Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the House on the Working on Country program. This is the Indigenous rangers program which I first had contact with when I was Minister for Agriculture. It continued when I was Minister for the Environment and I have kept a very close engagement and interest in it now that I have the responsibility in the shadow ministry for the finance portfolio.

In terms of effective environmental management and also in achieving significant social outcomes for employment there have been few programs provided by the Commonwealth that have been as effective as the Working on Country program. Effectively, the program funds and allows the range of work that needs to be done to look after country to be done by the traditional owners of that country. For some time I have had contact with a number of these rangers and, again, have worked with some of them in the Torres Strait earlier this year, cleaning up beaches on a number of islands.

A few weeks ago the Pew Charitable Trusts hosted a breakfast here at Parliament House. At that breakfast were some of the rangers who I had previously worked with, the Bardi Jawi Rangers from the Kimberley who I had camped with on Sunday Island—and I will never forget waking up in the middle of the night hearing what sounded like the roar of a jet engine but was simply the tide moving between the islands up there in the Kimberley in the Buccaneer Archipelago. I caught up with a couple of those rangers, Philip McCarthy and Daniel Oades.

I also caught up with a ranger by the name of Michael Ross at the breakfast. Michael Ross is responsible for Olkola country in Cape York and was very much involved with the work that was led by Indigenous rangers and traditional owners in determining whether or not they wanted to put their land forward for a World Heritage nomination for different parts of Cape York. That work and the programs associated with that consultation are currently on pause, but certainly the general work in looking after country that is performed by the Indigenous rangers up there continues, and Michael Ross continues with the work in his part of Australia as well.

It needs to be remembered that effective environmental management in Australia and the work of the Indigenous rangers is fundamentally different from environmental management in almost any other part of the world. In most parts of the world, if you take people off the land then nature looks after itself. In Australia, if you take people off the land then you change the ecology from what it is meant to be. This is because centuries of burns—in particular, cool burns rather than burns happening in the dryer end of the season—not only have worked as a fire management system but are something which the Australian ecology has come to depend on. A whole range of plant species only regenerate after these cool burns—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 12:07 to 12:21

To continue what I was saying before the suspension, there are currently 770 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders employed in full-time jobs in some of the most remote parts of Australia, with 1,423 jobs including part-time and casual employees. Around 30 per cent of all positions and half of part-time ranger positions are women. There is, generally, an under-representation of women in the ranger jobs. This is a problem with the program and something that needs to be constantly looked at, in program design, particularly given that for some parts of country only women are able to look after those parts of country.

In January, when I visited the Torres Strait, the senior ranger there was Laura Pearson. I worked with her on Warraber Island, Poruma Island and Iama Island, cleaning up beaches and, importantly, looking at different methods they are using in the Torres Strait to deal with the rise of sea levels. When we talk about the Pacific, it is easy to overlook the fact that we have islands that are Australian islands in the Torres Strait that are being affected, imminently, by rising sea levels. On Poruma Island, for example, you can walk along the beach and see the tops of coconut trees, which are all that is left of what was, not that long ago, part of the home of the people living there. It was, indeed, part of the formal boundaries of Australia. The work of the Working on Country program remains one of the most cost-efficient and effective environmental programs Australia has. I urge the government to continue to fund it, and I urge my own party to continue to expand it.