Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Wannon for his serious question about Indigenous disadvantage in education and how we are trying to address it. I am very pleased that I had the opportunity last week to visit the communities of East Arnhem Land, with the Prime Minister, other cabinet ministers and ministers. We went to the communities of Gunyangara, Nhulunbuy and the Yirrkala. In fact, these are not the first Indigenous communities that I have visited, because the first committee I ever sat on in this place in 1993 was the Indigenous affairs committee. I spent much time in Indigenous communities. With the former minister for health, Tony Abbott, I went to the APY Lands on many occasions to see what benefits we could bring to that community. If the opposition took Indigenous affairs seriously rather than seeing it as a tokenistic, ideological playground, they would actually recognise that some of the policies we are trying introduce—

See this speech in context