Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Indigenous Affairs (Senator Scullion) to a question without notice asked by the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate (Senator Wong) today relating to funding for programs for Indigenous Australians.

I want to refer to SNAICC , which is the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care . It is the peak body for Indigenous children in Australia. Currently in Parliament House there is a delegation of 40 people who have come from services across Australia to campaign for a fair go for Indigenous children. They are deeply concerned about the inattention in the new jobs for families package for Indigenous children and families. They have been told that budget based funding services will be transitioned across to the new package but have been given no detail on how or when this will occur. They are rightly perplexed that the new package, which is focused solely on child care, could even be considered to be applied to services which do not fund child care but rather play groups and family support. Of those which do provide child care, 43 of the 46 budget based services are facing closure under the new model. Budget based services are not exclusively Indigenous but 80 per cent of them are.

In addition to the main issues with the budget based services, SNAICC have three major problems with the jobs for families package. Firstly, as the name implies, it is focused solely on workplace participation. It needs to factor in workplace participation and early childhood development. For restrictive access principles under the new policy, an estimated 78 per cent of Indigenous children participating in the BBF program will have their access halved because they do not meet the activity test. Research has shown that children who benefit more from early childhood education and care are the very children have will be shut out of these essential services.

Secondly, the package is modelled on urban centres and no consideration has been given to the economic realities for rural and remote communities. We have been told that the safety net provisions will enable families to continue to access care. However, this funding is kept at $300 million over four years and will be open to competitive tender.

Further, money for families experiencing temporary difficulty circumstances will force families to choose which area of deficit applies to them in order to access funding to enable these services to continue. SNAICC advocate that a dedicated stream of funding be established for Aboriginal children and their families that is not predicated on pigeonholing Indigenous families as socially disadvantaged and at risk.

I just want to go to some very unhelpful comments made by Dennis Jensen, the member for Tangney. They did not help this situation at all. I have been to Baya Gawiy and I have met with the workers, families and children. Baya Gawiy in Fitzroy Crossing in Western Australia is an Aboriginal community controlled early childhood education centre that meets the needs of families in Fitzroy Crossing, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. Three-quarters of their families are Aboriginal and 70 per cent of them are working families. Ironically, under the new package, families would have to pay around $170 per child per day for those earning under $65,000 a year. This is clearly unaffordable and will drive working families out of employment in order to care for their children. The reason the costs are so high in communities like Fitzroy Crossing is due to fixed economic costs which cannot be changed through the three-year sustainability funding that the government seems to believe will resolve these issues.

In closing, I call upon Minister Birmingham to engage directly with SNAICC and its members' services to craft a fair package to meet the needs of all Australian children, not just those from middle-class working families. I am personally insulted that this minister, Minister Birmingham, has deigned not to meet this delegation while they are here in Canberra this week. Further, the bureaucracy must provide the details of the full extent of the package because the devil is in the detail. I will stress this one more time: it is all very well for a minister to take the $300,000-plus pay packet that comes with the job, but they should have the decency to meet the people who know what is going on on the ground, particularly in my part of the world—the remote communities up in the Kimberley.

David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on the motion to take note of the answers from Senator Scullion. I want to start off by recognising Senator Sterle and his genuine passion and concern for the people of Western Australia, particularly in Indigenous communities. In relation to his questioning of Senator Scullion though, I have to draw attention back to previous occasions when Senator Sterle has come in here with information that has been provided to him by people on the ground and with their view of what may or may not happen and has raised questions or made accusations about things closing down.

I take the Senate back to September 2014 where he asked questions about communities in Halls Creek and Fitzroy Crossing. He said that these centres were closing and he asked what the families were going to do. Senator Scullion pointed out:

The direct answer to your question is they are going to continue to go to these family and children centres because they are staying open. They are not going anywhere.

The point I make is that Senator Scullion, in his answer, is coming from the position of someone who lives in the Northern Territory, cares deeply for Indigenous communities and connects with people—

Glenn Sterle (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Ms Acting Deputy President, I raise a point of order. The good senator, unfortunately, is misleading the chamber. This is false information, and he should check with the minister's office and see how under-resourced these communities and these centres are. They have waiting lists. Kids are waiting to get in there, and this coalition cut the funding.

