Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

This document is the 2004-05 annual report of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Services, ATSIS, which was an executive agency of the Commonwealth within what was then the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs. It was established on 1 July 2003 as an interim measure and a means of implementing what the government called a separation of powers within the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. It was staffed largely through the transfer of ATSIC staff.

ATSIS was abolished, along with ATSIC, in 2005. This report covers the final period of ATSIS, the closure period, until March 2005. As the report says, the abolition of ATSIC and the administrative arrangements to disperse ATSIS programs, functions and staff to other agencies were undertaken by the current federal government as a move to what they called a whole-of-government approach. This report deals with the winding down or closure period. In that context, it is probably not massively enlightening in terms of the overall scenario of the administration of services to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. But I want to take the opportunity to look at the process that has followed on from the winding up of ATSIS, particularly this move to the so-called whole-of-government approach.

I will not revisit the debate we have just had about the Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination and their role with regard to the land rights legislation. I want to talk about another example of what has occurred with the government’s move to this whole-of-government approach and the winding up of bodies like ATSIS, which was not without its flaws.

A couple of weeks ago, I travelled to a number of Aboriginal communities in the Cape York area of Queensland, including Mapoon, Napranum, Hopevale and Wudja Wudjil, as well as a couple over in the gulf—in particular, Burketown and the Yarrabah community near Cairns. Predominantly, I went to listen to people and to hear what issues they believed were important in each of those different communities. Every community is different, despite the fact that we tend to take a one-size-fits-all approach to debates about and policies for Indigenous affairs. Even in just that one region of far North Queensland there are big differences between the communities.

One thing that came out very clearly was the very damaging effect on these communities as a direct consequence of the government’s changes to the Community Development Employment Project, CDEP. What has happened to a number of those communities, most notably Mapoon and Napranum out of the ones that I visited, is that the contract for the administration of CDEP has been taken away from the councils that had been running them for a long period of time and been given to an outside service provider, a Job Network agency, which now has to run the CDEP program.

Councils like Mapoon are widely recognised as operating very effectively with a very small number of people—there are around about 300 in that community, I believe, with about half of them being under 18. That council manages to run services over a much wider area than your average local government does. Yet they had their CDEP funding taken away from them with about a week’s notice, with it given to a service provider from out of town who did not even have programs ready to run. The bizarre scenario for that community is that it actually had people operating under a no work, no pay situation for a number of years suddenly being told that they all had to go on holidays because the new service provider did not have programs ready.

The brilliant whole-of-government approach of the federal government has led to sit-down money being paid on cape communities. What a fantastic reform! That is the sort of brain surgery we have had from some of the brilliant people now running this whole-of-government approach in Canberra. It is a reminder of how we are going back and repeating the same mistakes again. What we need are people who are willing to work on the ground rather than just pursue their ideological agendas and ignore the consequences. This is one more example of where the consequences on the ground go in the opposite direction to the rhetoric. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.