Pauline Hanson (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I asked a question today of the government: do they believe in Indigenous identity fraud? The answer I got from the government was no, they don't believe in fraud. I asked also: would they support a motion that I put for a parliamentary inquiry by the Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee or another committee to actually investigate it? On both counts I got a no. I think this needs to be drawn attention to because we have a referendum coming up with regard to the Voice to Parliament. Therefore, you're going to have 24 people who will be nominated to represent the Indigenous people. In all fairness, if we are asking for a Voice to Parliament there should be an Aboriginal voice, but there's no clarity by the government.

Let me state the cases here. In 1997-98, there was a case where the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre went to the Federal Court to challenge the eligibility of 11 people to stand for election to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. The head of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, Michael Mansell, declared that there were more phoney than real Aborigines in Tasmania, and more than half the voters in the 1996 ATSIC election were not Aboriginal. Mansell said that if properly investigated about 60 per cent of Tasmanian Aborigines would be rejected and nationally up to 70,000 self-proclaimed Aborigines would be denied their claimed identity.

We have another case, which is a court case from July 2000. Alan Appo of Bundaberg, Queensland, was charged in the Townsville Magistrates Court with a breach of the Fisheries Act by illegally catching undersize and female mud crabs. He was represented by Townsville Aboriginal Legal Aid and argued that, because he was an Aboriginal, fishing restrictions did not apply to him. However, a cousin of his, who was the daughter of an Aboriginal man, told the fisheries officers that Appo was not of Aboriginal descent and that his family's heritage was purely Sri Lankan. She complained that the 66-year-old and more than 100 members of his extended family had been practising the deception for more than 30 years. In that time, they had received millions of dollars worth of benefits, including housing loans, business loans, study grants, employment preferences and legal assistance. These are just a number of cases.

We also have the much-publicised recent scandal of Bruce Pascoe's fraudulent claim to be an Aboriginal man. Nothing is new or unique. Pascoe's forbearers are all English, mainly from Cornwall, and his genealogy contains no Aboriginal ancestry at all. However, this has not concerned the judges of the state premiers' lucrative literary prizes supposedly reserved for Indigenous writers or the academic committee at the University of Melbourne, who disregarded Pascoe's lack of any postgraduate qualifications or contributions to academic journals.

The numbers go on. There was another one who actually claimed to be Aboriginal—Bobbi Sykes, a one-time teenage striptease dancer who, on the strength of her journalism and activism, became well-known as an Aboriginal identity and advocate for the black power. Even though she had no undergraduate degree and left school at age 14 without finishing high school, she applied for and won a scholarship to America's top university, Harvard, with all expenses and accommodation paid, plus a generous living allowance. This hallowed institution awarded her a PhD in education. In 1983, Sykes was widely hailed as Harvard's first Aboriginal graduate.

There are many, many cases of it. For the government to deny there is no Aboriginal identity fraud when you actually have—and I pointed out here. In a matter of one year, you had $1.03 billion in 1,500 grants that were given out. No real qualifications are applied for. Who's getting these grants? And this is what is happening. If you really care about the people out there, then people must prove who they are. If you are an age pensioner, you have to prove your age. If you are on a disability pension, you prove you have a disability. Why don't we ask for the same means test? How can you tell the Australian people out there that, because you're not Aboriginal, you don't get these benefits?

People are doing it tough with the cost of living. They're living in their cars, homes, caravans—whatever they can—to provide for their families. And you are blatantly denying the fact that we have a problem here. It's disgusting on this government. You're covering up everything, because all you care about is the 'yes' vote.