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

I will speak to the Labor amendments which, as I understand them, seek to provide us with a bit of a halfway house from the government’s approach. The Democrats prefer an approach, which is reflected later on, to just scrap the schedule altogether. I still have not seen any evidence that it is necessary. I have heard plenty of assertions. We got a few assertions at the Senate inquiry and some during the debate in the chamber but I have not actually seen any evidence that this works. We got one page given to us without notice in the Senate committee hearing by officials from FaCSIA and, without being too harsh, it was not the most thorough in-depth justification I have read for a significant public policy change. It was basically a few dot points with a few assertions.

There are a couple of issues here. I am not here to defend the permit system as the be-all and end-all that should never be touched—I do not really see that as something I can speak about with sufficient justification—but I certainly feel quite justified in saying that it is not something that should be touched without consultation and at least some indication of a reasonable amount of consent from the people affected. It has been a longstanding provision and I have not seen any solid evidence, as opposed to theories and assertions, that it causes the sorts of problems that are being alleged. But we are certainly quite happy to look at it if evidence is provided. Even so, it is clearly far better to do that, unless it is absolutely necessary, with some reasonable degree of consent and consultation. I have reasonable suspicion that there would possibly be a few places that would not mind having some variation to the system, but having a review with secret submissions that are not published and then saying that you have made a decision on the basis of that is not exactly terribly comforting.

Going back to the specific link here, we are told that we have to do this now without consultation and without consent because it is an emergency and the emergency is linked to child sexual abuse and assault. But there has been no evidence at all to suggest that the permit system in any way exacerbates the problem. We are getting dodgy logic: that the permit system is in place in some communities and there is abuse in those communities therefore the permit system is not stopping it. Whatever the permit system was set up to do, I do not think that it was ever set up to stop child abuse. We have child abuse, it needs to be said, and child sexual assault at very serious levels in pretty much every town and community in the country to varying degrees, and to quite high degrees in many parts of the non-Indigenous community. That has been acknowledged by this chamber by a range of resolutions and, indeed, by the minister himself, Minister Brough. It is a very serious problem across the country—and that is everywhere where there ain’t no permit system!

The idea that by opening up a community, people will be able to see what is going on and they will see that there is child sexual abuse somewhere and it will stop, or people will not do it because there are other people wandering through their communities, is just ludicrous. People can think that way in regard to any city or any town of any size in the country. In many respects, it is the most secretive of grievous offences for all sorts of reasons. To link the permit system to child sexual assault and say that it gets in the way of that being mitigated, let alone eliminated, and to do that without evidence, is pretty lame, frankly, and that is being polite.

The wider issue then added on top of that is that it gets in the way of economic development et cetera. There is a debate that could be had there but it should not be tied to an emergency situation to do with child sexual abuse. I fully accept—before I get immediately misrepresented again—that improving the economic situation in some of these places would probably improve the strength of the community and reduce some of the psychological and social malaise that can be a contributing factor to child neglect and assault. I am certainly not saying that it does not matter whether we get improved economic circumstances, but that should be a more thorough debate rather than ramming this through under the guise of an emergency to do with child sexual abuse.

Again, I would ask, even on that point, whether there is some actual, decent, documented evidence, a good, peer-reviewed, thorough study, that demonstrates that those communities that have the permit system, on average, have a worse economic situation or worse child abuse statistics than those Aboriginal communities without the permit system. Certainly, in my state of Queensland, there are a number of communities and areas where there are serious problems with child neglect and abuse and there are serious problems with no economic development, and there is no permanent system in almost all of those. Senator Scullion mentioned a community before—I am not sure whether I can remember it now—that he was praising as being wonderful. Maybe it was the Daly River.