Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Indigenous Affairs (Senator Scullion) to a question without notice asked by the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate (Senator Wong) today relating to funding for programs for Indigenous Australians.

I want to refer to SNAICC , which is the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care . It is the peak body for Indigenous children in Australia. Currently in Parliament House there is a delegation of 40 people who have come from services across Australia to campaign for a fair go for Indigenous children. They are deeply concerned about the inattention in the new jobs for families package for Indigenous children and families. They have been told that budget based funding services will be transitioned across to the new package but have been given no detail on how or when this will occur. They are rightly perplexed that the new package, which is focused solely on child care, could even be considered to be applied to services which do not fund child care but rather play groups and family support. Of those which do provide child care, 43 of the 46 budget based services are facing closure under the new model. Budget based services are not exclusively Indigenous but 80 per cent of them are.

In addition to the main issues with the budget based services, SNAICC have three major problems with the jobs for families package. Firstly, as the name implies, it is focused solely on workplace participation. It needs to factor in workplace participation and early childhood development. For restrictive access principles under the new policy, an estimated 78 per cent of Indigenous children participating in the BBF program will have their access halved because they do not meet the activity test. Research has shown that children who benefit more from early childhood education and care are the very children have will be shut out of these essential services.

Secondly, the package is modelled on urban centres and no consideration has been given to the economic realities for rural and remote communities. We have been told that the safety net provisions will enable families to continue to access care. However, this funding is kept at $300 million over four years and will be open to competitive tender.

Further, money for families experiencing temporary difficulty circumstances will force families to choose which area of deficit applies to them in order to access funding to enable these services to continue. SNAICC advocate that a dedicated stream of funding be established for Aboriginal children and their families that is not predicated on pigeonholing Indigenous families as socially disadvantaged and at risk.

I just want to go to some very unhelpful comments made by Dennis Jensen, the member for Tangney. They did not help this situation at all. I have been to Baya Gawiy and I have met with the workers, families and children. Baya Gawiy in Fitzroy Crossing in Western Australia is an Aboriginal community controlled early childhood education centre that meets the needs of families in Fitzroy Crossing, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. Three-quarters of their families are Aboriginal and 70 per cent of them are working families. Ironically, under the new package, families would have to pay around $170 per child per day for those earning under $65,000 a year. This is clearly unaffordable and will drive working families out of employment in order to care for their children. The reason the costs are so high in communities like Fitzroy Crossing is due to fixed economic costs which cannot be changed through the three-year sustainability funding that the government seems to believe will resolve these issues.

In closing, I call upon Minister Birmingham to engage directly with SNAICC and its members' services to craft a fair package to meet the needs of all Australian children, not just those from middle-class working families. I am personally insulted that this minister, Minister Birmingham, has deigned not to meet this delegation while they are here in Canberra this week. Further, the bureaucracy must provide the details of the full extent of the package because the devil is in the detail. I will stress this one more time: it is all very well for a minister to take the $300,000-plus pay packet that comes with the job, but they should have the decency to meet the people who know what is going on on the ground, particularly in my part of the world—the remote communities up in the Kimberley.