Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (NT, Country Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians) Share this | Hansard source

The Closing the gap annual report and the three-year review on the National Agreement on Closing the Gap released recently over a critical period for Indigenous affairs in Australia. During the last year, all Australians were asked to give their view on how they would like to see governments across the country approach the issue of Indigenous disadvantage. The referendum was a rare opportunity for a single portfolio area to be given a national spotlight for information most would consider niche to be presented to the public, and for all Australians to contribute in a fashion, delivering their own recommendations to government.

The first recommendation of the Australian people is to approach these issues as one united Australia, focusing not solely on race but on need. We must address disadvantage where it exists, not at a racial level but where specific help is needed. If the target of Closing the Gap is to be reached, we must do away with the idea that there exists a silver bullet, a one-size-fits-all solution, to Indigenous disadvantage, a remedy that will work just as well for someone living in remote Australia as it will for someone in a capital city. I believe that the next step in our approach to Closing the Gap requires a restart of sorts, a fundamental rethink of our approach to Indigenous disadvantage. That begins with a closer look at the organisations and bodies that exist right now.

This year we marked 15 years since the first Closing the gap report was tabled, yet Aboriginal on Aboriginal violence remains an all too real problem that others would seek to ignore. It's on the streets of Alice Springs, throughout the Northern Territory and across the country. The rates of domestic violence within Indigenous households are devastatingly high. Drug and alcohol abuse are all too common. Children are often abused, sexually assaulted and treated in unthinkable ways, yet many still prefer to ignore that in this chamber. Education rates are low. Traditional owners struggle in their fight to use their own land for economic opportunity, and, as we have seen recently, organisations and individuals exploit them for personal gain. Clearly something is not working, and I believe that only a thorough audit of those organisations will reveal what that is.

Likewise, only a thorough audit will show us where some groups are having success and how that might be emulated. I believe, as does the coalition, that only a royal commission into Indigenous child sexual abuse, which others want to ignore, will reveal the full extent of the problem and what we must do to put an end to it. Accountability and transparency are fundamental to the approach that Australians have asked us to take in addressing Indigenous disadvantage, and it is accountability and transparency that must form the basis of this next stage in addressing Indigenous marginalisation and disadvantage.

Each year members of this parliament rise to speak about the annual report. It is a tradition that I fear will continue for far too long. I mean, eventually we want to get to a point where we are not addressing this report because the gap will have closed. I hope we will make this year different. I hope that we will use this opportunity not simply to mark yet another report, but to mark a new approach. Well, I hope that we begin a fundamental rethink of the current method, a questioning of the premise from which we launch our fight for real change and an end to the separatism that has characterised our approach so far.

I believe what the coalition believes: we can close the gap, but it starts with change not more virtue signalling and empty gestures. No more putting all our eggs in the one basket. No more grand silver bullet approaches to disadvantage. We will close the gap if we come together and focus on need, not race.