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

I would like to talk about an issue that has been in the headlines recently, unfortunately very negatively, and that is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander disadvantage. Now that the latest media ‘crisis’ concerning violence and sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal communities has died down, I feel it is appropriate to make some comments about the difficult issues that are facing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and to address the underlying causes of the universal disadvantage of Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders.

I am aware that there are many on all sides of the chamber who have been actively working on these issues and who share many of the concerns I am about to talk about. Many of us have had mixed feelings about the latest crisis. The allegations and the stories are truly shocking, but everyone working in this area knows that this is nothing new; there has been no sudden change on the ground. Many of us have been trying to draw attention to these problems for a very long time, often with very little success. Perhaps at this stage the only real changes have been that we have a new minister and the willingness of the mainstream media to pay very brief attention to issues that have been largely ignored for decades. Unfortunately they are still not paying attention to the significant underlying issues.

It is tempting to hope that this might signal that, after a decade of erosion and neglect, there might finally be an opportunity to move forward and address the underlying causes of this very significant disadvantage. We must provide to Aboriginal communities the basic services that the rest of us take for granted. Government agencies have always had this responsibility but have consistently failed. ATSIC became the scapegoat, despite only ever delivering one-seventh of the money allocated to Indigenous affairs. The rest of it was delivered by mainstreaming—but those responsible have never been held to account.

There has been a lot of talk about the mainstreaming of Indigenous affairs, but the truth is that mainstream departments have always found it very difficult to deliver services to Aboriginal people. There has often been a mistaken perception that the existence of special so-called top-up programs for Indigenous people excuses them from the responsibility to deliver these services to all Australians. The very programs meant to address this underlying disadvantage and to try to level the playing field have unfortunately resulted in them receiving less than they are entitled to as Australian citizens. At the very same time, certain elements of our community have used this to attack Aboriginal people for receiving so-called special treatment.

We have recently got a new minister who has been making some very strong public statements about problems of violence and sexual abuse in remote Aboriginal communities and promising intervention. Should we be hopeful that this signals a change in government direction? It is hard not to be cynical about the likelihood of any real change, particularly when we have just had a federal budget in which the issues of Aboriginal health and housing have basically been ignored, despite the well-known statistics on life expectancy, which is 17 years less than for non-Aboriginal Australians, and overcrowding—consistently between 15 and 20 people in a small three-bedroom, one-bathroom house—while at the same time the budget handed out huge benefits to the wealthy.

The government has spent billions on tax cuts and continued to hand out tax cuts at this last budget. Despite the rhetoric, Aboriginal services have clearly not been a priority. Perhaps it is a shame that these so-called revelations of abuse did not come slightly before the budget rather than afterwards. The majority of Australians have never been better off. It should be a source of great national shame that, while other first-world nations have moved significantly forward in addressing the rights and living standards of their first peoples, Australia continues to go backwards.

I am worried—and I know that many share my concerns—that there will be a knee-jerk reaction to the latest media so-called crisis, resulting in extreme law and order measures which fail to address the underlying causes and that we do not learn from what has been done before. Meanwhile the issue has faded from the headlines while the poverty and underlying hopelessness have not been addressed and remain untouched. The government has failed to give effect to its much vaunted whole-of-government approach to mainstreaming. There has been no real oversight of service delivery to Aboriginal communities. There is no accountability and little evaluation.

Why weren’t the problems at Wadeye picked up in the COAG trial delivered by the Department of Family and Community Services? What happened to all those millions promised for housing? Why didn’t the minister know what was going on? There were 28 houses destroyed during the ongoing troubles at Wadeye and yet we have been told that there are between 300 and 400 people who are now homeless. What does that say about the housing in Wadeye? Did those 300 or 400 people live in 28 houses? Either those houses were extremely overcrowded or those people did not have housing in the first place. There were ongoing significant problems in this community that the COAG trial has failed to address. The obvious failure of the COAG trial in Wadeye, despite the considerable attentions of senior departmental secretaries and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, is a clear indictment of the process.

What this shows is that it is truly hard to work across departmental silos and budgets. We understand that. The concept of the new whole-of-government approach, which has been vaunted as the quiet revolution in Indigenous affairs, supposedly depends on the ability of the staff in ICCs, the Indigenous coordination centres, to be able to enter into discussions with remote Aboriginal communities and then enter into shared responsibility agreements, which pool funding and resources from a range of different mainstream agencies to meet community needs—at least that is the story that we have been told. However, what Wadeye and other COAG trials have shown to the secretaries group, which is supposedly coordinating across the government agencies and taking a whole-of-government approach on this, is how truly difficult the whole-of-government coordination program really is, particularly if you are trying to deliver resources that have not previously been strictly identified in the budget.

We also have to ask: with the attention of government so closely focused on Wadeye, how did they fail to recognise and see the recent crisis before it became so obviously evident? Where were the tell-tale signs? Why weren’t they picked up? How is it that the quiet revolution could be based on a trial that is so obviously a failure? The quiet revolution was based on the COAG trials—the COAG trials that have not been evaluated, that are only starting to be evaluated now and that have quite clearly failed. They have had so much government attention, how could we seriously believe the whole-of-government approach could be implemented when it is based on a failed process?

If you look at the recent CAEPR paper, Views from the top of the “quiet revolution”: secretarial perspectives on the new arrangements in Indigenous affairs, you get a clear sense that even with some very senior staff spending a considerable amount of time trying to deliver the whole-of-government approach to services in each of the COAG chosen sites, these very senior people have found it very difficult and time-consuming to negotiate these arrangements. They have had to call on their status, their political acumen and their considerable bureaucratic knowledge and networks to get anything done. What hope do we have putting all our faith in the ICCs being able to deliver a coordinated approach when the ICCs are struggling to find staff? Those staff are usually at more junior levels—and I am not having a go at the staff at ICCs—and are of course finding it extremely difficult to deliver the outcomes that we are trying to get from the whole-of-government approach.

The kind of negotiation that is required is required at a very senior level if we are to make this sort of approach work. It is little wonder that we continue to hear stories of bureaucrats and public servants finding it extremely hard to make this process work. Can you imagine the unlucky person who has been given the job of telling a community, ‘We want you to wash your kids’ faces and clean your houses before we deliver you the basic services to your community’? You could almost believe that they would probably breathe a sigh of relief when the community, understandably outraged, tells them to go away. They would then be unable to deliver their side of the so-called agreement. It must be extremely hard for them to go in and try and negotiate those sorts of so-called agreements. (Time expired)