Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens, as I think this place would be fully aware, did not support the nature of the intervention that the previous government put in place just over a year ago. We absolutely agreed that there needed to be a vast improvement in the amount of resources that were spent and the way things were done in the Northern Territory, but for the coalition to put the argument that everyone was shocked when the Little children are sacred report came out means they were not paying attention. There is a pile of documents this high that, over the last 20 years, have tried to point out the issues that were at stake here, the level of abuse that was going on in Aboriginal communities, the disadvantage of Aboriginal communities, the lack of access to proper education, the lack of access to adequate health resources. Where have they have been? Where were they for those two decades? Where were they for the 11 years they were in government? At one minute to midnight, just before an election, they suddenly discovered that there was a problem, that there was a 17-year gap in the life expectancy of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. I have been shocked for 20 years; they were shocked in June 2007. What a lot of nonsense! To use that as justification for taking people’s land away, for taking people’s rights away, for undermining and exempting what they were doing from the Racial Discrimination Act is absolutely disingenuous—I must point out that is one of my favourite words at the moment.