16-March-2005
Speeches, Indigenous Affairs
Mr ROBB (Goldstein) (10.17 a.m.)—The debate on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Amendment Bill 2005 is very important. A review was conducted into ATSIC over a 10-month period from December 2002 until October 2003. This was the first comprehensive review into the activities and the effectiveness of ATSIC since its creation 15 years ago. During the review, there were two major rounds of consultation. One round involved a panel which met with stakeholders from across the nation, including the 35 ATSIC regional councils, and which reviewed some 156 written submissions. This was a serious and comprehensive review.
These consultations revealed widespread disillusionment and dissatisfaction on the part of Indigenous Australians with ATSIC. Overwhelmingly, Indigenous Australians noted that they did not feel represented by ATSIC. There was a significant lack of goodwill and support from the broader community for what ATSIC was doing to help and support the community—or, more to the point, what ATSIC was not doing to help and support the community.
In this regard, last year Mark Latham spoke a simple truth: ATSIC was a failure. So for our opponents in this House to say over the last day or two that the disbanding of ATSIC removes the means by which the views of Indigenous Australians can be effectively put before the government is quite baffling. ATSIC as a representative body has given no effective voice to Indigenous people. That as few as one in five eligible voters turned out for the ATSIC election should reveal the lack of resonance that ATSIC has had within the Indigenous community.
ATSIC has not given effective voice in dealing with the crises of continuing poor health, domestic and sexual violence and substance abuse in the Aboriginal community that have accompanied ATSIC’s 15-year life. These are the criteria which ATSIC should be measured against, not some ideological approach to the existence of ATSIC and not some blind political stunt to try and oppose everything the government is seeking to do to address these very serious problems. ATSIC needs to be measured against these criteria.
The symbol driven, rights based approach for Aboriginal people has been a dismal failure. ATSIC has reflected this approach. Labor cling to this agenda, which has failed Aboriginal people so dismally, and they have no alternative but to pour more money into the ATSIC black hole. A culture of blame and victimhood, combined with a second-rate service delivery, has not produced satisfactory improvements for our Indigenous Australians. Despite a substantial increase in government expenditure and some important improvements, many of the problems have been intractable.
Reading the contributions of those on the other side of the chamber and listening to them this morning, both here and in the Senate, you see no acceptance and no acknowledgment of this dismal failure—no acceptance and no acknowledgment that it is time for a fundamental change to seek to address the huge issues at stake. There is no acceptance and no acknowledgment by those Labor and minor party members or senators that the Aboriginal community itself has accepted and acknowledged that ATSIC has failed and that fundamentally different approaches must be tried.
The comments by those opposite demonstrate an ideological commitment to a second-rate system that has failed Indigenous Australians and has disappointed all Australians for decades. The comments by those opposite offer no alternative way forward to reduce the indisputable level of disadvantage faced by many Indigenous Australians. All they seem to want to do is tinker, tinker and tinker. They prattle on about blame, encourage Aboriginals to see themselves as victims and as having no responsibility. They suggest that we simply pour more and more money into a lost ATSIC cause. More sit-down money, more resources and more facilities delivered in a way which carries no responsibility for individual Aboriginals is no answer. It is a recipe for compounding the crisis. It is a recipe for further stripping our Aboriginal community of self-esteem, self-respect and personal responsibility. The Aboriginal community understands this; our opponents appear not to.
Labor talks on and on about starting to build a future for our Indigenous community based on mutual respect and understanding. I do not disagree with this. However, I disagree profoundly with the way the Labor Party suggests this will come about. Labor’s approach works directly against this objective, focusing endlessly on a process of acknowledgment and redressing of past wrongs. Attributing blame and building a culture of victims not only is not productive but it is counterproductive.
Mutual respect and understanding will be built very quickly as the Aboriginal community is given the opportunity to take responsibility for its own actions. This is the direction of changes being pursued by the government; this is the direction being requested by the Aboriginal community itself, and the winding up of ATSIC is necessarily part of this because ATSIC do not share this vision of empowering their own people. Their record stands testament to that.
The government have introduced sweeping reforms to Indigenous affairs that have dramatically increased the focus on Indigenous issues. The reforms seek to place responsibility back into the mainstream of government activities, but importantly involves sharing responsibility directly with Indigenous Australians, on the ground, to help them create their own solution and improve coordination of efforts across key federal, state and local agencies.
The abolition of ATSIC marks a change in the government’s evaluation of and approach to Indigenous programs, Indigenous policy and Indigenous expenditure. No longer will the amount of money being spent be the measure of us doing our best for Indigenous communities. The true measure is outcomes: what are the outcomes of these programs and have they improved the lives of Indigenous Australians—that is how we must be measured in the future, not on the quantity of money that is spent on and delivered into programs and to various communities.
At the heart of these changes, which critically includes the scrapping of ATSIC, is the principle of shared responsibility, which assumes that government alone cannot fix Indigenous problems. Both government and Indigenous people have rights and obligations, and all must share responsibility. It is commonsense; it is not ideology as our opponents glibly suggest. More critically, this approach reflects the demands and the realisations of the Indigenous community. Again we hear from our opponents on the other side of the House that this approach of mutual obligation—shared responsibility—should deal with peripheral issues, none of these central services, central facilities or essential resources. The Aboriginal communities dispute this. They understand that mutual responsibility, shared responsibility and Aboriginals taking some responsibility for their own destiny are at the heart of their future—and this relates to all of the services and all of the resources which are at their disposal. All of the opportunities that they take on must involve some notion of responsibility for their own destiny. They understand that; others in this House do not.
More critically, this approach reflects the demands and the realisations of the community. It reinforces, once again, that cultural change cannot be imposed; it must reflect the will of the people. We see examples all over Australia of Aboriginal people deciding to do something for themselves. One such example is the residents of Wadeye, a tribal Aboriginal Catholic community of 2½ thousand Aborigines situated at the western edge of the Daly River reserve in the Northern Territory. Wadeye has faced all the problems of other remote Aboriginal communities—grog, drugs, paint, illiteracy and aimlessness. The community built a much-needed swimming pool last year. At that time, the Wadeye elders agreed to impose a ‘no school, no pool’ rule. Theodora Narndu, a 63-year-old community elder who has six children and 24 grandchildren, says:
“I feel confident our kids will (now) have a future away from the grog, the drugs and everything else.”
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“It got to the point that things were so bad, where there appeared to be no hope for the children, that the community just decided, that’s enough, we have to do something for ourselves.”
The Wadeye elders agreed to impose a “no school, no pool” rule. When the pool was complete last year, more children started arriving at the Catholic-run school, many of them sent by parents who had no education. But when classes opened recently, teachers were stunned when scores more children than expected arrived, including 15 young mothers for year 12 and teenage boys who had been running amok in the town. Five hundred and eighty-two of the town’s about 700 children had enrolled, a 50 per cent increase on last year.
This is a wonderful example of the move afoot out there in many Aboriginal communities. The changes being introduced by the government which seek to work with local communities directly, aim to foster this frame of mind in Aboriginal communities.
ATSIC has not accepted the significance of the Aboriginal community taking responsibility for their own destiny. ATSIC has failed in this regard. It is not representative; it has not been representative; it cannot be representative; it does not understand this cultural change. ATSIC is part of the problem, not part of the solution. This bill is part of striking out in a new and encouraging direction for our Indigenous community. This is not an end to a place at the table; it is the start of an opportunity for every local Aboriginal community to have a place at the table as they share responsibility for their own destiny through agreed programs relevant to each local community.
Media contact: Kathryn Hodges 0409 132 567