Patrick Dodson (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Reconciliation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wish to draw attention to an excellent paper by the Nulungu Research Institute based at the Broome campus of Notre Dame university. It shows that First Nations people in the Kimberley coped magnificently during the first wave of COVID. Thousands were mobilised, leaving places they deemed to be unsafe. But the researchers had trouble finding good population and infrastructure data, which clearly hampered pandemic planning. I wrote in the foreword to the paper that a government which doesn't know its own backyard is a government that doesn't care. What's clear from the paper is that, while the first wave of COVID didn't infect the Aboriginal communities in the Kimberley, it was a matter of good luck rather than good management. The paper concludes, unsurprisingly, that remote community infrastructure is in disrepair; that communications with government and service agencies are inadequate; and that many families live below the poverty line.

These conditions, ripe for COVID, are as bad today as they were two years ago when COVID first arrived. But, knowing all this, governments have done not enough to work with these communities and agencies to prepare for the next wave, which we know will come. I'm gravely concerned that even our mainstream services in the north are under-resourced. Finally, the concept of living with the virus is a poor option when our communities have serious health problems and known shortfalls in housing and service delivery.