Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I have the pleasure of landing myself an adjournment speech tonight because of a function involving the vast majority of people in the coalition, as they take into account the privilege they have been given of representing this nation for the last 10 years. It gives me a chance to touch on the Senate Community Affairs References Committee and the work they have been doing with petrol sniffing. It is a very serious issue. Because of other commitments, I did not have the opportunity to travel around the country with the committee and I want to show tonight my support for this issue. It is good to see Senator Scullion, a Northern Territory senator, here because this is something that really touches the remote communities of Queensland and the remote communities of the Northern Territory.

Last night at around 12 o’clock, I was watching a Russian film on SBS about the effects of kids sniffing glue in Moscow. We followed the life of a girl, who was 14 years old when first shown, until she was put in a coffin. She had rigor mortis and you could see this girl, who you had followed through the whole process of the film, as they tried to move her body, which was frozen because she was dead. It really brought home to me the final affliction done and where it actually leads. The film was in Russian with English subtitles. It showed these children who were completely disassociated from their parents. They went to bed at night saying, ‘I love you, Mummy,’ even though their mothers were not there. That film showed the complete scourge of glue sniffing—they called it moonshine—which destroyed their lives and ultimately led to death.

The big problem about that is that it is happening right here in Australia. It is happening in our country, in what we call an advanced Western nation. There will be children tonight in a number of communities who will be sniffing petrol, which will kill them. If we are civilised people and if this is an honourable chamber, we have to put our weight behind doing something about this. There are at least 600 people sniffing petrol in Central Australia and 200 more in the Pitjantjatjara lands. This is causing enormous complications, from mental illness and foetal abnormalities to social breakdown and social violence, as people lose control of their faculties and become basically uncontrollable. They need to be locked up for the terms of their lives in what would otherwise be called a mental asylum because they no longer have any control over their mental faculties.

What are we going to do about it? We have to move ahead. The government has been making some good moves with regard to the roll-out of Opal. But I think we need to do more. It is, in areas, being got around. It is a scourge. We have to ask ourselves: why are there these areas, and what drives a child to acquire petrol, put it in a cut-off milk bottle, soft drink or ice cream container and stick their face over it and disappear from a connection to Australia? What is Australia doing and why does this event occur?

It is a hard and multifaceted question. We cannot just jump on the bandwagon that says it is a sense of social isolation or disassociation from the land. That might be a factor but it is not the only factor. There are a range of things that we have to look at. It is the same as what was happening in Moscow. I do not think those kids felt that they were disassociated from the land of Russia, but they were doing the same thing. The problem there was the effect of vodka on the adult population—alcoholism, basically. Alcoholism was driving children from home because they felt that home was no longer home. The scourge of petrol sniffing is the child of the scourge of alcoholism. I would suggest that in Australia that is also the case—the scourge of petrol sniffing is the child of the scourge of alcoholism and we have to address it as such. We have to address the fact that in a family breakdown within a regional community, when there is no sense of ‘I am going home to go to bed to be with my mother and father and to have a meal,’ then these things start to become endemic.

I remember, as a young bloke growing up in a strong Aboriginal community, going home after school and—I will not mention the house—going to an Aboriginal friend of mine’s house and seeing him not even blink as he walked in the door and the whole family were drunk around the walls—because there was no furniture in the house—and passed out. We walked in and he did not blink at it. That is a sense of what some of these kids have to go through to try and bring themselves up, because there is no family at home and there is no place to go.

I see it even in towns were I live at the moment. I still live out west. Basically, children do not live at home. They live on the street in western towns and I see all the bits and pieces and problems that go with that. Of course you are open to complete sexual exploitation on the street, and you see it. You see it right front of your eyes, and no doubt anybody else who has lived out west in the communities will have seen it as well. Hand in hand with sexual exploitation goes venereal disease—the serious venereal diseases: we are talking AIDS and we are talking things that are probably going to kill them. This also is connected, if you keep following the path round, to abuse of alcohol leading to abuse of further drugs. The consequence of this, if we do not do something about it, is that we have to sit here and know that, while we were not responsible for it, we stood by while children as young as seven and eight were killed by this drug.

I will describe some of the other effects of this petrol sniffing. In some Aboriginal communities, young Aboriginal boys go up to white people—and I have seen it myself being a white man—and basically prostitute themselves for petrol. That poses the idea that they must have seen other people doing the same thing as a means of getting their hands on petrol. This is something that we have to take seriously. The fingers of this are insidious and it attracts a criminal element from all sections of the community and opens these kids up to complete exploitation.

We have to treat the whole social infrastructure, and we have to stop making excuses that the answer is just some social program; we have to become a lot harder. If you want to talk about social programs, talk about the economic development of the area. If you want to jump on a bandwagon and push a barrow, talk about the economic development of an area and how we could inspire in our government a sense of a greater broadening of the economic base in these areas. Whether that can be achieved by capital infrastructure payments or by manipulation of tax rates, whatever you can think of as a means of broadening the economic base should be considered. Petrol sniffing is not a big issue in Tamworth and there is an Indigenous community there. It is not a big issue in Armidale and there is an Indigenous community there. It is a big issue once you get into a depressed remote regional zones because you do not have access to a further path out from there.

We live with these issues in the National Party. It is not some place we visit—we stay there after everybody goes home. It is an issue that you have to connect, not just to some new social security department, but to a real concrete statement that you are going to develop the economic base of these areas. This was very much an off-the-cuff speech tonight but I just want to offer my sincere thanks to those in the Senate Community Affairs References Committee for the wonderful work they are doing. (Time expired)