Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, rise to speak on the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2013. This bill aims to increase the appropriations for some measures until 30 June 2014, in particular to boost spending for the School Nutrition Program, which caters for over 5,000 students in 65 schools selected in the Northern Territory. As well, there are to be an additional 200 teachers in the Northern Territory and new funding for the Achieving Results Through Indigenous Education project, which will be administered through the Sporting Chance Program, also funded through this bill. The problem is that this still only amounts to a series of one-year commitments. This is the third round of one-year ad hoc commitments. Imagine the lot of the individuals and their families employed in these programs—that is, the teachers, the administrators and the fieldworkers. They are trying to focus on their work but, every six months, they have to contemplate: where do we go to next, what new job application do we send off?

Think of the Indigenous children and their families who have come to expect nothing more than short-termism, a revolving door of ad hoc programs, new faces, new people, always one finishing, one starting up and with no expectation of continuity. This is the hallmark of a chaotic administration and of governments that pay only lip-service to assisting one of the most disadvantaged populations embedded in any developed nation.

Take the Indigenous Youth Mobility Program, which provides accommodation support for remote young people as they take up, say, a trade or a traineeship. First, Labor cut the program's funding, leaving students in their dreams of a better life stranded, leaving their families disenchanted and saying, 'That's what you expect.' But then the government replaced the funding a year later. So this is not only chaotic; it is cruel, given its impacts on young people's hopes and plans. We all know that the educational outcomes for all students have been deteriorating under the Labor regime. This is the case across the country and it is deeply shameful. But that is what the deeply flawed but much loved by Labor NAPLAN results show us. We now have the statistics to compare ourselves with developed nations in our Asia region and beyond. We are in an incredible situation where we see maths and literacy skills and learning are contracting over time, not improving. We are also seeing a widening gap between the most able students and students who struggle. On a national scale, translate that into the situation for Indigenous Australians, where many of them are living in extraordinarily remote communities, a long way from job opportunities and role models, with a range of different occupations and in families which may not have known work or which may not have participated in the modern Australian economy for two or three generations.

Quite clearly, we need to have an education plan and funding which is not short term and which is not one year at a time—'Let's see what's in the budget, let's see if we can throw a bit of money back at that program we cut last year' seems to be the thinking of the ministers responsible for Indigenous education in Australia. It is not good enough and it results in deeply disadvantaged, cynical, isolated individuals. Many of them, especially our Indigenous youth, end up in jail. They end up with thwarted life opportunities and with alcohol and drug consumption levels, which are dangerous to them and their children.

Two recent reports of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs—and I am deputy chair of this committee—addressed in particular this issue of young people and their educational opportunities in Australia and the failure of our education system for them. One is titled Doing time—time for doing: Indigenous youth in the criminal justice system. The other report is titled Our land our languages. Both these reports identified the terrible failures in the provision of formal education for Indigenous students. I have already mentioned the outcome for many of our Indigenous students is early engagement in the criminal justice system, particularly for boys.

Recommendation 9 of the languages report asked that, by March 2013, the Commonwealth government develop and announce an implementation plan, given its endorsement of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People. This endorsement was made in 2009. People on this side will not be surprised to hear that that deadline has well and truly passed and this government still has done nothing more than endorse this declaration, pay lip-service to it. The human rights of Indigenous Australians, in regard to them having access to the economy of Australia and having a decent life, are now just as remote for Aboriginal peoples as they were many years ago. The gap between the life opportunities and quality of life between Indigenous Australians and the rest of our society widens, whether that gap is measured in health terms, numbers in incarceration or numbers who are unemployed and who are therefore experiencing extreme poverty. Whatever way you measure this gap, it is growing in Australia and it should not be tolerated by a developed nations like ours.

That inequality and that gap can in particular be addressed through better education and training opportunities for Indigenous families, Indigenous Australians. This is what this bill is supposed to be about, but all it does is throw a little bit of money for one year at a couple of programs. This is a serious problem.

School for remote Aboriginal families in particular almost universally reinforces their sense of alienation and isolation from mainstream society. It reinforces their lack of power or lack of independent action after they have finished some schooling in remote Australia. An indication of exactly what most of our Indigenous children think about their schooling is in the levels of absenteeism. Most Indigenous students arrive at preschool or primary school in these remote settlements with a home language which is not your standard Australian English. These children may speak traditional languages, or a creole, a complex contact language. Our inquiry into languages and issues surrounding education in languages found that these children's languages were not identified at the time of their arrival as a little girl or boy full of hope and expectation on their first days at preschool or kindergarten or primary school. Typically they were expected to be speaking standard Australian English on the day they arrived and they were taught like that. They were not taught first in their home languages, and their teachers were not universally trained in teaching English as a second language. So these children began from their first day to be alienated and disadvantaged because there was a totally different set of expectations about what they were actually understanding in the classroom. Very often employed in that classroom, at a poor salary and with very limited career expectations, is an Aboriginal teacher's aide. She typically does speak the language of the children in the classroom but she is not the one instructing the children.

