Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

This is very important legislation which deals with a very important issue. For many years, Indigenous Australians have been calling for strong community and government support to assist them and work with them to overcome some of the difficulties they face, and the Democrats have been supporting them in their calls for many years. I remind the Senate of a motion that I moved and that was passed by this chamber on 30 March 2006, which supported a call for all politicians to develop a national strategy in partnership with key stakeholders to address the issue of sexual assault on children. Of course, the Democrats welcome efforts to make a start to address the issue of sexual assaults on children and some of the wider issues affecting Indigenous people in Australia, which, again, I have spoken about and the Democrats have spoken about for years, reflecting the concerns of Indigenous people themselves. But there are two key points that need to be made.

Firstly, these strategies have to be done in partnership with key stakeholders, as every person in the Senate supported back in March last year. Secondly, it has to be emphasised that the sexual assault of children, child abuse and child neglect are widespread problems in Australia. That has been recognised by the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and recognised by the Senate in motions passed by all parties. It is something that I have spoken about many times. Child abuse, including sexual assault, is a widespread problem nationally. It is, I believe, something that can be validly called a crisis. I believe that is a description that the minister himself has used. We should not use the fact that there is a particular emergency among some Aboriginal communities in the Territory as a reason to turn our minds away from that problem of child abuse in the wider community. It is very easy to look at another group and say: ‘Look at them. They have real problems. There is something wrong with them. We might help them as a way of ignoring problems in our own backyards and in our own homes.’ That is something we are still doing. The legislation before us deals with the Northern Territory predominantly and Aboriginal communities in particular, so I will focus on that, but let us not forget that child assault, child abuse and child neglect are very serious and widespread problems in the Australian community and that we need to recognise that and do more about it.

The vast majority of Aboriginal men are not child abusers. They, along with Indigenous women, do believe that little children are sacred. It should be noted that the title of the Little children are sacred report is a translation from an Aboriginal language in the Northern Territory. It was chosen by Pat Anderson and Rex Wild as the title because it was a message they continually got from Aboriginal people themselves. That was why they were making that call for help: because little children are sacred. It is absolutely crucial that we do everything we can to take the politics out of this debate. The continuing politicisation of this debate is very distressing and completely unacceptable. Frankly, I believe that to date the debate has been conducted in a way that is completely dishonest. I am not talking about the debate in this chamber thus far—although we have already had some contributions earlier this morning in relation to the cut-off motion that I think were very dishonest and, frankly, happy to use Aboriginal children as political footballs. But the wider public debate and the political debate have been grossly dishonest.

We have this totally false paradigm set up where supposedly you either completely support everything the government is doing—and support it now, without question and straightaway—or you support the paedophiles. There is no middle ground according to that paradigm, which many in the government and some of their supporters are trying to set up. I totally reject that paradigm. I am prepared to wear those continuing smears, and we heard them again from Senator Abetz this morning, that suggest that anybody who wants to even examine this legislation before us is preventing children from being protected. I will say it once more: if the government throughout this debate can point to a single measure in any of these pieces of legislation that is essential now to protect a child from harm tomorrow then we will support it now. Chop this debate off, bring that part on now and we will support it straightaway. The government has not done that. It has not at any stage identified any components of this legislation whose passage today would save a child from being harmed tomorrow. All of the measures that deal with immediate intervention for a child at immediate risk can happen, and are happening, regardless of this legislation. Police can still intervene, and are intervening. The child protection process in the Territory and elsewhere is still operational. It is certainly far from perfect—it is very much flawed—but the suggestion that holding up this legislation at all means that a child who would otherwise be protected will not be is simply not true. It is dishonest. It is a smear. It totally distorts what is too important a debate to resort to that sort of rubbish.

The legislation has many components to it. Whilst I have been and will remain critical, firstly, of the government’s attitude and process to date and, secondly, of some measures in the bill, it is simply ridiculous to say that the bills are 100 per cent bad and completely without merit. There are measures in here which, as far as I have been able to examine them to date, appear to me to be clearly beneficial. There are other measures which appear to me to be certainly without any linkage to child protection. There are other measures which appear to be retrograde and which potentially will make things worse. There are others, frankly, which we need more time to examine. From my point of view and the Democrats point of view, it appears that we will get a grossly inadequate, farcical one-day Senate committee process on Friday. We will still make efforts later on today to allow a proper process. We will use that grossly inadequate, farcical process to try to get more information to properly inform ourselves. We will use the committee stage of the debate next week in this chamber to get more information and to explore ways to make this work better.

We will make our assessment at the end of the debate. That is what we should do. That is our job. Frankly, it would be a dereliction of duty—which seems to be enthusiastically encouraged by the government—to abrogate our responsibilities and not examine this legislation, not listen to people and just bulldoze it all through without even taking the time to turn our minds to it. I am not going to do that. I was elected by the people of Queensland to do my job—that is, to properly examine what is put before us unless a clear-cut case can be made that there is a matter of absolute urgency that needs to be progressed straightaway. The government have not made that case. They have not even attempted to make that case. All they do is respond with generalised smears towards anybody who criticises them or even raises a question. It is a time-honoured tactic going back many decades, and probably many centuries, where people who simply raise questions or seek to apply some reason and common sense to what is going on get slagged off and attacked because they are not just giving 100 per cent acquiescence. It comes back to the old cliche that to reason is treason. That is the line applied to people who seek to question whatever the government does. That is the Senate’s role, and it is certainly the Democrats role. We do that not just because of our role here in the Senate but because that is our responsibility, I believe, with respect to Indigenous Australians. They are going to be the subject of all this.

We need to recognise in this debate that there is not a single Indigenous voice in this chamber. There is not a single Indigenous voice in the House of Representatives. We are here talking about what we are going to do to them, and they are not even going to have a chance to tell us what they think. That is a disgrace. Let me also make it clear that that is just one small example of a long legacy of the same thing happening. It is one part, of many, of why situations of disadvantage continue in such an entrenched way. You do not deal with the consequences of disempowerment, which is what this legislation and the wider intervention is about, by further disempowering people. There is no greater, more clear-cut way of disempowering people than just saying: ‘Shut up. Out of the way. We know what we’re doing. We’re going to do this to you. It’s for your own good.’ That is the overall take-home message of this. I heard the Prime Minister on television last night saying: ‘Look, everybody knows what’s happening because we’ve been talking about it for five weeks and this is just legislation to implement it.’ That is simply not true.