Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome this important debate today as we consider the Closing the Gap targets revised last year. We would all agree that this is about healthy and economically independent Indigenous Australian families; meeting not just Australian targets but global targets; quoting not just national averages but breaking these gaps down into local government areas, regional and remote areas and by community; and making closure of these gaps the first order of business in everything we do where Indigenous Australians have a stake. Ultimately, there has to be an Indigenous private sector thriving in every corner of this land, services delivered by Indigenous Australians to the rest of the nation and thinking way beyond that the only good that can be created is dot paintings and the only service delivered being a tourism operator or a ranger.

There are three hard questions that we've completely missed with these 16 targets, and it gives me great pain to point these out. But none of these targets can be met. There's no guarantee we won't have another decade of failure until we answer these three questions. The first of those is: are we prepared as a nation to have the hard conversation around empowering Indigenous men and women to lead their own communities and not have it corroded from beneath by individual welfare payments imposed as a Western model nor large payments into communities where families in an internecine way are turned upon each other?

This is about allowing senior men and women not just to lead but to have the power to.

Once they lead, I trust they can achieve a second of these practical goals—that is, owning education. It's not just getting enrolled in education, it's not just the education certificate; it's the outcome, not an administrative output, that matters. Where there are Indigenous Australians there must be an Indigenous say in the curriculum, the syllabus, the bilingual nature of education, complete ownership of the successes and the failures, because Indigenous education is not something that should be done to them. Once you have empowered elders and they own education, they can engage the economy. This is not just about employment anymore. What we've created is, basically, a single-pass vortex of welfare money in, leaving in the first pass straight out in non-Indigenous manufactured goods or, as they call it out there, crap—excuse the vernacular.

There's no service economy of note. Healthy economies around the world have a fifth of their population in the public service, a fifth of their government spend in public services, not 100 per cent. Until we fix up this absolutely obvious distortion of Indigenous Australia, created by non-Indigenous Australia, you can't begin to hope for a thriving services sector that creates non-government employment. For those reasons, I have to finish by saying what the five great inadequacies in the targets we've just adopted are.

In education target No. 3 we can't just look at school enrolments, we need to look at where it goes. It's about completion of school and the academic goals that have been achieved while at school. The 55 per cent school potential target No. 5, for the AEDC, is unacceptably low and it must be closer to 100 per cent. If we don't have children achieving these domains in the AEDC we cannot achieve targets 5 and 6. In target 7 economic engagement has to be 100 per cent, by definition. If we accept 67 per cent, we allow one in three to wash through the system as disengaged. That doesn't work in the rest of the world, let alone Australia. In employment goal 8, it's split employment into public and private, because private employment is just as important, and that gap needs to close. We simply can't employ every Indigenous Australian in the government and call it a success. While the quantum of housing in goal 9 is important, we need sustainably managed and maintained housing, where the resident can pay the rent out of private income.

Finally, in criminal justice targets10 and 11 the rate of Indigenous offending is what matters, not the incarceration—that's just an administrative output by the judge. We've got to stop the offending; that's the goal that needs to be closed. We need to report all interpersonal violence, not just that against women and children. However important that is, we need the entire violence gap closed. It may not start against women and children, and we need to be measuring that too. These are highly emotional topics, and every Australian needs to be united in engaging them.

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