Barry Haase (Kalgoorlie, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

When the second reading debate on the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2006 was adjourned on 16 August I was speaking about the school based sporting academies. The projects will run in partnership with sporting bodies to give children the chance to learn a new skill, be part of a team and boost their self-esteem. This funding may give children a reason to engage with or remain at school as well as improve their health.

A perfect example of this is the Clontarf Football Academy in Western Australia which is run by Gerard Neesham. That project has now been taken to many schools across Western Australia to engage predominantly Indigenous youth in the finer arts of playing football—something that they are incredibly naturally skilled in already. There is ample evidence at the very highest level of Aussie Rules football as to how good those Indigenous players are. I commend Gerard Neesham for taking up the opportunity to use some of this federally allocated funding to encourage children through sporting engagement to participate in schools and therefore participate more in a real education.

I say again and again that, without continuous attendance at school and full participation in the whole school curriculum, Indigenous youth do not have a fighting chance of engaging fully in society and enjoying all that the independence of employment has to offer. How can children who are brought up in an environment of malnourishment, violence, sexual abuse shorter life expectancy, unacceptably high levels of illiteracy, higher levels of diabetes, infant mortality, alcoholism, drug abuse and imprisonment, and the highest levels of unemployment, aspire to make a contribution to the tax-paying society of today?

There is provision in this amendment of $7.3 million for Indigenous youth festivals as part of the Community Festivals for Health Promotion campaign. These festivals combine music, dance and art to engage youth and promote healthy and positive lifestyles. You cannot simply sit a child down and tell them not to eat junk food, watch television all day or sniff petrol if that is the only example they know. We hope that the children will participate in these festivals and it will give them some sense of pride through participation as well as an education.

A classic example of this was to be found most recently with the Croc Festival in Meekatharra in Western Australia, where we had some 600 predominantly Indigenous children from, I believe, 15 schools in the area participate in a three-day event which culminated in a concert that those children contributed to. I had the pleasure and the good fortune of attending that Croc Festival with Minister Joe Hockey. He got a finer appreciation of the good works that these festivals do in promoting lifestyles that are healthy and beneficial. This will greatly contribute to the outward nature of these children.

The opportunity for them to engage in and experience some education in lifestyle and careers by participating in things like the Croc Festival is something that many of us that sit in this place take for granted but in reality is an absolutely rarity. It is a look into the future, almost a rose garden, for many Indigenous students that come from remote communities. It is sometimes the only opportunity that they will have to engage with a range of other people and to witness firsthand the diversity that is the reality of life in employment today.

The Australian government is also providing money for Indigenous youth—in this case, an additional $43.6 million—through the projects that I have outlined under this bill. However, too often the expenditure of those Indigenous communities becomes a great source of frustration, because the resources are too often eaten up by what they call the seat-warming bureaucrats rather than used by more practically minded people on location who might actually make a difference. It is the real problem. In many cases we do not need to reinvent the wheel. What is required is an honest delivery of services that so many departments, both state and federal, theorise about and gain great publicity for but, in reality, often fail at the point of delivery.

We have classic, topical examples today in child welfare delivery and police delivery. Too many of the remote communities in my electorate of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia, which is 91 per cent of the Western Australian land mass, do not see a police presence. There is no sense of real community in families. Women and children are fearful for their personal security and, when you consider that we take these state delivered services of child welfare and police absolutely for granted, we would be horrified if in any of our Perth suburbs we had to wait a couple of days for a police presence. We would find that totally unacceptable, and yet it is the absolute norm in my remote communities.

States should be ashamed of the fact that they do not deliver secure communities for the people of those communities. Until such time as they do, women and children will continue to be fearful for their safety, and with that base premise you cannot expect mothers to be fundamentally involved in and concerned with sending their small children out of the home, where the children afford some degree of company and there is some sort of natural security, to a classroom where they will no longer be able to come to their aid in the case of domestic abuse. Too many people sleep well in their leafy suburban environments, convinced that Indigenous youth can move through life as their children do—educated, eventually employed, useful and equipped with the skills needed and having the opportunity to gain self-esteem through finding their place in society and gaining from all that is modern Australia.

The aspirations of Ministers Bishop and Brough and of this government are high and well intended but, until such time as state governments take responsibility to cooperate for the improved future of Indigenous people and until such time as appropriate, grassroots programs are resourced in a meaningful way, we cannot expect the situation of Indigenous communities to change. We must move away from well-intentioned and politically correct projects which often do not address the grim reality of community life. We do not need to reinvent the wheel; we simply need to make the appropriate investment in people resources that will assist in the provision of the basic tenures of civilised life. The alternative is to endure as a reality the continuation of the past, which those persons well informed know is unacceptable. I commend this bill to the House and congratulate our current ministers, who are working with the full cooperation of the coalition backbenchers, for their efforts to effectively create a groundswell of change.

See this speech in context