Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

Can I just acknowledge the member for Barton and also acknowledge the traditional owners of this country that we are meeting on today. I am the longest-serving member of the parliament on this side of the Chamber. That means I have seen a lot come and go, and I have seen a lot of policies come and go, particularly in the space of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs. I want to concur with the comments which were made at the outset by the member for Barton about the importance of what we do here and the importance of our actually addressing the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and doing things with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people—in concert with them, not to them. I speak regularly with the minister. We have a commitment to try to work here in a bipartisan matter. But I have to say that when we are being critical—and we can be critical; and my comrade here is bring critical—we want to be constructive in the process.

I want to refer to Closing the Gap targets. As you know, in February of this year, the ninth Closing the gap report found that only one of the seven Closing the Gap targets was on track. The target to halve the gap in child mortality by 2018 is not on track this year. The target to close the gap in life expectancy by 2031 is not on track, based on data since the 2006 baseline. In December 2015, COAG renewed the early childhood education target aiming for 95 per cent of Indigenous four-year-olds to be enrolled in early childhood education by 2025. This is not on track. The target to halve the gap in employment by 2018 is not on track. The target, however, to halve the gap in Year 12 attainment by 2020 is, pleasingly, on track. Yet, in this year's budget, it appears to us that there are few initiatives to improve performance in many of the areas which are of concern. Only the employment target and the education target have any new money associated to them—and I will come to that education money at later time.

I want to make this observation: the member for Barton mentioned that $500 million was taken out of the budget in the 2014-15 budget. That still has not been replaced. Portions of it have, but there has been no replacement of the 2014-15 budget's $500 million, and there is nothing we can see in this budget. We would like the minister to inform us about what the government has done since the release of the report in February of this year to reverse the trend in each of the target areas and get the Closing the Gap framework back on track. Can the minister list the new initiatives under each of those targets?

One of the other areas that I want to refer to is housing. In 2008, the Commonwealth committed $5.5 billion to the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing. In 2015, funding for the final three years was transferred into a new Indigenous housing strategy. The budget papers indicate the amount transferred was $1.1 billion. However, the website says that the total funding under the new strategy is $777 million, and many of the differences between this strategy and the old strategy are not clear, nor is it clear if construction has begun or what progress has been made under the new agreement. My questions under this heading are: how many houses have been built since the National Partnership Agreement on Remote Indigenous Housing was converted to the Remote Housing Strategy; is the program on track to meet its targets; and is the government committed to extending this beyond the middle of 2018? I would appreciate responses from the minister.

While I am on my feet, I will make an observation about the ranger programs, which I am pleased to say were given additional funding by the government. Of course, it has not matched Labor's commitment to double funding for the ranger programs. I will just make the observation that there is a particular minister—I will not name him just in case he might get embarrassed by it—very close to this portfolio who said, not too long ago, that the ranger programs were not real jobs. They are real jobs, and I am glad that the government has recognised the importance of those jobs. They are very important not only in sustaining the environment but in providing culturally appropriate employment opportunities for Aboriginal people where they live. That is a really important outcome of the ranger programs.

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