Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also wish to speak on the Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (Emergency Response Consolidation) Bill 2008. I support the comments I have just had the pleasure of hearing from Senator Humphries. I also cannot support this bill in its current form. As Senator Humphries has outlined, amongst other matters this bill seeks to reintroduce is the now discredited permit system for entry onto Indigenous lands in the Northern Territory.

The permit system was originally established with the best interests of the Indigenous people of the Northern Territory in mind, but it is now abundantly clear that the system has become an Iron Curtain behind which crimes can be committed and children placed at risk. When this legislation was introduced into the other house by the Indigenous affairs minister, Jenny Macklin, she justified its reintroduction on the grounds that the permit system was a vital tool in stopping ‘rivers of grog’ from entering the communities in the Territory.

This very reason from the government has been dramatically undermined by police figures that were revealed in the Australian newspaper this week. According to these figures released by the Northern Territory police, the great majority of people who have been summonsed or arrested by police for bringing liquor into alcohol restricted communities in the Territory in the past 15 months were in fact Indigenous people, people who did not need permits to enter the land. The statistics show that there is no basis whatsoever for linking the flow of alcohol into communities to non-Indigenous grog runners or to the lack of a permit system. Rather, it is Indigenous individuals who are running grog and supplying it to their own people.

In reality, the problem of grog running in the Northern Territory is almost exclusively an Aboriginal related problem. The Territory police figures that were released this week show that, since 1 July last year, 98 Indigenous people have been summonsed for bringing liquor into a prescribed area, compared with five non-Indigenous people and one person of unknown descent. Police arrested 65 Indigenous people and two people of unknown descent for the offence. Police have said that 40 Indigenous people and three of unknown descent had been summonsed for consuming liquor within the prescribed area during that period, while 41 Indigenous people and one non-Indigenous person were arrested for this offence.

On that basis, it is deeply disappointing that the Rudd Labor government used its numbers in the House of Representatives to defeat an opposition amendment to this bill that would have allowed free movement into the townships of the communities. Of course, that was a key part of the original Territory intervention laws developed by the Howard-Costello government.

The Rudd government has argued that the permits protected Indigenous Territorians from negative outside influences, including alcohol, sexual predators and dodgy art dealers. I regard this as outrageous paternalism. What other Australian communities are protected by the government deciding who comes and goes? What other Australian communities would tolerate government or, for that matter, community leaders speaking on their behalf in terms of deciding who comes and goes? Most importantly, as alluded to by Senator Humphries, what other Australian community would feel safer because someone else was deciding on their behalf and without independent scrutiny who could come in and who could not?

In another context I have warned that the minute we treat any group in our community as special and put them in special places with special rules we invite corruption and perversion to flourish. Closing the doors or the gates and stopping normal social interaction is always wrong. The truth is, as the Northern Territory arrest figures show and as this government refuses to accept, the negative influences do not in the main come from outsiders. But even if that were true, this return to the bad old status quo without any sort of a trial of what openness and freedom might mean is absolutely the wrong answer.

Senator Humphries has spoken about the evidence taken by the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs in relation to the Northern Territory intervention, and I was struck during evidence that was given by the outright paternalism displayed by a number of Indigenous leaders, never mind the very strong evidence given by the journalist Paul Toohey. The committee heard a number of times that the permit system was there to protect naive and ingenuous people from outsiders. We were told by Indigenous leaders that, if this did not happen, vacuum cleaners would be sold to people who did not have carpets, people would buy mobile phones when there was no network coverage in the area and so on.

Firstly, there was no mention of drug or grog problems made by these leaders, and there was only grudging acknowledgement from them of any problems with violence or sexual abuse in these communities. I do not think that these witnesses were in any way deliberately trying to mislead our inquiry, but they were painting a far rosier picture than the reality. They were burying their heads in the sand in regard to the true source of dysfunction in their communities.

