortunately, there are so many issues associated with these five bills, two of them appropriation bills, that in this short time we can address only some of them. There are many issues that come out of the comprehensive changes that are made by these bills. Because of the shortened time for the committee process, on Friday we will again only touch on those. I am hoping that we can address more of them when we debate the legislation in Committee of the Whole.

These interventions have been condemned by Aboriginal organisations around Australia and by social justice and community organisations from around Australia. The Combined Aboriginal Organisations of the Northern Territory have also condemned this intervention. These are the people who are living in the Northern Territory and on whom this punitive, racist and discriminatory legislation will be imposed. The civil society community have been meeting in Canberra over the last two days and they made this statement:

Everyone wants to see Australian children safe and protected but there is terrible potential for this legislation to further dispossess and disempower Indigenous Australians. It may well be saving children now only to condemn them to a future without their land, and without control over their own lives and the lives of their communities.

This statement by many community based organisations, including Aboriginal organisations, hits the nail on the head. The Greens will be opposing these bills. We believe that they will not achieve the intended outcome of addressing child abuse. They are thinly disguised, ideologically driven land grabs to take the control of land away from Aboriginal communities and to impose on Aboriginal communities punitive approaches to their issues. They are not backed up by evidence based policy. Numerous reports from 1996 on—if the government cared to read them—have proposed very strong alternative approaches. The government has cut funding to community care programs and to safe community programs.