Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is my pleasure to rise this evening to speak to an issue that I hope will be very significant for many Australians and will take a very prominent place in our national considerations tomorrow—and that is the Closing the Gap report, which is set to be delivered for the sixth time.

Closing the Gap is something which I hope Australians are becoming familiar with, but I thought in my opening remarks I might refresh people's memory. The Closing the Gap report, which is presented in the first week of parliament each year, is a commitment by all Australian governments to improve the lives of Indigenous Australians and, in particular, to provide a better future for Indigenous Australian children. When I think of the issues that will be reported on tomorrow, I particularly think of the young children being born in this country today. There are women who are going through labour right now, as we speak in this place, who will give birth to young Australians. We know that today some children being born into an Indigenous family will live a far shorter life than an Australian being born to a non-Indigenous family. This is a great national shame and it requires constant and focused attention at every level of every government.

The good news is that, in the six years since Closing the Gap was initiated by the Labor government—and it is continuing under the new Liberal-Nationals coalition—COAG has agreed to specific time frames for achieving its six targets. These six targets are very important, and when I read them I think: how can it be that this year it is the reality for Australians being born in the same country as me but to Indigenous families?

Our first goal is to close the life expectancy gap within a generation, and for that we have given ourselves a target of 2031. Our second goal is to halve the gap in the mortality rates for Indigenous children under five within a decade—and that decade is ticking over. The date we have set is 2018, and it is pressing on us. We need to keep our eye on the prize of delivering that important and essential life opportunity. Our third goal is to ensure that, within five years, there is access to early-childhood education for all Indigenous four-year-olds in remote communities. I am very happy to put on the record again here today what was noted in the report last year, which was that we actually met that target in 2013. This was the year we set as our deadline for achieving that goal. I may have some more words to say about the importance of early-childhood access, if time allows me towards the end of my speech.

The fourth goal that we seek is to halve the gap in reading, writing and numeracy achievements for children within a decade, again, by 2018, and to halve the gap in Indigenous year 12 achievements by 2020. I reflect on the comments by Senator Scullion today about school attendance: that should already set the alarm bells ringing. It is hard to be successful at school if you are not attending. Sadly, failure at school is too often linked to terrible health outcomes, shorter life expectancy, lower income and a life of significant and sustained disadvantage. Our final goal is to halve the gap in employment outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians within a decade—by 2018, and that date is close approaching.

These are worthy goals, and they will require considerable effort. I am pleased to report to the House that COAG has committed an additional $4.6 billion investment to Indigenous-specific programs—at least that was the case, because I do have some concerns at this point in time, given the rhetoric and practical action of this new government, about cutting significant amounts of funding support to Indigenous communities and the most vulnerable in those Indigenous communities. The targets I have just described already indicate these communities are suffering considerable disadvantage in this great countries of ours.

To that end of enhancing awareness of Closing the Gap and making sure that we continue to pay attention, and ensuring that we do not lose our focus, I took the opportunity in my opening speech to the Senate to indicate that I would put a motion to the Senate that would propose a joint meeting of the houses of this parliament, the Senate and the House of Representatives, to give status and due recognition to the importance of this report as part of our national psyche and our national endeavour, as a collective, across many parliaments, sadly, to achieve these goals. I am pleased to say that I was supported by all members on this side of the chamber. At the time, the government opposed this proposal; but, nonetheless, it did pass the Senate and a message was sent to the House of Representatives. I am pleased to note that yesterday afternoon senators were advised that we had been invited to attend—it is rather short notice, and I do not know how many senators will be able to make that occasion tomorrow, but it is an indication of good will, at the very least, that we begin to properly and symbolically acknowledge how critical this work is for this place and for the leading parliament of the nation.

