Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Cities and Digital Transformation) Share this | Hansard source

I thank all three members for their questions. I will seek, in the five minutes I have now, to get through as many of them as possible. We continue to accumulate a very long list of questions, so I will seek to focus on the most important of them, because there is no possible way that I can get through all of them in the time allotted. There are important questions around suicide prevention, the Don Dale corrections centre facility—a series of questions were raised there—and, of course, extremely important questions around the Indigenous businesses and entrepreneurs program. Of course, that program in itself is very, very important for creating opportunity for Indigenous communities and creating gainful employment, which we know is an enormously important issue.

Let me touch first on some comments on the Don Dale correction facility questions. Obviously, the government is very concerned about the serious issues raised by the ABC report into the treatment of young people in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre. The Commonwealth did act swiftly in establishing a royal commission into the detention of children in the Northern Territory, as the member opposite pointed out. Quite rightly, we made the decision to get on with it. Sometimes in politics it is very important to act decisively when there are very, very important issues at stake. We have asked the royal commission to forensically examine the workings of the Northern Territory's youth detention centre.

Minister Scullion already acknowledged that his office received briefing information about the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre going back to 2015. These documents and the information contained in all reports available at the time did not include the footage shown by the ABC. I understand that, following the lodgement of FOI requests, his department conducted a thorough search of briefs prepared for his office, and this also found some reference to the centre in the background of a meeting brief from 2015 as well. It is important to recognise that the documents received by the minister stated that the NT government was investigating the allegations and implementing the recommendations of the vetted report. In fact, the NT Children's Commissioner stated at an NT estimates hearing in June 2016 that she was satisfied with the work done on the implementation of her report's recommendation.

The NT government has made a number of immediate changes while the royal commission undertakes its work—and it is a good thing it is doing that—including announcing it will appoint an inspector-general for corrections and establishing a special police task force to investigate the allegations of violence.

I can go a little further into that, if time permits, but I do want to spend a moment on the question around Indigenous businesses and entrepreneurs. I thank the member for Brisbane for that important question. He, of course, was in his electorate, when the $115 million Indigenous entrepreneurs package was announced by the Prime Minister during the election campaign. That package is a very important one, because it provides $90 million for the Indigenous Entrepreneurs Fund, which Indigenous small businesses and entrepreneurs can apply to for business assets. The fund will focus on regional areas and remote communities where accessing commercial finance is often not possible.

All of us know that a successful, growing business is an extraordinary opportunity. It creates opportunity not just for the business itself but for the employees and for the people in it.

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