Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is the seventh Closing the Gap report since the targets were set up by COAG in 2008. There have been some improvements in outcomes in education and health but, on the whole, Indigenous Australians continue to experience vastly increased rates of incarceration, lower life expectancy, higher rates of many life-threatening illnesses and poverty when compared to non-Indigenous Australians.

But I think we must look beyond some of those very sad statistics and focus on particular communities. For example, Aunty Melva Johnson is an elder of the Yorta Yorta community living in Echuca. She was forced to give birth on a veranda at Echuca hospital when she was younger woman. She then a little later worked in the hospital as an unskilled supporter. But now she is on the Echuca Hospital board. She actually takes part in managing that very large public hospital. In her one lifetime she has been gone from being a pariah forced to give birth on a veranda through to now being part of the hospital management board. I think that is an extraordinary situation and one we must celebrate.

When I was elected, I have to say, that the protocol of acknowledging country and welcome to country were practically unknown. In fact, if you had acknowledged country, people would have wondered what on earth you were talking about. But today we have that protocol of acknowledging country or receiving a warm welcome to country, particularly in my electorate, virtually every day. And the flags of the Indigenous and Torres Strait Islanders fly at most schools, particularly the Aboriginal flag, alongside the Australian flag. If we were in Queensland, we would see many more of the Torres Strait Islander flags proudly flying.

Sadly, our Australian history curriculum in our states and wherever there is still Australian history taught to an extent still does not teach about the pre-colonial Australian cultures nor of the culture contact period—the period when the people who were invading Australia largely from Britain did not understand the way the Australian continent was owned by numerous numbers of tribes, each with very distinct and well-known boundaries who were prepared to protect those boundaries with their own lives, not just from the new colonial British but also from one another if there was an incursion.

So we have a situation in Australia too often where there is a lack of understanding of why we have right now such extraordinary rates of poverty, violence in communities, very high-risk alcohol and other drug consumptions which lead to violence, neglect of family, often brain damage and certainly some of the highest rates of incarceration in the world. Too many young Indigenous Australians are born with irreparable brain damage, particularly to their cognitive capacities, which are the consequences of their mother's drinking alcohol when pregnant. We all know the statistics where, per person, Indigenous Australians are less likely to be a drinker compared to non-Indigenous Australians. But when Indigenous Australians do drink alcohol, they tend to drink at much higher levels of risk.

A recently published report on the incidence of foetal alcohol syndrome and the foetal alcohol spectrum disorder in an Indigenous community in Western Australia has found some of the world's highest rates of irreparable brain damage and other associated disability in the population of children under eight years of age. Ironically, that particular community has imposed some of the most successful alcohol reduction strategies in their community in Australia. But now they have to live with the legacy of the alcohol impacts of the earlier high-risk drinking rates that were prevalent in their community for generations. We just recently had a tragic car accident where one of these young, damaged people only some 13 years of age has been involved in an accident and there have been deaths. This is a tragic outcome for that community, which has seen so many deaths associated with high-risk drinking and the violence that often ensues.

I chair the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs and our current inquiry aims to identify the reasons why Indigenous communities are drinking alcohol at such high-risk levels. We want to identify successful strategies that have reduced alcohol consumption or that have helped those with drinking problems to be rehabilitated. We have seen, unfortunately, very few examples of these successful strategies. Too often, the strategies that we do come across identify are extremely short-term in their funding generation or they have lost the champion who was making sure that they were well established and functioning in a particular community. The impacts of high-risk drinking include: extreme levels of violence—some of the highest levels of violence you will find in any community in the world; child neglect; poverty; and, as I have already said, incarceration rates that rob children of their parents, particularly their fathers, as they grow. But unfortunately there are also extremely high rates of Indigenous women incarcerated related to their high-risk alcohol consumption.

Our government's priorities for making real improvements in the lives of Indigenous in Australians include: getting children to school; keeping them there for a good education; getting adults into work; and making Indigenous communities safe so people can live, work and raise their families. As I have been inferring, the key ways to make sure these communities are safe, that the adults are able to have meaningful work and that the parents supervise their children's school attendance are very often affected by whether or not the families are addicted to alcohol and other illicit substances.

One of the saddest things about the inquiry that we are undertaking now in 2015 is that almost all the identical terms of reference were given to a committee in the 1970s chaired by Mr Philip Ruddock. Those terms of reference came up with, I am sure, what will be similar outcomes and conclusions as our report will find. And that is the tragedy of Australian Indigenous life—the fact that we have been trying, government after government, state, federal and territory governments, to find ways forward. I do not agree with the previous speaker, who said it is just about resources. It is not just about more financial resources. It is about strategies that are put forward by Indigenous communities themselves. It is about champions, like June Oscar in Fitzroy Crossing, who are stunningly courageous women who have taken issues in their community and run with them. They are really working towards a better life for their children.

Unfortunately, in our particular inquiry, we are finding that there is still a great deal of despair. People are throwing up their hands and saying, 'We have tried everything. We are not sure how to get children to stay in school. We have tried removing welfare access and we have tried having the children go to other places for school, but we still have not as yet managed to find an outcome which ensures that most Indigenous children go to school and stay in school.' They end up having no choices in their life other than going back to a very remote and small community where their destiny is probably likely to be like that of their fathers and mothers. That is, a life of abuse, poverty, poor health and, too often, incarceration.

I just want to read a section out of a book which I produced many years ago in the 1970s, which looks at the evolution of Australian government policy in relation to Indigenous affairs. This is a speech made by Paul Hasluck in the House of Representatives on 8 June 1950. It says:

According to the census taken in 1944, there were then in Australia 71,895 persons who were classified as aborigines…

He goes on to talk about how many were half-castes. But he says:

… one-third were classified as nomadic and slightly fewer than one-third as being in employment.

So the employment issue was really being addressed. This was prior to the time of a lot of welfare being available. He says:

The problem today is not a problem of protection. In the old days, when they were a primitive people living under primitive bush conditions, the problem chiefly was to set up a barrier between them and the invading white community. Those days have gone and the nation must move to a new era in which the social advancement rather than the crude protection of the natives should be the objective of all that is done in this sphere.

He goes on to say:

We must either work for the social advantage of aborigines or be content to witness their continued social degradation.

He says:

… their future lies in association with us and they must either associate with us on standards that will give them full opportunity to live worthily and happily or be reduced to the social status of pariahs and outcasts, living without a firm place in the community. In other words, we either permit this social evil to continue or we remedy it.

If we take away some of the racist language, which refers to these people as primitives and so on, I think the sentiment is the same now as it was 75 years ago. That is that we have people in our Australian community who are underemployed or unemployed and who are not enjoying the advantages of being full participating members of our Australian community. I think he is saying that they can either be pariahs and outcasts or they can live with the community and enjoy all that is good. (Time expired)

See this speech in context