David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

The lack of progress in meeting our Closing the Gap targets as a country is clearly a blemish on our nation. The dismal statistics reflect our failure to recognise our past and are a manifestation of the pain still felt and disadvantage still experienced by so many First Nations people. It's crystal clear in these statistics and the Productivity Commission report that our current approach is failing. We cannot just keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. We must do better.

Many would think that the nation's capital wouldn't have the same failures seen throughout the rest of the country. Unfortunately this is far from the truth. An Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person in the ACT is almost 25 times more likely to be sent to prison than a non-Indigenous person—25 times. This is the highest rate in the country. We're the fourth worst in the country for Indigenous children in the child protection services, right here in Canberra. It's the same story when it comes to health. It's the same when it comes to financial outcomes. The fact that we allow this to happen in a jurisdiction as small as the ACT is a disgrace, and it seems clear to me that it is not enough of a priority for some of the ACT's elected representatives.

You have to look at the work of somewhere like Winnunga, the only Aboriginal community controlled health organisation in the ACT, the work that Julie Tongs and her incredible team do in our community for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and for other Canberrans. I'd like to take the opportunity to recognise her and the whole team at Winnunga.

The ACT showed the strongest support of any jurisdiction for the Voice at the referendum. I think that the ACT government should take this as an endorsement from Canberrans to move forward with a truly independent Indigenous elected body—a body that is not under the thumb of the government and that can provide frank and fearless advice to government on what is going wrong and how we can fix it here in the ACT.

This goes right to the heart of the Productivity Commission report. We have to end tokenistic engagements. We have to start putting the power to solve these persistent problems into the hands of communities in a meaningful way. Time and again First Nations people, and especially elders, have shared with me their extreme frustration at the totally inadequate support for fundamentals like health and housing that can help change the future outcomes for their children and grandchildren. Again, the ACT falls behind the rest of the nation in these areas. We have fewer GPs than some rural and regional areas, the lowest bulk billing rates in the country and the highest gap fees by some distance. There are at least 3,100 people on the social housing waitlist, and public housing stock is in a condition that the CFMMEU national secretary has called Third World—here in Canberra.

I believe the only way we will start to see the gap close is by solving these core issues of health and housing, and by putting the power and the responsibility of creating community led solutions into the hands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. There's much work to do in this space, and, again, I would like to acknowledge people here in the ACT who are working tirelessly and have done so for decades to solve these problems. It's up to elected representatives to give them more power and more agency to implement those solutions.