Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to make a few comments about this section of the legislation because I think the government has got this fundamentally wrong. Despite the fact that there may be some elements of this bill I have supported, I seriously think this part of the legislation is driving a personal agenda. I am not sure if it is the personal agenda of this minister or of the member for Solomon, who has advocated long and hard to have the permit system abolished. I am not sure because this does not actually cover any of the seat of Solomon.

The government got the opportunity to make this move into the permit system and, looking at their history, I think it will be just the start of further changes to come. We had an announcement last year that this minister and this government were going to conduct a review of the permit system. That happened. They say they got over 100 submissions. Funnily enough, I got three-quarters of those cc-ed to me. I am not sure on what basis they came to their conclusion but, on reading those submissions, I could come to no other conclusion than that the permit system needs not only to be kept in place but enforced. I have heard the minister say that a couple of people dragged him aside at a meeting and said, ‘Look, I didn’t want to say anything publicly, but I’d like the system abolished.’ Well, we do not usually operate like that in this country. When you call for submissions to an inquiry, people need to have the tenacity to front up and put in a public submission, a submission that is available for all time for others to see. We do not usually make changes by Chinese whispers or word of mouth. So I am not convinced that your submissions overwhelmingly said the permit system should be changed in any way at all. I think that, if you were so convinced that that was the evidence before you, those submissions would have been public, a paper summarising those positions would have been public. But we have not seen that at all.

I think this is the beginning of taking away some of the control that the land councils have in the Northern Territory. I do not say that there would be no communities in the Northern Territory that want changes to the system. So why don’t you consult with Indigenous communities and, for those who want the changes to the permit system, do it? It would be quite easy to schedule those by regulation to say that you will make changes to the permit system when and if required by individual communities, but I do not see that happening.

I went to Maningrida nearly seven weeks ago along with the member for Lingiari, Warren Snowdon, and I made it my business to talk to the police in that community. I did not talk about this in my speech on Tuesday night because I was leaving it for now. The afternoon that we were there we sat with those five police officers and had a cuppa, and they said to us both categorically: ‘Look, to be quite honest with you, we rely on the permit system as our key to stopping intruders in this community. Twice in the last 12 months we’ve noticed strange vehicles in this community, and the permit system was our opportunity to stop those vehicles. The first one took off and we weren’t able to chase them. We were immediately suspicious then about why they didn’t stop, but they got away. The second one didn’t get away; we were able to stop them. They had a stash of marijuana under the seats in the back and we were able to prosecute them.’ That, to me, is real hard evidence that the permit system works.

The police officers I spoke to three weeks ago said to me, ‘The reality on the ground is that the federal government needs to put more police into communities’—and, let’s face it; it is not going to happen overnight in these 70 communities—’or, when they take away the permit system, give police the power to stop a car.’ For what reason? You actually have to have a reason to stop a car; you cannot just flag down a car and say, ‘You’re a stranger in this community; I want to search your car.’ The police tell me that, if the permit system is revoked on the main road, they will have no key, no mechanism, no trigger to stop, talk to or question people who may be suspect. The government has to seriously look at the implications of this on the ground and have a bit of common sense in this. I do not see any common sense prevailing in this.

I cannot believe that the federal government would turn their backs on the Northern Territory police force, on the Northern Territory Police Association and on the Australian Federal Police Association and say to those well respected members of those police forces, who seriously know what they are doing and seriously know how well the permit system can be used and implemented: ‘We know better than you. You guys out there on the ground are dealing with this 24/7, but your thoughts and ideas are really irrelevant in all of this.’ I would have thought that this week, with the Police Association meeting in Darwin and the strong representations that have come from the Australian Federal Police Force and from Vince Kelly, they would at least put a hold on this section of the legislation. They could just take it away and rethink it for another fortnight, and perhaps they say to themselves: ‘All right, we’ll make these changes but we’ll do it community by community, or we’ll implement these changes when more police get into communities.’ The way they are currently going about it does in no way in the world convince me that this is being done in the best interests of the children—in fact, quite the opposite.

The example that I gave earlier this evening is a real example. It was an example that moved the nationally renowned journalist from the Australian to write about it. He was so disturbed about it that he finally decided he would blow the lid on this operation between a senior traditional owner and a fellow from interstate. I heard what you said before, Senator Scullion, about the supply of Viagra, but, let us face it, you can get it over the internet. If you are like me and thousands of other Australians who access their email every day, the spam for the purchase of Viagra is coming at you day and night. You can buy it. You do not need a prescription and it is being peddled out there in the community. That is the reality.

This is the one area, I would have thought, in the whole saga of child abuse and child neglect that we have heard about that you might seriously try to turn around. But I am blowed if I can understand why you will not give either the land councils or the minister the power to revoke a permit if a TO is given that permit. I think that this sort of situation is going to be exacerbated. You know that as well as I do—you are from the Territory—and I think you know deep down that this is not going to work either.

Secondly, if you want to turn your back on the police forces in this country and suggest to them that you know better about how policing on the ground works, then I think you have seriously got this aspect of the legislation wrong. Finally, the irony is that somebody said to me the other day: ‘You know, Trish, if this government wants to abolish the permit system so that more tourists can go into the 70 communities, at the end of the day that will be the ultimate evaluation of this government. They have been an abysmal failure in Wadeye and a dramatic failure in Mutitjulu. So, if more tourists in this country witness what a devastating effect some of their policies have on these communities, maybe people on the eastern seaboard might suddenly wake up to what is actually going on in those communities and demand that more action be taken and the money be better targeted.’ Maybe at the end of the day, opening up these communities to more tourists might actually be the one form of scrutiny and evaluation that this federal government finally needs.