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

You are newer in this place than I am, Senator Scullion. You have to understand that when a sledgehammer is brought in you have a choice of going with it or going against it. This is sledgehammer legislation but there are good components to it. We are making it very clear that long before you came to this place we supported and were calling for the services that should be given to Indigenous Australians—for example, the half a billion dollars a year that is required to help close that 17-year gap in life expectancy that advantages non-Indigenous Australians over Indigenous Australians. To close that longevity gap would cost approximately half a billion dollars according the AMA, and there is a move in that direction but it is not in this legislation.

Let me go back to the point I was making. We absolutely support children having medical checkups as part of that program. As the task force commander, Major General Chalmers, revealed yesterday, the checks have uncovered a range of medical concerns including high levels of dental problems and skin, ear, nose and throat infections. It is long past time that the medical services that would fix those illnesses were available in these communities—for example, there are extraordinary statistics in relation to the loss of hearing because of ear infections in Indigenous communities. They largely come out of the failure to provide adequate medical advice—primary health care—and then treatment when the problems arise.

We have heard about the failure to provide adequate education facilities. There are thousands more places needed at schools if there are going to be the same attendance figures at these schools that we have elsewhere. But the point I am making here is that it would have been much better for the honourable Minister Brough to announce that he was going in to attack the dreadful statistics for Indigenous Australians dying young, not just in the Northern Territory but right across this country. You only have to look at the statistics in Redfern to see an example of that, fantastic though the medical services provided by the Indigenous community there are. Minister Brough did not use those statistics; he chose to pick on the equally appalling statistics of child sexual abuse—and so did the Prime Minister—as a fulcrum for this move.

All I am saying, because it needs to be put on the record, is that that was an extraordinarily damaging way to go about it. It was advantageous to the government but devastating for Indigenous communities. It was surely a political advantage for the government but a very great disadvantage for Indigenous Australians, who have enough to put up with in terms of the way in which they are publicly presented. I am glad that the medical interventions occurred, and I am glad that the high levels of health problems suffered by Indigenous children have been uncovered and will be fixed up. That is how it should have been decades ago, but now at last it is happening because the money and resources are being put in there. We did not need calumny about the Indigenous people to get this action going; that is my point. We cannot undo that now, but thinking about how Indigenous people are portrayed and their need for pride in self—the same need that all of us have—would have been a better way to go, from the outset. There is good coming out of this. I agree with Senator Scullion about that, and I congratulate the government for that, but it was most unfortunate the way that Minister Brough went about it and I hope he does not do that again.