Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the Closing the gap report with sadness, like many members in this House. It's sober reading about the collective failure of the nation to address the disadvantage over generations for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. There are people who might, from time to time, want to use these issues as political point-scoring. Frankly, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people deserve better. It's not a failure of one government or two governments or three governments; it's a failure of what happens when you break apart a culture, a tradition, a connection to country and ideals and the human consequences that then flow.

There are of course in this Closing the gap report some areas with glimmers of hope, particularly around educational attainment and meeting two of the seven standards. We are particularly happy to see that happen, including having 95 per cent of all Indigenous four-year-olds enrolled in early childhood education by 2025. In 2018, 86.4 per cent of Indigenous four-year-olds were enrolled in early childhood education compared to 91.3 per cent of non-Indigenous Australian children. The gap has halved for Indigenous Australians aged 20 to 24 with year 12 attainment or equivalent attainment rates by 2020.

These are of course signs of opportunity and of growth, because education provides a foundation for people being able to make informed decisions and go on to live happy and successful lives. That's why the Liberal Party in the Gladstone administration in the United Kingdom many years ago established the whole principle of universal education. At the heart of it, universal education comes with the principle of equal opportunity for all people regardless of their circumstance. It is continued throughout the Australian tradition here, but there has been a gap, a chasm, around the realities experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

In many of the other remaining metrics around life expectancy and health and wellbeing, there is so much further to go. We know that it all isn't going to be solved overnight. That failure is not because of a tick or a flick of a bureaucrat's pen or a lack of funding but because often issues around health and inequality exist across generations, across cultural problems and against a culture of responsibility that we need to foster over time. That should never be used as an excuse. We must be able to demonstrate clearly that we're heading down the right path and that we're seeing improvement. But, sadly, those standards and those goals have not been met.

I particularly want to welcome the speech by the Prime Minister on the Closing the gap report not only because I thought it was one of the finest speeches that he has given as Prime Minister but, more critically, because his focus—as well that of the Minister for Indigenous Australians, the great Ken Wyatt—was not to accept the report and say, 'We failed yet again; let's keep trying more of the same.' In fact, what they did was turn around and give an appropriate, philosophical, practical plan to address the issues of disadvantage which have led us to the situation where we have not achieved the targets that we have set for ourselves.

I think the focus the Prime Minister and the Minister for Indigenous Australians have put on community and not Canberra is particularly welcome, because many members for a long time have talked—and rightly so, I might add—about the failure to encourage Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders to have the freedom to take responsibility. They have spoken about the lack of self-determination. In the words of the Prime Minister: 'We have failed the opportunity to recognise that freedom is built on empowerment and responsibility.' So focusing on community and not Canberra reflects a fundamental understanding about how the success of all of our lives is built.

We are individuals, but we do not sit on islands. We come together and form family, and the community is the foundation for nationhood. It's something that we take for granted every day: how to build a nation from the citizen and the individual up. Too often what we have had, in the issues affecting Indigenous Australians, is the exact opposite: Canberra deciding how people should live their lives, and Canberra seeing through the lens of bureaucrats and of the people in this place, and thinking they understand best the reality, the conditions, the circumstances, the culture, the attitudes and the traditions of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. And, frankly, too often Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have been displaced in favour of the world view of people who sit in this city.

So to focus on community and not Canberra, to have a yarn and to listen to Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders, to take us all as a nation on a collective journey, is the foundation for addressing closing the gap in the future, and I would hope that the members opposite would welcome the initiative of the Prime Minister and the Minister for Indigenous Australians have taken, because I think it provides the opportunity for not just a reset but a sense of ownership by all of us, but most by those who would seek to gain the most from a change in policy. To empower people, with our support, to take the maximum opportunity for control over their own lives and that of their communities to advance the collective interest—that's what we should want for ourselves and that is what we should want for Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders, if you want to empower people not just today but for future generations as well.

I said in my address-in-reply speech to this parliament that one of the most important evolutions that I've seen in my lifetime, in my 39 years, has been the embracing by the whole of the Australian community of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages and culture and traditions into the culture of the nation—a powerful and ongoing symbol that we all share about our past and how we can move forward together as a nation. But we can never do that while we continue to have citizens who are not able to realise their full ambition to live a happy and successful life, and that is the closing of the gap that we need. The journey is not over, and we all share a great responsibility to make sure that we build it together, in partnership, with respect and through listening, so that we can empower people to be able to live out their full Australian dream.

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