One of the things that I also raised in my speech was that, apart from the power of the parliament to give significant symbolic impetus to the status of the report, in my time as a member of the House of Representatives I have noticed that increasingly fewer and fewer of the media have been in attendance to receive the report. It is not that they were not paying attention up in their media centre and getting the information out—I understand that—but when we report on the items that I describe as our targets for Closing the Gap, I believe that we are reporting to the First Peoples, to whom we need to give redress. The chamber should be filled with leaders of Indigenous communities from all around this country. The chamber should be filled with people who share a passion for the redress of this great shame in our country. I am sure there are enough media people present in this place to have at least a few of them in the gallery to acknowledge that. What will it mean to our Indigenous brothers and sisters that we continue to pay attention, that we attend physically, morally, emotionally and financially with 100 per cent of our attention to this goal from which we will not avert our gaze?

What I can say about Closing the Gap is that we have seen, in the past, comments about the power of parliament being degraded by people saying parliament cannot make a change. Even the national apology was once described by Mr Abbott as a campaign for something that was going to add a sense of grievance on one side and guilt on the other. But I am expressing my hope that there has been some significant change in the Prime Minister's position and that, after the 'sorry' speech, he was awakened to the fact that we can indeed achieve great things and that the parliament has a role to play in it.

What I am concerned about is that the power of that rhetoric, and the symbolism of this place, requires money to match it and this government is off to a shaky start with the announcement of a series of cuts and reviews that threaten to further marginalise Indigenous Australians. We know already that millions of dollars in funding for Indigenous legal assistance has been cut, that billions of dollars in school funding has been cut, and we sense impending cuts to welfare which have been much announced. My fear is that such policies will only serve to exacerbate the inequality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia.

I want to acknowledge the Indigenous Advisory Council and the work of Warren Mundine, who I have personally seen make an amazing contribution to hundreds of young Indigenous people. But there is no reference to the Closing the Gap targets in the terms of reference for the Indigenous Advisory Council. I hope that does not indicate that we have taken our eyes off the prize. I hope it was just a very small oversight that can be rectified sometime very soon as we continue to put front and centre our acknowledgement that the conditions I describe, to which we aspire by these Closing the Gap targets, are untenable in this day and age. They are all Australians' responsibility. We need to pay attention to the report card, we need to put in more effort, speak more, notice more and write more—every single one of us.

Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today marks 157 days since the federal election on 7 September last year, and it means we are about 15 per cent of the way through this government's one and hopefully only term in office. On a personal level it has been a challenging time. Mr Acting Deputy President Smith, as a Western Australian you will be aware that the election of Western Australian senators to this place is at this time still unresolved and before the courts. I am sure I speak for people right across the political spectrum—members of parliament, their staff and families, and those voters of Western Australia who have had their confidence in the electoral system shaken—in saying the sooner this gets resolved the better. If, indeed, the only path to resolution is a fresh election for the Western Australian Senate, then the Greens are ready.

On a political level it has been a challenging time as well, although in a very different way. I first want to acknowledge this government's strengths. For its outstanding representation of wealthy, middle-aged, white, Catholic, heterosexual men, it is impossible to ignore the strength that this cabinet brings to bear. We knew from the moment the Prime Minister appointed himself as the Minister for Women, while abolishing the position of science minister, that we were in for a wild ride—and, of course, you have not disappointed. For a while, as government MPs lurched from one wedding expenses scandal to another, I allowed myself to imagine that perhaps their displays of incompetence would be confined to Australia. Australians are a forgiving lot. I thought maybe people would cop Mr Barnaby Joyce attending the weddings of Indian coal billionaires and flights for Liberal Party MPs to attend crucially important cricket matches at taxpayers' expense as long as everything was kept quiet and low-key—because, after all, you promised a grown-up government and a government of no surprises. I can just imagine the Indonesian government's surprise when we accidentally invaded their territorial waters a short time ago. If you want to transform Australia into a systematic regional human rights abuser, I guess you are going to have to break some eggs. Presumably, as long as we keep tapping the phone of the President of Indonesia's wife, we will be able to keep an accurate gauge of just how surprised they continue to be.

The Prime Minister appears to be cultivating the impression that he does not know what is going to come out of his mouth until he hears it. It might be applying his sophisticated geopolitical analysis to the nightmare unfolding in Syria as 'baddies versus baddies' or—and here is a local example—justifying the withdrawal of all Commonwealth public transport funding as 'a mental health initiative'. The Prime Minister, when in opposition, said better roads mean better communities; they are good for our economy, good for our society, good for our physical and mental health. This kind of thing must drive the Prime Minister's media advisers absolutely mad. But everyone stuck in a traffic jam from here on can breathe deeply the carbon monoxide and know that your world-class public transport services have been cancelled until further notice because our PM has declared that there will be no rapid buses or light rail under a government he leads.

