Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to take the opportunity here, because there is not one elsewhere, to ask the minister about a report by Ashleigh Wilson and Patricia Karvelas in today’s Australian which says that:

... 850 indigenous children have received health checks across—

20 communities in—

the Northern Territory in the first phase of the Howard Government’s intervention in Aboriginal communities.

The operational commander of the taskforce, Major General David Chalmers, revealed yesterday that the checks had uncovered a range of medical concerns, including high levels of dental problems and skin, ear, nose and throat infections.

But Major General Chalmers said he was not aware of health workers notifying authorities of any cases of child sexual assault.

No allegations of abuse have been passed to Territory police since the intervention began.

When Mr Brough announced this national emergency, it was on the basis of the threat to children. That is a real threat and the figures used in this debate point to that. I quote from his press release of 21 June 2007:

The emergency measures to protect children being announced today are a first step that will provide immediate mitigation and stabilising impacts in communities that will be prescribed ... The measures include:

…            …            …

Introducing compulsory health checks for all Aboriginal children to identify and treat health problems and any effects of abuse.

Not discounting the devastating impact of child abuse in all communities in Australia—it happens in Canberra, in Sydney and in the Northern Territory—wasn’t the minister, on a racial basis, making a point of child abuse, which he overdid, to facilitate the argument for his intervention? As a result, the whole Indigenous community in Australia has suffered. He said that the point here was to have compulsory health checks. These were held up as an immediate need. We had pictures of doctors with stethoscopes going to the Northern Territory to check children ‘to identify any effects of abuse’—to quote the minister. And the first 850 checks have found zero effects of abuse.

Having been a doctor myself, I understand that, if it does not turn up in the history, you are unlikely to find the abuse, because you are not going to look for it. But on the day this announcement was made I also made it clear that it would be a breach of medical ethics and of the law to compulsorily examine children—those were the terms being used—for sexual abuse. Has the minister had time to review the overstatement and the abuse of Indigenous people right across the country that came out of those statements to proceed with this measure that the government wanted to proceed with, and all the things we have been talking about in this parliament going ahead anyway because the government has got the numbers to do it?

I ask the minister: didn’t his colleague Mal Brough make a very unfortunate mistake in the up-front assertion that there was an urgent need for compulsory health checks of all Aboriginal children—not others, but Aboriginal children—to identify any effects of sexual abuse? In fact, those checks have not discovered sexual abuse. Other means, like policing, are required to discover that. What appalled me about this process was the language used and the implications in the language used to brand Indigenous Australians in this way. I think it was reprehensible and regrettable. It was not needed. The government has the outcome.

The point here was that for the first time the Commonwealth moved to put an enormous amount of money compared to past times—not enough yet—into giving the health services, the education facilities, the community services and the upgrading of housing that are required to help Indigenous people to overcome the enormous disadvantage of neglect by governments at territory, state and federal level over decades. We agree with the government putting the resources at last where they are needed.

What I disagreed with from the outset was Minister Brough using the matter of sexual abuse, which has to be attacked wherever it is—in non-Indigenous or Indigenous communities. I give those figures again of 34,000 reportable cases of child abuse in the last year for which there are statistics, some 6,000 relating to Indigenous communities. That is a disproportionate amount, but nevertheless we are in the situation where the laws here are going to allow the invasion of people’s homes and the surveillance of Indigenous people but not of white people. Sexual abuse of children, wherever it occurs, has the same destructive impact on people’s lives. I think it was enormously unfortunate that Mr Brough and the Prime Minister used that one measurement of distress in Indigenous communities to try and win over the political support that was required for the measures that are going through this parliament today—regrettable and unnecessary. A real concern for Indigenous Australians would not have allowed it to be pitched that way.