I have met so many bright and eager young people in small Northern Territory, Western Australian and Queensland outback schools who are approaching their final years at school and who, according to the data held by the school, have actually been in school for six, seven, eight, nine or 10 years but have no working knowledge in English-language speaking, and they certainly cannot write it. These young people want to get a licence to drive a car, they want to work in the mines, they want to play football for Collingwood—they have a whole range of expectations like any other young Australian. But they will be competing to get a job, to participate in our economy, with one hand tied behind their backs because the education system has completely failed to give them adequate English language skills.

It is one of the most important things to retain traditional or contact languages amongst our Indigenous communities, and as an anthropologist I understand that profoundly. But it is equally important to ensure that the young person is not marginalised or open to exploitation or disempowered because they cannot communicate in standard Australian English. This is, unfortunately, too often the consequence of eight, nine or 10 years of formal education for an Aboriginal student in their remote Indigenous school. This is pathetic and it should not be tolerated. We have recommendations in our report, Our land our languages: language learning in Indigenous communities from September 2012, when we brought down our recommendations about all these issues. We spelt out quite clearly what the federal and Northern Territory governments in particular should do. I am very sad to say, but you will not be surprised to find, that those recommendations have fallen on deaf ears.

Then we have the extraordinary situation of alcohol consumption in some of our Indigenous communities to the extent that women who are pregnant are still drinking, and so we have foetal alcohol spectrum disorder at a rate of prevalence in some Indigenous communities which means that a significant number of the young children are brain damaged, and have been brain damaged at birth. We are not addressing in our schools now this issue of how to support and give some instruction to those young children who are brain damaged as a consequence of their mother's consumption of alcohol when they were in the womb. Some communities in Western Australia have had prevalence studies completed in terms of the proportion of children affected by foetal alcohol spectrum disorder.

Let me say that the proportions of children affected are shocking, deeply shocking. Are those schools being given support in terms of special programs? Are they being given support from a multidisciplinary team which has everything from psychiatric to speech therapy to physiotherapy skills? No, they are not. We are just noting how many children have foetal alcohol spectrum disorder consequences. We are saying, 'That is bad.' We do not yet even have any program in Australia which brings the community's attention to the problem of drinking while you are pregnant. Yet here we are with a bill giving a few dollars for a year to a few Indigenous programs in schools, but we are ignoring the elephant in the room, which is that in some Indigenous communities up to half of the children have brain damage at birth. They cannot learn like normal children and yet they do not have an intellectual incapacity; they have a cognitive incapacity, so they understand profoundly what their own shortcomings are. One of the most tragic things you watch is a short film called Tristan where a young 10-year-old Indigenous boy from Fitzroy Crossing says: 'I just want to be normal. I would like to be a policeman but I just want to be normal.' What a tragic statement of yearning from a young boy born profoundly brain-damaged, with other physical disabilities as well, because his mother was drinking while she was pregnant without any support for her alcohol dependency while she was pregnant. In fact, that mother has other children with the same condition.

This government, I am very sad to say, still has not responded to the House of Representatives Social and Legal Affairs Standing Committee, which brought down a report late last year into foetal alcohol spectrum disorder in Australia. The recommendations that we put up were to be responded to by this government by the end of this month. We have heard nothing. I am hoping that we will be having a government response to that report very soon, because too many young children in Australia—not just in the Indigenous communities but in the broader Australian community—are being born brain-damaged, with their capacity to learn severely impaired because their mothers were not aware of the dangers of drinking during pregnancy or because their mothers were addicted or had a drinking problem and have not been given any support during their pregnancies.

So I have many concerns. Having worked in the education sector in the academic training of teachers and in developing curriculum, and as an anthropologist and a person working in Indigenous communities for many years, I am deeply concerned by the limitations of this bill. Of course, the opposition will not oppose this bill, because at least it gives a few dollars to a few good programs, particularly the program which will feed little Indigenous children in the schools. But it is short-termism. This is just a one-year program commitment till June 2014. That is not good enough. That is an insult. It is disrespectful to Australian society, which expects the government to seriously address the disadvantage in Indigenous communities. From 14 September this year, I am expecting that there will be a real change where a different government will put the priorities for Indigenous Australians first and that we will begin to see a closing of the gap in educational outcomes, because nothing else will do for a nation which claims to be developed and caring.

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