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

I rise to make a contribution to the discussion on this report, Commonwealth Indigenous Advancement Strategy tendering processes. I initiated it—and it was with the support of the chamber, of course, that this committee inquiry was undertaken—because of the enormous feedback that we got from the community about how disruptive the IAS process was. The inquiry has established that in fact it was enormously disruptive to the process. We had a final hearing in Canberra, but the one just before that, in late February, was in Darwin. There, even 12 months down the track, organisations are still feeling the effects of the disruption from this process. The committee inquiry overwhelmingly confirmed that sense of disruption and confusion and how disheartened people were by this process.

I build on the comments that Senator Peris made, because she has also described what we found during the inquiry. I too would like to quote from Mr Gooda, who is quoted in the report. He said:

Respectful engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples regarding these significant changes was conspicuous by its absence; there was little or no input from Indigenous peoples, their leaders or their respective organisations into the design or the implementation of the tendering processes.

Mr Rod Little, the Director of the National Congress of Australia's First Peoples, also reported that they had not been consulted at the beginning of the process and suggested that there should have been greater involvement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the design and delivery of the IAS. Those comments were reiterated and reiterated by witnesses and in the large number of submissions that we received.

So what did the government do after that? The government said, 'Okay, we'd better go and find out afterwards what people think, what they thought of the process.' So they did some consultation after the fact, but then they gave short notice to people to attend those meetings. They developed a new set of guidelines—which, as Senator Peris outlined, seem to have been delayed again—but there is going to be no consultation on those guidelines. Those guidelines are coming out as the final guidelines. Once again, we are seeing a top-down approach to the way the IAS is rolled out.

One of the recommendations that Senator Peris outlined—there are nine recommendations in the majority report, and the Greens have two more in our additional comments, and I will come to those in a moment—was:

The committee recommends that the Government release the revised funding guidelines as a draft for consultation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and their organisations.

And I really encourage the government to listen to this process, because when this announcement was made, gaps were immediately identified in the funding process. Youth services in Central Australia were just not funded. Up in the Kimberley, the domestic violence and women's shelter was not funded. You could go around Australia and find service after service not funded. If you look at the government's additional comments to this report, you see that they talk about the disruption and they say:

Government senators acknowledge that this process has been disruptive for organisations and some organisations have missed out on funding.

Yes, it has been disruptive and organisations have argued very strongly to us that that disruption was not worth it, because it has not delivered better outcomes.

The government then went on to quote Mr Tongue, from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, saying:

However the government is determined to ensure that money is serving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities best, therefore it should be provided to organisations which are achieving positive outcomes.

The fact is that the government did not do an audit of what services were available and who was doing a good job. So that is a nonsense. Government senators also go on to talk about the need for increased transparency. This process has not increased transparency. It is extremely hard to find the information on who was funded and who was not. We still do not definitively know which organisations were not funded. The committee also recommended that 'future tender rounds are not blanket competitive processes' because—and this is really important—that process undermines Aboriginal organisation, and that those processes should be 'underpinned by robust service planning and needs mapping'.

The committee talks about the guidelines—and this is particularly important—and recommends that the 'selection criteria and funding guidelines should give weighting to the contribution and effectiveness of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations to provide to their community beyond the service they are directly contracted to provide'. We also talk about the need to support Aboriginal organisations to participate in the processes, because we found that larger organisations were basically able to out-compete smaller organisations because they could take on consultants.

I know that a number of people want to contribute to debates this afternoon, so I am going to wind up very shortly. The Greens put in two additional recommendations. We urged the government to reinstate the funding to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander programs. As Senator Peris clearly pointed out, so much money was taken out of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander programs during the 2014-15 budget. That should be reinstated. We also need to particularly look at the funding gap that has been identified for legal services in the Barkly region.