Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I really do not think that is good enough—though I know that will not make any difference. Quite frankly, that is the sort of assurance we got for the COAG trials. People said: ‘It would be too early to tell,’ ‘We’re waiting on the formal review,’ ‘We’ve got mixed results,’ and ‘We think things are going well in some areas.’ We got all the double-speak. It took us years to find out that the trials had been a total and utter failure, that we had totally failed the people who were subject to the trials and that we had made a complete hash of it. I got reassurances for a long period of time—’It is too early,’ ‘We need to have a formal assessment.’ There were plenty of reassuring words, but money was going down the tube, Indigenous people were not getting the services they deserved and the grand experiment—the ‘quiet revolution’ was the title for that one—was proving to be an abject failure. The revolution was a squib and the people who suffered as a result of the failure of the revolution were the Indigenous people upon whom we were conducting that particular experiment.

As this approach is experimental and quite radical, we ought to be much more focused on review. We ought to be focused on KPIs. I would like to see the KPIs contained in the legislation. We talk the language inside the Public Service, but we do not put it into the bills. I would like to know who is accountable for this stuff and who is going to lose their job if it does not happen as planned. I do not want to have a crack at the FaCSIA officials, but no politician and no departmental official is responsible when failure occurs. We are being asked again to take it on trust. I hope it works; I really hope it works. But it is another experiment; it is another stab in the dark. This government has had three or four; we had a few when we were in government. None of them worked; none of them made a fundamental difference to the lives of the people in these communities.

I do not want to give you a blank cheque. I do not think that the parliament ought to give you a blank cheque. The parliament ought to force the minister and the government, of whatever persuasion, back into this place to say, ‘Yes, it has worked in terms of alcohol control, but school attendances have not improved,’ or whatever the outcome is and explain what is working, what is not working and why not. We should not just give you a blank cheque so that someone can quietly drop a report that the opposition spokesperson has to find by nefarious means, that says that the whole thing was a disaster and that for the last year or two people have been skating around admitting that it was a disaster. That is not good enough. It is not good enough in terms of public administration, but it is also not good enough for the Indigenous people.

I think that this is an important amendment. I am not reassured by the minister. It would be a huge blue to not demand accountability for the measures that we take. We need key performance indicators and a real sense of accountability from the policymakers and those delivering the service. We say that these measures are going to improve Aboriginal people’s lives. Let us prove it; let us hold ourselves accountable. The minister’s response reeks as being the sort of response we have had for every other experiment: things are allowed to quietly slip away as the political attention and the circus moves on and no-one is held accountable for the fact that we did not deliver to Indigenous people what we promised. I think that this is the most important clause that should be in the bill, but I know that it will not get carried. I and others will be much more assiduous about ensuring that there is proper reporting and measurement than perhaps we have been in the past.