Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today, I want to talk about two issues that impact on the health and welfare of children: one overseas and one within Australia. I first of all want to raise the issue of orphanage tourism. I note that in schools in my electorate, across Perth and, no doubt, across Western Australia, we are seeing a rise in the phenomena of orphanage projects being embraced by schools, usually private schools, who are taking their senior students to volunteer in orphanages in Asia. I speak here mainly about Cambodia because it is the area to which I have had some exposure. On a recent parliamentary delegation to Cambodia, I was quite shocked and horrified to learn what was, indeed, developing in Cambodia as a result of this orphanage tourism.

I want to acknowledge that I absolutely understand that the schools, the parents and the students are acting with the very best of intentions. The students, usually in middle high school years, go over, in this case, to Cambodia, and they undertake some maintenance and building work, and spend time playing with the children in the orphanages. Schools, understandably, see these visits as an opportunity for their students to engage in philanthropic activity to help others but also, importantly, to gain perspective on their privilege. I think these are very worthwhile aims. We want our young people to be good global citizens and to have a very strong sense of the need to help others who are less fortunate than themselves.

After having several briefings now from Friends-International and from Save the Children fund, I am deeply concerned that what we are doing, unwittingly, with this exercise is creating this business model of orphanage tourism. There are around 300 registered orphanages in Cambodia and hundreds more that are not registered. The really frightening fact is that an estimated 75 per cent of the children inside those orphanages were not orphans at all or had one or more living parents. It is not the case that these are situations where parents are simply incapable of providing for their children, although we do recognise that, particularly in rural Cambodia, there is massive poverty. Save the Children and Friends-International tell us that parents are actually being pressured to put their children into care, to ensure orphanages have their population—that they have their basic product—and that the operators of these facilities then rake in the money from well-intentioned volunteers both from schools and from the general population.

The majority of these orphanages in Cambodia are owned and operated by foreigners. The concept in Cambodia was an introduced one. There is certainly a misconception that people do not care about their children because they give them up to orphanages. This is not true, and a great deal of misrepresentation is made to the parents about the type of life that will be offered to their child in that orphanage. The orphanages regularly use children to raise money by handing out flyers and putting on shows and, in some, they try to encourage the kids to look malnourished to encourage donations, and there are many, many other tricks involved in the whole process.

There is also another problem. As you have this constant stream of well-meaning people coming to these orphanages, these kids, without the support of a family, obviously gain attachments to those people who come through. The psychological damage experienced by children having this constant stream of people coming to the orphanage—they form a bond and then they leave and are replaced with someone else—is really quite horrific. I really do think that we have to ask our school community and the broader community to think very deeply about what the unintended consequences of your well-motivated actions are here. We do not want to discourage schools from visiting foreign countries, from visiting Third World countries or, indeed, from being involved in assisting those countries in raising money.

By way of a contrast, I would just talk about a project which I think is very worthwhile. I want to commend those schools in Perth that are involved in the Angkor Project. This is a project where schools, and often quite working-class schools like Morley Senior High School, adopt a sister-school relationship with a Cambodian school in a particular province and the kids then raise money and that money goes over to the sister school and the school community determines what they are going to spend that money on. I was very, very proud to visit a school just outside Phnom Penh, where I arrived to see, in great big letters, 'Morley Senior High School Toilet Block'. This had been a very important development, because young women, once they reach puberty, are very reluctant to go to school if they do not have access to toilets. So the introduction of a toilet block, funded by the fundraising activities of the kids at Morley Senior High School, has had a very real impact on the ability of girls to maintain their education in that area.

The kids at Morley have raised around $30,000 for the sister school, for the toilet block, for the Morley Senior High School computer room, where kids have computers, and for a variety of other science equipment that has enabled the school to offer programs that they would otherwise be unable to provide. This is all being done in the context of the traditional family structures. Children from poor environments are being helped to get their education without those children being used as a business model for some pretty unethical behaviour.

So I do think it is important that we reflect on our actions and what our well-intentioned actions can sometimes result in. I urge schools to look at alternative processes, like the Angkor Project, where you can in fact provide that assistance and get an enormous amount of satisfaction from helping a school in Cambodia without having this destructive impact on the fabric of society and on so many young people. My friend and colleague the member for Canberra is equally concerned about this, as is, I understand, Senator Linda Reynolds, and I hope that we can get together and work with the schools here to perhaps get them to understand that there is a less destructive model that exists where their students can get the benefit of understanding more deeply another culture and providing financial assistance without being a destructive force.

The second issue of the welfare of children that I want to raise relates to the unintended consequences of a change in the childcare package and policy. The government has been very proud of its new childcare policy and the packages that it is putting forward in its Jobs for Families package. This, unfortunately, is going to have very, very substantial consequences for Aboriginal communities across Australia. I particularly want to focus on Fitzroy Crossing, where Emily Carter and June Oscar have led the development of an amazing early learning centre and a child-parent centre through the Baya Gawiy centre, which is an absolute standout in providing a deeply engaging environment for young children to ensure that young Aboriginal children from some of the most disadvantaged communities in this country are able to get their developmental needs met.

We all understand—and Fiona Stanley put this very profoundly yesterday in a video to members of this place—that those early years, those first three years of life when a child has its greatest neuroplasticity, is the time when we must ensure that children are being exposed to a stimulating and nurturing environment. Through that, they develop their neural architecture that enables them to have a chance to succeed at school. It is without doubt the time when you need the clearest intervention. It is the time when you get the best cost-benefit return, because you are laying down that fundamental architecture of the brain that will last with the child for the rest of their life. If we do not get that right, then the ability for us to intervene through the time of formal education becomes highly compromised. We all know that. The science is beyond doubt.

By introducing increased standards for the activity test, it means that, for the average child in Fitzroy Crossing who currently has access to 20 to 24 hours a week of this stimulating, nurturing environment, that will now be reduced to around 10 to 12 hours a week. This is a massive backward step. The activity test is just not going to work in these Aboriginal communities. What we are trying to do is to break that cycle of intergenerational poverty. To say you can only put your child into these childcare centres if you are out there looking for jobs, working or doing something like that is to totally miss the point—that is, we have to have a strategic intervention in these communities.

I know that the government is saying, 'We have this other packet of money. We have this other magic pudding, the Community Child Care Fund, which can be utilised.' But that can only be accessed if you have a plan that shows, after three years, you will not need access to those funds. We are not going to turn around the situation in Fitzroy Crossing or in any other remote Aboriginal community in three years. This is something that we have to stick at for the next 10, 15, 20 years to break that cycle to ensure that the kids coming through are able to get a good-quality education and that they are developed to the point where they are able to seize the opportunities that we can offer them at school and post school. So this fund, the magic pudding at the side, is not going to be the answer to this problem.

I urge the government to look at this again to ensure that these changes to the activity test do not apply to these Aboriginal communities because they will undermine the very positive work being done by people like Emily Carter and June Oscar in Fitzroy Crossing. They are people who are actually showing leadership, going out there and really wanting to build social sustainability and social resilience within their communities.

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