Secondly, not one of these witnesses suggested that teaching people to identify con men and tricksters might be another and perhaps a far better way to protect people from scams and abuse. There was no suggestion of overcoming ignorance with consumer education, just paternalistic protecting. Yet we had reports yesterday in the financial press that Indigenous landowners at Uluru are part of a consortium planning to bid for the $400 million Ayers Rock resort. If we want more Indigenous groups to have the skills to undertake projects such as this, to fully participate in economic development in the Territory and, dare I say it, to get jobs, then education about business and smart consumerism is surely a better answer than straight-out protective paternalism.

The police figures that were revealed by the Australian clearly demonstrate that these issues are, by and large, ones for Indigenous communities to fix from within. This cannot happen while communities pretend that the dangers are in fact coming from without and while communities are kept closed by leaders with paternalistic attitudes. The reintroduction of the permit system, a system which was designed to keep non-Indigenous Australians and others out, will not stop the vast majority of the grog runners, who happen to be Indigenous themselves, from entering Aboriginal lands and bringing contraband into communities.

The reintroduction of the permit system will mean that less light is shone on these perpetrators and that innocent and ingenuous people will go on being their victims, without any support or input to change this process by the government. If community leaders and grog runners act in collusion, as has been suggested in a number of areas, reintroducing the permit system means that other community members have very little chance to have their voices heard and that there is very little chance of anything except sustaining the system that currently oppresses them.

The communities are in fact in desperate need of intervention—they are in desperate need of being opened up to the expectations and help from the rest of the Australian community. We cannot do this by closing the doors and pretending that this is somehow beneficial to the people who are being cruelly paternalised by the system. The Howard-Costello government made some very significant and beneficial reforms for all Australians, and I believe that the Northern Territory intervention, which was a decision taken towards the end of our time in office, was one of the most important long-term decisions that the government made. As Senator Humphries pointed out, for 30 years governments of all persuasions have been acting in what they believed to be the best interests of Aboriginal people. They have acted with goodwill towards those people with their policies. But it is pretty clear that what we did up until the time of the intervention was not working. The horrific evidence from the Little children are sacred report was evidence that we had failed and failed miserably.

Now we have the opportunity through the legislation passed under the Howard-Costello government’s Northern Territory intervention to take a new approach—an approach that empowers and enables people. Yet one of the first acts of this government is to turn this on its head and to go back to the paternalistic protectionism that has allowed the problems that were outlined in the Little children are sacred report to flourish.

The Northern Territory intervention proposals, as adopted by the Howard-Costello government, if allowed to be seen through, if allowed to run their course, if allowed to be trialled properly, had the potential to dramatically improve the lives of many Indigenous Australians now and in the future. They had the potential to do this by giving people back their self-esteem and by giving people the power to change their own lives and not have some external group tell them what was in their best interests.

The Labor Party’s support for the hasty reintroduction of the permit system is both sad and dangerous. It demonstrates that the Rudd Labor government has not been able to stand up to the noisy special interest groups—some of them, sadly, within the social services industry itself—that have lobbied so loudly to reintroduce the system. It was a system that benefited them but not the people they were supposed to be helping. The government has not been able to stand up to other vested interests in the Northern Territory who, again, have their own perpetuation more at heart than the welfare of people from the Indigenous community. The Rudd Labor government has not been able to separate itself from the autocratic demands of the Left—the people who believe that they are the only ones who are right, that they are the only ones who understand. Certainly their history of success in this area would suggest that they are anything but the ones who understand or the ones who have the correct answers. The people from the autocratic Left are the ones who are so very concerned about rights, but they have no interest in responsibilities. In particular, they have no interest whatsoever in helping people to develop their own freedom of thought, expression and action, and they have no interest in the responsibility of every resident in the Territory to abide by the law, whether they are Indigenous, white Australian or non-Australian, or whether they are in communities or out of them.

I cannot support this bill in its current form and I would encourage other senators to give the abolition of the permit system time to work, particularly within the townships. Other Australians enjoy freedom of movement, freedom of expression and freedom of difference. If that is not an allowed commodity, we cannot hope to see any future development. I would ask other senators to oppose this area of the bill. Thank you.