Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will pick up on what Senator Macdonald was saying, although he was speaking mainly about Aurukun and I want to speak about Mabuiag Island. What happened last week was unbelievably shocking and the insensitivity of the Queensland health department knows no bounds. One really has to query how a nurse could have been treated in such a shocking way when she phoned the health department on Thursday Island and was told—I think the words reported were—‘It’s an unfortunate incident, you being raped, but get over it and catch the next plane to Thursday Island.’ She was not able to do that because the police were coming over by boat and in the long term her fiance had to hire a helicopter to get her out and take her over to Badu Island.

This was reported by Mr Tony Koch, a very reliable and knowledgeable reporter, particularly on Indigenous affairs. I think Australia owes Tony Koch a lot because he has exposed what has been happening, sometimes very sympathetically towards the Indigenous people. He has opened the debate on what has been going on in some of these Indigenous communities. Only a month or two ago he raised the issue of a 10-year-old girl being raped and the perpetrators of the crime being given a warning. His exposure of what happened on Mabuiag Island in the Torres Strait last week really put a chill down everyone’s spine. A nurse was sent to an island—I suppose the island would have 100 people living on it. Her quarters had no locks, no airconditioning and no blinds and she was left there exposed to what eventually happened.

I raise this issue because I have read that the federal government will appoint a commissioner to take some interest in Queensland Health. If this is the case then I think one of the first priorities for the federal government should be to investigate people who are put in these positions on islands or in communities and have no security, whether they be policemen, nurses or doctors.

Unfortunately, I have not been to the Torres Strait for a number of years, but I used to go there fairly frequently, and I could never believe that this sort of behaviour would take place. It certainly would not have taken place 10 or 15 years ago. But I think, as Senator Macdonald has said, that with the porn, the booze and the drugs that have gone in there the whole ethics of the islands have changed. This would never have happened 10 or 15 years ago, and I cannot believe that it has happened now—but it has. A woman, a nurse, was left alone to look after the community, to serve the community. It is a great hardship to be treated like that.

We can pour scorn on the health department—and they deserve every bit of scorn that could be poured on them—but where I am coming from is looking at a more positive aspect of this. If the federal government is appointing a federal health commissioner to liaise with the health department in Queensland, then surely this has got to be a priority of this government to take some action on.

We are also seeing the unwinding of the intervention. People in the communities will be asked whether they want pornographic literature and pornographic movies to be allowed in. If you allow that sort of stuff in, you are going to suffer the consequences. The consequences happened at Mabuiag Island last week. For everyone’s sake, no-one wants to override Indigenous people, but we cannot just allow this to continue. All Australian people want the Indigenous communities to succeed, but everyone realises the talkfests are over. They have been going on for 20 or 30 years and it is time to finish them. The Howard government realised that and took action. Yes, it was unpleasant for some people, but overall it did have overwhelming support. I am appealing for none of that to be watered down. It is necessary. It is absolutely necessary when you go into these Aboriginal and Islander communities.

So I say to the people on the opposite side who have some influence with the federal government: if a federal health commissioner is appointed to liaise with the Queensland health department, for goodness sake make it the commissioner’s first priority to see that the people in these remote communities do have some security and somewhere that they do not have to lock themselves in, if they have locks on the door. Give them some sort of peace at night, which they do not have. I take this opportunity to make those few remarks.

Question agreed to.