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

That is not a point of order; it is a debating point.

David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Checking the record, I am quoting directly from the Hansard here. My point is that what the government is concerned about doing is getting outcomes for people. If you go back to my very first speech in this place, one of the things that I talked about was that a disappointing aspect of so much of politics is that people love to talk about the inputs. They talk about money spent or programs announced and then they move on to the next thing. One of the things I like about Senator Scullion in particular is that he is really concerned about getting outcomes for people, not just about making announcements. He drives policy announcements and he drives the implementation to make sure they actually deliver outcomes.

His key priorities in Indigenous affairs are getting children to school, getting adults into work and helping to build safer communities. Despite the threats, the talk and the fear campaigns about cutting front-line services, the fact is that the government is still continuing to invest some $4.9 billion over four years in Indigenous-specific funding. The government is not just focused on the funding though; it is focused on getting outcomes. Part of that is working in partnership with Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander communities to deliver better outcomes for our first Australians. I think this minister deserves a huge amount of credit for the amount of passion and attention to detail that he puts into this portfolio area and into getting those outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

The budget update, the MYEFO—which is where some of the claims around funding have come from—includes that additional $48 million for the portfolio, as part of the white paper on developing northern Australia. This funding will help Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the North maximise the use of their land, including through better support for native title holders, improved leasing arrangements and reforms to land administration. The fact that that money is coming in through a different portfolio area but is applying to Indigenous people living in the North is indicative of the fact that the best way for them to develop their communities, as we are seeing from comments by Noel Pearson and others, is for them to engage with modern Australia and the modern economy and to provide opportunities for their children to have work, to see businesses grow and to see enterprises grow.

The enabling things, like better use of land title and the ability to develop business, are equally, if not more, powerful than some of the specific funding that goes into Indigenous programs. They provide those linkages to other aspects of the economy that will give them an opportunity to grow all of the things that Noel Pearson talks about, in terms of the achievements, the pride and the satisfaction of having some control and influence over their future.

In taking note of this answer from Senator Scullion, I just want to reinforce the fact that he is a person concerned about outcomes. The government is continuing to invest significant amounts of money not only into Indigenous-specific portfolio areas but also into related areas that combine to provide people with an opportunity to achieve those goals of getting kids into school—because they will actually have a future and a reason to be there—getting adults into work and building safer communities, both for adults and, importantly, for children.

Sue Lines (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the motion to take note of answers to questions put by Senator Wong to Minister Scullion on funding cuts to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander portfolio. Yesterday, in the chamber, I was really shocked to hear the government attack SNAICC, the umbrella group for budget based funded services, who are facing closures due to the cuts and changes that the government is making. The government attacked SNAICC's Deloitte report because it shows that children will suffer and that services will close.

I will echo the words of Dr Jackie Huggins. When she spoke about the closing the gap report, she said that the government needs to be respectful. She said that in her working life she had never seen Aboriginal affairs at such a low point. There is no engagement and no respect. She agrees with Patrick Dodson and Noel Pearson that we are in deep crisis. We saw that yesterday in the Dorothy Dixers put by the government to Minister Birmingham. There is a real issue with budget based funded services. The Deloitte report clearly sets it out.

Instead of respectful engagement, the heart of what Dr Huggins goes to, we just saw this sledging going on in the Senate yesterday against SNAICC. The government need to sit down, talk and actually listen respectively to what SNAICC are saying about the funding crisis that they are facing. It is real. The government came in here yesterday, they were not being respectful and they just started to sledge. We saw that from Senator Scullion again today. I was very shocked when I heard him, in response to a question about cuts, say there was nothing particularly exceptional about that. Ask an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person who has lost funding as a result of that.

There is something exceptional going on here, and Aboriginal leaders across this country are saying there is no respect and the relationship with government has never ever been at such a low point. It is time the government listened respectfully and put in place solutions led by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, not white bureaucrats. That is what is happening here. The comments by Dr Jensen yesterday were a disgrace. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.