Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In his remarks just now, Senator Farrell has reaffirmed a tone that we have heard again and again from Labor members speaking about the Northern Territory intervention. The Australian government’s official position is that it supports the intervention. It is in favour of the intervention. It gave support to the Howard government when it made the decision to intervene in the Northern Territory and provide a sweeping range of services and changes in those communities that were affected. Yet when Labor members and senators rise in places like this as well as outside in the community to speak about the intervention, they dip their comments in vitriol. They spike them with criticisms and reservations about the intervention. They tell us more reasons why we should not support the intervention than reasons why we should.

The fact is that the Australian Labor Party is deeply ambivalent about this major social reform in the Northern Territory, but they do not have the courage to say to the Australian community, ‘We are not in favour of this and we intend to undo it,’ because before the last federal election they did not think the Australian people wanted to hear that. As a result, they decided to say to the Australian people: ‘Yes. We support the Howard government’s decision to intervene in the Northern Territory.’ This is summed up by what one reporter said in the Australian, quoting a Labor MP:

One MP said: ‘We didn’t want to get into a debate about this before the election but we have to relook at it now.

This was just after the federal election in November. Indeed, that is true and Senator Farrell’s comments have confirmed that yet again. This flip-flopping, this inconsistency about the legislation does Labor no credit because it sends the signal to both Indigenous Australians and other Australians that Labor’s position just cannot be pinned down, that they are sort of in one camp and they are sort of in another. I do not think that serves this community very well.

I want to say that I am very clear about my position. I think the intervention is conceptually right. It is appropriate and necessary for us to move into communities which are extremely dysfunctional and provide services and support to deal with immediate and real problems. That is what the intervention was intended to do. That is what the intervention has succeeded in doing in many places. No-one pretends, least of all the previous government, that the intervention was the complete solution to the myriad problems facing Indigenous Australia. But we believed then and we believe now that action to deal with immediate and real problems, particularly those affecting the welfare and safety of children, was absolutely required.

Senator Farrell was at pains to point out that he did not feel we had done anything about the welfare of people in Indigenous communities, but he then proceeded to list a whole range of activities that were taking place: welfare reform, clean-up community programs, community stores and school nutrition programs. He read from the latest FaHCSIA Operation Update, the operation headed by Major General Dave Chalmers, who spoke to the inquiry of which I was a part. Those things, of course—in case Senator Farrell was unaware—were facilitated, were only possible, by virtue of the Howard government’s decision to intervene in the Northern Territory. That is what we did. It happened while you were in office, but we initiated that program; we made it possible. I think that it falls back on Senator Farrell and his colleagues on the other side of the chamber to work out where they are going with all of this. Are they in favour of decisive action to deal with the indicators, at least the symptoms, of dislocation, dysfunction and societies which are in need of urgent repair, or do they wish to sit back and mouth platitudes about this or make claims like that made by Senator Farrell in this debate that we are going to fix this problem, obviously using some different mechanism from the one that is being put in place and which they have inherited?

I have to say that I contribute to this debate more in sorrow than in anger about the way in which this is all proceeding. We have here an unpicking of key elements of the former government’s legislation, again without a coherent alternative strategy being laid out for us all to see. If Labor came to this place and said, ‘Here is our alternative; we have a new scheme to deal with the problems of Indigenous Australia, which everyone can understand and talk about and it’s all laid out for us to discuss,’ I would feel a little more confident that they knew what they were doing. But I see here a series of changes which are designed to appease certain stakeholders with whom they have a certain relationship. They made a promise to get the permit system back in place and they promised to do something about access to narrowcasting in these communities, and they do not really particularly care whether or not that fits within a coherent system of policy towards Indigenous Australia.

I want to deal with some of the issues that the legislation deals with. One, of course, is the permit system, which has been much discussed. We believe that the permit system presents a series of real problems to the environment in which we face these issues, and we believe that the permit system needs to be seriously reconsidered. We note that, in the course of the inquiry conducted by the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs, there had not been a single formal complaint about the abolition of the permit system under the 2007 legislation. We think that the evidence is highly ambivalent about whether or not the permit system is successful and, as such, it is a mistake to pull away from the reforms that we made in this area with so little evidence available about whether those reforms might have been successful.

We had a number of witnesses give evidence to the committee and, although it is true that many of the Indigenous stakeholders and their advocates or spokespeople defended the permit system, there was other very powerful evidence against it—and as members of this place would know we do not operate on a poll system, we do not tick off the number of people for or against a proposition to determine that that is the way we decide whether or not an idea is supported; we look at the quality of argument. The argument put by Paul Toohey, a senior journalist with News Ltd, who spent a long time in the Northern Territory, were very compelling arguments, ones which the committee took very seriously. He said to the committee:

I think it is a tragedy that the permit system will be reintroduced for townships.