We launched our campaign for light rail in Perth in the run-up to the 2007 election, and it has been one of the best campaigns that I have ever had the privilege to work on. We took it from a 7-page sketch to a serious project with half a billion dollars of Commonwealth funding committed and a small but very motivated project team working—credit where it is due—under the Barnett state government. Premier Barnett spectacularly dropped the ball and, in the smoking wreckage of the state's AAA credit rating, light rail was one of the state's first casualties. The Greens are determined to pick it up and run with it, and we will get it built sooner or later. We used the idea of fast electrified public transport as the basis for a project called Transforming Perth, which is a joint study with the Property Council and the Australian Urban Design and Research Centre, who put us in touch with urban theorists and also those in the development industry who knew a little bit about developing cities along public transport networks. The study looks at what a transformed city could be if we created diverse affordable housing along public transport arteries. It has been a remarkable collaboration.

Looking at overseas examples for the last few years, and amazing innovations in renewable energy, some of them from right here in Australia, has given the Australian Greens enormous optimism about the future of the clean technology sector. Our work with engineers and those from Sustainable Energy Now, in WA, in the development of the Energy 2029 clean energy plan for 100 per cent renewable energy for the south-west grid has similarly set up a cause for optimism in just how much progress we could make in Western Australia given the opportunity—even as this very government gears up to deliberately bankrupt the clean energy industry in this country.

There is so much optimism around the world, and there is so much energy that can be leveraged towards the renewable energy or the clean energy transformation of our cities and regional areas, that it is really difficult to comprehend the systematic hostility that is being brought to bear in the attack on clean energy—on everything from household PV right up to large-scale utility baseload, or better-than-baseload, solar industry—that seems to be implicit in your attack on the Clean Energy Act and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

So, as disaster prone as this government appears to be, something else is up. The lurching around, the gaffes, the unforced errors and the increasing signs of dissent from within the coalition's own party room could lead us to think that this will be a government that is buried under its own incompetence and gone in another two and a half years. I wish that were true. But I am not sure that it is, because I think what is going on here is much more dangerous. What looks random and chaotic is actually quite systematic. The government is working its way down the Institute of Public Affairs hit list of 75 radical ideas to transform Australia. I noticed they topped it up with another few dozen. This is not by any means a random list. It speaks to the systematic entrenchment of inequality, with attacks on trade unions and the national broadcaster, the privatisation of SBS, and the ruination of the environment. It is a manifesto of sorts for the unregulated corporate takeover of the country in order to liquidate its natural assets as rapidly as possible, no matter how many species go to the wall, no matter how many families slide into working poverty.

Of course, it does not have to be like this: we elected this government and we can unelect them. We cannot rely on this government to self-destruct. I was one of those who naively thought that they might do so from opposition and that the kinder and gentler and more moderate face of the Liberal Party might be revealed. It was unlikely then, and I think it is impossible now. What we need over coming years is old-fashioned organising to swing the pendulum back very, very hard. The only way to do that is to unite the disparate parts of civil society in opposition to the extremists that are running the show today.

Five months on and I think Australia is suffering from a remarkable case of political buyer's regret. That is what the polling seems to be showing. We do not have time for your government to get it, to rediscover that renewable energy—even as you have managed to preside over the implosion of the skilled manufacturing sector in this country—and that affordable, sustainable modular housing and that affordable, locally fabricated, renewable energy plants may be the answer staring you right in the face for skilled manufacturing employment in this country. I am not sure we have time to wait around for you to get it. We are going to need to drive the renewable transition despite this government, not because of it. So if there is a by-election in Western Australia, by all means send your Prime Minister to WA, and we will put federal politics through a Western Australian lens. It is very, very rare, as you will know, Mr Deputy President, that that happens. Then we will find out just what people are thinking about the damage that you have done in the last short 157 days.