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

The Greens will be opposing the opposition’s amendment to this bill. I endorse the comments of Senator Crossin. In all the travelling that I have done in the Northern Territory—which I acknowledge is nowhere near as extensive as Senator Crossin’s and Senator Scullion’s—I have overwhelmingly been told that the communities want to retain the permit system. The evidence to the Senate committee from communities all said, ‘We want to keep the permit system.’ When Minister Brough introduced this legislation, in particular these measures to abolish the permit system, he referred specifically—and I know Senator Crossin touched on this in her speech on the second reading as well—to the review of the permit system conducted by FaCSIA in February 2007 and used that to justify taking away the permit system. He implied that there was a large level of community dissatisfaction with the permit system. In fact, he even said that in his second reading speech:

The government has been considering changing the system since it announced a review in September 2006 and the changes follow the release of a discussion paper in October 2006 and the receipt of almost 100 submissions.

Over 40 communities were visited during consultations following the release of the discussion paper. It was disturbing to hear from officials conducting the consultations that numerous people came up to them after the consultations, saying that the permit system should be removed. … They were afraid to say this in the public meetings.

However, despite requests, the minister refused to release this report and did not substantiate his claims of the numerous calls to remove the permit system.

In evidence to the committee of inquiry into this bill, the Law Council of Australia, through a freedom of information request, found:

All 80 consultations—

and the minister, I might add, said almost 100—

revealed unanimous support among Aboriginal communities, individuals and organisations for NO CHANGE to the permit system.

The minister was implying that a lot of people came up after consultations and implied that really they could not say they did not want the permit system when they were in the consultations. But these submissions said, ‘No, we don’t want any change.’ The submission from the Law Council of Australia said that they could find no record, in any of the documentation provided, to support the minister’s claims that individual community members had made private submissions to departmental officers. All the records showed that the submissions and the consultation process supported no change to the permit system.

The Greens have said all along that we do not support the permit system. Besides that, we have seen no evidential base to support the abolition of the permit system. The rationale given for its abolition in fact seems to be at odds with the evidence that was provided during the official consultations, which clearly the minister hoped would say, ‘Yes, the community wants change,’ but which in fact said, ‘No, we don’t want change.’

It has often been said that we need the permit system so that people can go in and reveal the child abuse in these communities. But for 20-odd years report after report has indicated the level of disadvantage, child neglect and child abuse in communities, and do you know what? They were done with the permit system in place. Governments of various ilks failed to take any notice of those reports. But, when it became politically advantageous to the then government to start raising those issues, all of a sudden it was the permit system that was hiding this child abuse. We knew about it; we just did not do anything about it! There was nothing in the Little children are sacred report that said, ‘Take away the permit system’; it was what the minister wanted. The government had been after it for ages and could not achieve it, so they used this excuse to get rid of it. To be fair, Minister Brough had been absolutely clear about his agenda; he just could not achieve it. So he used this as a way of achieving that agenda. There is no evidence that communities want to get rid of the permit system; there is ample evidence that they want to keep it. That evidence was provided to the Senate committee and it has been provided to me in innumerable emails.

Senator Crossin mentioned that when she was on Elcho Island people were screwing up how-to-vote cards. I would also put to this place that it is no coincidence that the Greens vote in the NT went up substantially during the last election, and I would say it partly reflected our strong stance on the intervention and our strong opposition to changes to the permit system. It is very clear that communities do not want the permit system removed. If this chamber does not support this legislation it is flying in the face of what the community wants, again taking a paternalistic, discriminatory approach to the Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. I have not had one email, letter or phone call from an Aboriginal person in a community saying: ‘Senator, you are wrong. You shouldn’t be supporting the permit system. We want you to support getting rid of it.’ Not one! The Greens will be strongly opposing the opposition’s amendment. We support the government’s intention and the amendments in this bill to ensure that the permit system in the Northern Territory remains.