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Keeping these townships closed is backwards, negative and basically a dangerous act which does not help anyone. No-one has any issue with requiring people to have a permit to access the vast holdings of Aboriginal land. The roads leading to them and the townships are a different issue altogether. If people want to practice their culture, protect their land, protect their sites, run businesses on their land and require people to have permits, so they should. It is land that had been won under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act or vested even earlier than that. I fully support Aboriginal people having total control over that except on the roads and the towns where there are schools, clinics, police stations and shops. I fail to see why these places need to be closed.

Indeed, he makes a very good point. We are not talking about the entirety of Indigenous land when we say that the permit system should be wound back. We are talking about those places which, in any other community in Australia, would be considered public places: places around schools, roads leading into and out of communities, areas around shops, police stations—those areas where you close access to the outside world and you create closed communities. Philosophically, I think, we need to ask ourselves whether that is a wise position from which to advance a series of solutions to problems which themselves involve the perpetration of acts and crimes behind closed doors. That is the issue we are facing here: what is being done to people, particularly to women and children, behind closed doors in situations where the law has not been able to reach them or protect them. To perpetuate the problem of closed communities around those issues is, philosophically, I think a mistake. I am not being dogmatic about this. I do not say that the permit system is absolutely wrong and should necessarily go. What I am saying is that the reforms put in place only last year should be given a chance to work, to be tested, to see whether they actually make a positive difference to the outcomes for people in those communities, as unquestionably some other aspects of the legislation have been successful for those communities.

I notice that Warren Mundine, the erstwhile President of the Labor Party, has also made some comments on the question of accessibility to communities. On 26 January this year, he said:

If you want to create a real economy you’re going to have to have more commercial activity happening and that happens by allowing people to flow in and out of places.

On another occasion last year he said:

I think we should take advantage of what the former government did. We have to build on that. The biggest fear I have is that we start to fall back into our old ways and start some of the failed policies of the past.

Another journalist, Nicholas Rothwell, in an article entitled ‘Back to a system that permits social rot’, wrote:

The primary effect of permits has long been to cut off remote Aboriginal societies from the outside world: to hinder economic activity, to kill tourist curiosity, to protect the incompetent administrators and local leaders presiding over their dysfunctional little kingdoms.

Those are strong words. Perhaps they are too strong, but they create an environment where I think we ought to reconsider the rush to put in place changes so soon after this set of reforms was installed by the previous government.

The legislation also winds back the arrangements made by the former government with respect to narrowcasting of pornographic material into these communities. Again, the government has not seen fit to let these changes take root before they are prepared to weed them out. We do not believe that this material benefits Indigenous communities, particularly when there is obviously a high rate of sexual crime, and we think it is important to make sure that communities are protected against this kind of material being accessible to them. The effect of the government’s legislation is to make protecting those communities harder to achieve. That is the effect of what they are doing. It will be harder to achieve the kinds of insulating programs that the previous government put in place. I do not think that the government has justified that change. The industry, when they came before the community affairs committee, attempted to justify their support for winding back the policy—in other words, their continuing capacity to sell their products into these communities—and they were comprehensively unconvincing. They argued that there was a constitutional reason why you could not prevent Indigenous communities from having access to this material. Their attempt to justify that was, frankly, quite pathetic and they suggested that there were all sorts of technical difficulties with being able to engineer this change. I am completely unconvinced and I think the industry’s self-serving statements in these circumstances were quite transparent.

Senator Farrell, in his remarks, also made comments on Senator Adams’s remarks about the cost of living and attempted to link that with Work Choices. The fact remains, of course, that there are far too few Indigenous people in the Northern Territory who are in employment. One of the measures that we could see benefiting from the winding back of the permit system is the capacity for more commercial activity in Indigenous communities and the prospect of real employment to be created as a result.

We need to carefully consider whether we are making a serious mistake by this piecemeal approach to undoing the good that was done with the raft of reforms by the previous government. Nobody wants to pretend that this is more than it actually is. Nobody—on this side at least—wants to pronounce that we have discovered the magic bullet that will solve the problems of disadvantage and disempowerment in Indigenous Australia. They are very real problems, they are very severe problems, they are problems that will take generations and a succession of governments to solve. I think Senator Farrell was extremely brave to say, ‘We are going to fix this problem.’ I do not think it is mere coincidence that governments of both persuasions over at least 30 years have failed to do that. We need to test propositions empirically and see whether they are capable of relieving the underlying causes of those problems I just referred to.

We have a review being conducted into the Northern Territory intervention package. That review is due to be released to the community at the end of this month. But today, in the middle of the month, we are debating the repeal of certain elements of that legislation. The question is: why have the government seen fit to unpick certain elements of it at this stage? I think it is because they have made promises and they have people to appease, and since they do not have an overarching narrative to give us about where they are heading on Indigenous affairs, it does not really matter if you move certain bits of that around because it does not affect the overall picture at the end of the day. I do not commend this legislation. I suggest the Senate should look at it very seriously. I particularly commend the amendments which have been moved by Senator Bernardi. I suggest that we take steps to ensure that we protect the value of the reforms that have been put in place and acknowledge and try to consolidate the gains that have been made as a result of the NT intervention to date.