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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I only have five minutes to speak and this document is about 380 pages, so obviously I will not be able to fully reflect on its detail. I will start by lamenting that it is unfortunate that we have such a comprehensive—and, might I say, very substantial and substantive—document about issues that have been, at least in part, very much in the headlines in recent times and the subject of some quite passionate and occasionally quite fiery debate in a range of areas, and yet it gets tabled, thrown to one side and we are lucky we can talk on it for five minutes on a Wednesday night. This document is from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, who is tasked with overseeing and considering the social justice situation in regard to Indigenous Australians and measuring it against the range of human rights benchmarks that Australia as a nation and as a government have committed ourselves to. I think this does not do justice to what are very important and significance reports and recommendations contained within them.

This report only contains nine recommendations. The key ones regard facilitating Indigenous access to government services. I think we need to continually monitor and assess how this is going. I know that one of the real frustrations amongst many Indigenous people and organisations is the fact that there is so much lecturing and public commentary from ministers, state and federal, from people in the media, and from people across the board talking about how Indigenous people have to do this, have to do that, have to take responsibility for this, have to lift their game in that, and all those sorts of things. As often as not there is a reasonable degree of truth in some of those things, but it is only one part of the story. There is another big part to this story—and there is plenty of evidence to demonstrate this; and there is a lot of it in this report—that is, whatever the failings of Indigenous organisations and Indigenous communities, there are very much comparable, if not greater, failings in the delivery of government services from the government point of view.

It is just so easy to blame Indigenous people for their own problems, and we have such a long history of this. Certainly there needs to be responsibility taken—you cannot just sit back and be a victim—but that should not be used as a way to excuse the reality that there is plenty of failure to go around on the government service delivery side of things. That is a message to all governments, not only the federal government but also the state governments. I note that recommendation 1 here is directed not only to the federal government but also to the federal parliament. I think it is appropriate for parliament itself to consider and debate that particular recommendation further. A significant part of that is to have a federal parliamentary committee regularly examine the progress of the new arrangements in Indigenous affairs and the progress in achieving whole-of-government service delivery to Indigenous communities—looking at all the different components there and outlining some terms of reference as suggested.

I want to emphasise a couple of other key recommendations which are labelled here as ‘Addressing the fundamental flaw of the new arrangements for Indigenous affairs—the absence of principled engagement with Indigenous peoples’. This is not just a matter of a nice form of words or of being polite and saying, ‘It is a nice thing to engage with Indigenous peoples about government programs, government service delivery and government policy.’ It is a matter of making these things work. Even if you want to ignore basic rights and principles in regard to this, if you want to have government services, policies and programs that work then the chances of them working are dramatically reduced if you do not have proper engagement and meaningful, realistic, ongoing, continuous, honest and equal engagement with Indigenous peoples themselves. They are the ones on the ground. They are the ones who have to live with a lot of these issues. So many people, as we all know, are working themselves into the ground trying to fix and address issues. If they are not properly engaged with the government—which is coming in with various programs, buckets of money or different allocations and requirements—then the chances of things working are dramatically reduced. We really need to take into account this report. It disappoints me that there is not more opportunity to examine it fully through the parliamentary process. It is certainly something I will seek to do to ensure that the very rich detail in here is taken more fully into account. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.