Ken Wyatt (Hasluck, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Makin for his motion. In discussions I have had with Premier Barnett; Minister Collier, the Western Australian Aboriginal affairs minister; Minister Helen Morton, the Western Australian Minister for Mental Health; and Terry Redman, the minister for regional Western Australia, all four have given me a strong commitment that there will be no closure of Aboriginal communities. There will be no closure without consultation. What they have raised with me is the concerns that I have seen over my lifetime: access to services, facilities and career pathways for children. Even when I was involved in many of the early reports that were tabled in either state or Commonwealth parliaments, the message consistently was: 'We will choose to live in certain areas, but we also accept that there are areas where governments cannot provide funding. It is our choice.' That choice is important.

But what I have found since the Hawke government is that there has been a decline in the practice of consulting on the ground and talking about what is needed. In fact, when I was in Health I worked with Shane Houston to develop a measure in Health that looked at community functioning. It was designed to be a tool that would enable Commonwealth and state agencies to go into a community and look at the programs and services that were being provided. This came off the back of my thinking in respect of an earlier inquiry by the Commonwealth Grants Commission on Indigenous expenditure and a couple of very salient points they made. They said—they made this point quite strongly—that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander funding was supplementary to mainstream government services. They went on to say that government agencies at both the state and federal levels relied on Aboriginal budgets to provide services to communities and to organisations, instead of saying, 'They are citizens of Australia; they are entitled to have access to funding.'

I have always found in agencies that, when you are planning, they say, 'What's in the Aboriginal bucket?' When I was in Health, I asked the then secretary of the department what was the representation of the Aboriginal dollars in Aboriginal health against the total health budget. I asked for a pie chart to be shown to us. That slice of the pie chart, when you considered the total Commonwealth budget for health, was as thin as a strand of somebody's hair. It was insufficient. Yet people should be accessing the range of government services. We should not talk about mainstream services; they are government services to all citizens.

I know that my four parliamentary colleagues in Western Australia are considering that issue in the context of the planning that they have in mind for the engagement with Aboriginal leaders within each of those communities, and they have given a genuine undertaking. Terry Redman, when he met with me in my office, talked about an orbit community around a central hub and how they could provide and look at job opportunities in the future. He was certainly looking at agriculture, particularly in the Pilbara and in the Kimberley, given the northern Australian strategy as a way of proceeding. But it was also the intent of CDEP and many other training programs to train people in particular skills that would give them pathways into jobs that any other Australian could walk into. Instead, what we saw was that those programs became enmeshed in, as Noel Pearson says, sitting down for the dole. The training that was supposed to come did not happen. Had it happened, communities would then have been better positioned to take care of their infrastructure. There would have been jobs.

The intent of programs and services has significant merit, but I find it fascinating when I walk into an organisation and I am being told that they meet their KPIs yet, when I get permission to walk through a community, I do not see the change that is supposed to have happened. I think all successive governments, including future ones, need to look at outcomes on the ground so that education, employment and health become the priorities and we give people choices as to where they live. But if they choose to live in a family context on country then there must also be the reciprocal understanding that they then access a hub within the orbit arrangement.

There is hope and opportunity, but I think that all members of this parliament have to set aside their positions and work collectively to achieve the changes that we need to make a difference for the next decade, because if we do not then nothing will be achieved.

Debate adjourned.

Sitting suspended from 13:44 to 16:00

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