Andrew Giles (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Like other speakers, I acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people as the traditional owners of the land on which we are gathered now, and I pay my respects to elders past and present. I have been reflecting over the past few minutes that this is my third opportunity to participate in this debate on the closing the gap statements. It has been important to me to reflect on the purpose of this debate as part of our parliament and as a driver of progress towards equality and reconciliation in Australia. It has been a great privilege to sit in the parliament and be part of what are very significant setpiece debates involving what have been moving speeches from the Prime Minister and the opposition leader. They have been great setpieces of hope, reflecting a bipartisan commitment to closing the gap.

This bipartisanship is important if we are to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, but it is not something that we should prioritise over getting the policy settings right about really engaging with the problems and challenges before us. Similarly, I see this closing the gap process that we are participating in now, this debate on the Prime Minister's report, is necessary and important, but we should not regard it as a sufficient driver of change in marking our progress towards closing the various gaps and, indeed, in highlighting those areas where we have failed to make progress.

I will touch very briefly on the Aboriginal population of the electorate of Scullin, which has been small but is growing. It reflects changes in the distribution of Aboriginal people in Melbourne as people are moving more to the suburbs—in particular, to the northern suburbs. These changes have not yet been adequately in access to services and to community facilities. I take this opportunity to draw the attention of the House to the critical importance of ensuring that Aboriginal people right around Australia have access to community facilities that are not only owned and governed by community but also readily accessible to community members. This is important in our major cities, where the population has often been dispersed but where health centres and early childhood education centres have traditionally been located in the inner city.

In this regard, the significance of the Bubup Wilam children and family centre is absolutely critical to the Aboriginal communities that I am proud to represent in this place. This centre, unfortunately, has been under enormous pressure with the federal government's failure to carry on the national partnership which led to its foundation. That a centre such as this, which has been achieving extraordinary outcomes for Aboriginal young people and families, is under threat causes me great distress and is a great shame for all of us in Melbourne's northern suburbs. We have seen the impact of the programs led by community, driven by community and formed by culture have been making in the increasing school attendance, which is obviously a critical new Close The Gap target under this government. To see that at risk would be a terrible, terrible shame. I again take the opportunity to implore the government and the minister to reconsider their attitude to that national partnership.

I was pleased to be in the House for the contributions of the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition in the last sittings. I noted with pride and interest the Prime Minister's respectful use of language. Deputy Speaker Claydon, you will forgive me for not seeking to emulate the Prime Minister's linguistic talents in this place. I was concerned though by some aspects of his contribution to this debate. I am concerned in particular that the Prime Minister moves far too quickly when he speaks critically of closing the gap as being 'described as a problem to be solved—but more than anything it is an opportunity.' This is characteristic language of our Prime Minister, but in this case, in this context, it is far too glib, far too dismissive, of the challenges that face Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia today, challenges highlighted by the report he was speaking to and which I am addressing today. It was just too glib in tone. Of course we must celebrate successes, we must deliver and strive for hope through our contributions in this place, but we must also squarely acknowledge our failures—there are many. I will turn briefly to some elements of the report in this regard, shortly.

I will touch on the contribution in the main chamber of the Leader of the Opposition, who in a tremendous speech built on what I thought was a very significant contribution to some of these debates at the University of Melbourne some months ago, when he spoke on some of the great challenges of Indigenous justice, challenges which this report highlights. Indeed, the statistics are terribly shocking and bear repeating. If you are an Aboriginal man you are 15 times more likely to be imprisoned than a non-Aboriginal man. Half of all Aboriginal prisoners in custody are under the age of 30. The re-imprisonment rate for Aboriginal young people is higher than the school retention rate. In the last decade, while we have focused our attention on closing the gap, imprisonment rates have more than doubled, grown considerably faster than the crime rate, which goes to some of the complexities and challenges in our justice system. We see for Aboriginal women very, very troubling large increases in the prison rate. They make up one-third of our female prison population, despite being slightly into three per cent of the overall population. These are shocking and unacceptable statistics, and I commend the contribution of the Leader of the Opposition in this regard. I also draw attention to two other aspects of his speech, which I think he made very powerfully and which bear reflecting upon: his contributions on health and his call for us to focus on closing the political gap as a critical component of addressing the wider challenges of closing the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.

One other matter which should be mentioned but which has perhaps not got the attention it needs to, and was touched on by the member for Griffith earlier, is that of the great challenges in family and domestic violence, violence against women in Aboriginal communities, urban and regional. This is another area where we have failed to make the progress that people, women and children in particular, deserve.

On the whole, the 2016 Closing the gap report shows that we are failing on too many key indicators. Eight years after the first report we are on target to meet only two of the targets. This is unacceptable. The life expectancy gap is too wide. It is a challenge that we in this place, working with professionals and working with community, must face head-on.

I note and acknowledge that the report does show that we are on track in two important areas: child mortality to be halved by 2018, and to improve year 12 completion by 2020. However, while we are on target with the latter achievement, we are looking at only 60 per cent of Indigenous children finishing high school. In this regard, we can and must do much better.

The rate of Indigenous employment has fallen significantly. As we on the Labor side of politics can attest, having a job is the key for most of us having dignity. It is shameful that Indigenous employment today is lower than it was in the 1990s.

Responses on literacy and numeracy goals for children are also mixed. In this regard, it is important to reflect on Labor's policy alternative, the Your Child, Our Future policies. Needs-based funding clearly is the best way to address this gap. When this government took half a billion dollars out of the social services budget, clearly this has made these targets harder to meet. It is simply the case that we cannot cut our way to Closing the Gap.

This should be an area for bipartisanship but, again, bipartisanship is not a goal in and of itself; it is a driver to enduring progress. The targets of Closing the Gap, bipartisan targets, are ambitious, but without having ambitious targets we have no prospects of reaching parity. In order to continue the progress that we have made, we need to better engage in partnership with Indigenous communities. This involves listening to hard truths without flinching.

What we must do—going back to the contribution of the Leader of the Opposition—is to commit to a target to lower Indigenous incarceration. We know that any incarceration leads to increased likelihood of recidivism. In a time when Indigenous people make up 26 per cent of the prison population, this is an unacceptable statistic.

I am very proud of Labor's commitment to invest $9 million to close the gap in Indigenous vision loss. I note that Indigenous Australians are six times more likely to experience vision loss in cases that are treatable or preventable. This is a tiny investment for a very significant outcome.

Finally, as others have spoken about, we do need to recognise the first Australians in our Constitution. This is important symbolically and practically. Prime Minister Rudd began the process of healing when he apologised to the stolen generations. This is the next step. It is the chance to continue the process of eliminating racism in Australia and to complete our Constitution—the one three-word slogan of the former Prime Minister I agree with and echo in closing my contribution on responding to the great challenge posed by this Closing the gap report. I hope that next year we will have more progress based on sounder policies and greater investments to show for our efforts.

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