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

[by video link] This is an important change to social security law in remote Indigenous Australia. There is a long history of battling to make sure that the opportunities we enjoy in the cities and regions are also available in Central and remote Australia. And it's a timely reminder that, right now, Indigenous Australia has been exploring, as recently as last week at the Aboriginal Economic Development Forum in Alice Springs, potential opportunities to unlock the Aboriginal estate; and to recall that, by 2030, perhaps half of Australia's landmass will be under Indigenous control, and we need to make sure that Indigenous Australians can be maximising their opportunities for cultural, economic and social self-determination. There's plenty of that kind of talk in the parliament, but, in reality, how many of us have actually lived in a remote community to understand how it works?

Having listened to the member for Barton give a speech clearly written by someone else and basically read out word for word, it's of enormous frustration that there's certainly no reform zeal from the party that have consistently made out that they lead the way in social policy and in Indigenous policy reform. Quite clearly, the federal opposition are all about moving the lips just sufficiently to not offend anyone and to walk both sides of the street, making out that they're defending the needs of those in remote Australia but also doing the right thing by those in the city and being seen to be appeasing the bleeding hearts that insist on these terrible generalisations that come out of the left wing—that every young Indigenous person wants to be either a ranger or a painter, and it's simply not the case.

Aboriginal Australia have moved on from the Australian Labor Party, and they're about making the most of opportunities that are increasingly coming to remote Australia. But, before we can get there, we do need a fit-for-purpose social services system and we don't have that at present. That's despite the efforts of two sides of government. As an employee of ATSIS in 2004 and, arguably, one of their last employees—I was paid out long after the organisation ceased to exist—as a consultant I saw firsthand exactly what was going on in education, employment and housing entities, and I was, among other things, reviewing how CDEP worked. Listening to a Labor Party politician, let alone a shadow minister, talking about CDEP as if it was creating real local jobs and a genuine alternative to welfare—that is an urban-based Indigenous Australian who clearly has never lived in a remote community to understand how it is out there. You quite simply cannot expect these kinds of outcomes that she describes, a pathway to self-determination, from programs like this alone. What's needed is an honest conversation.

We've got 16 Close the Gap targets, so many that no-one can remember them all, and virtually no-one in this country wakes up and makes it a mission to close the gap. There are simply too many of them. It's fine to have a blizzard of Close the Gap targets, but it starts off with the somewhat paternalistic notion that they need to catch up to us. I firmly believe that Indigenous Australia can be better than us—that the black brand can be something that the world seeks. This is not about closing a gap. This is about, in many cases, Indigenous Australians moving ahead of the way we see the world, if they haven't already, and exploiting and maximising the opportunities available to them. But what have they got to do for that to happen?

We need some honest conversation about the importance of senior men and women in an Indigenous society that simply doesn't exist in mainstream. We've set up a welfare system that weakens, erodes and undermines the senior men and women who should be having more of a say on the ground. This is not about regional and state voices to parliament. This is about local voices, full stop. Until you're listening to local voices, not undermining them with these individualised welfare models that work very well everywhere else but don't work in remote Australia—and then we use the overlay of community funding arrangements to cause internecine disputes and squabbles over funding, and we have supracommunity groups, such as, and dare I say it, very good people on land councils.

But, as long as land councils are doing the stuff that families need to be looking after for themselves, there will still be an agentive challenge. We need to be honest that the work of land councils, some of it good, some of it maybe not, needs to come back to family groups. There's nowhere else in the world where we basically expropriate our own financial services and our financial matters off to another body when we do not actually know what we own in the body. It's one thing to use technology like blockchain to identify exactly who the trusted authorities are and exactly who owns what, but we don't have that at all. We're seeing money funnelling across into these other agencies and, rightly, questions on the ground about whether this is working in the interests of individual family groups.

If there is one message I would leave today as we try again for a new set of pilot assessments for a better way of community economic development in remote Australia, be it small, be it modest—and it needs to start small and then be replicated when successful—it would be to identify the senior men and women in kinship and clan groups and work with them for a solution just for their family group. If there are three, four or five of them—however many there are in a community—that's so many conversations we will have to ensure no-one is left out. We need a menu of training, employment and education options for every working-age adult and every teenager on their way to becoming a working-age adult, to give them a solution. And we need more opportunities than there is demand for them, remembering that, like everyone, people will fail, change their minds and try something new. That has to be accounted for.

You may be listening in today to this debate and wondering which side of this green chamber is actually looking out for the family connection to land, this absolutely understood relationship between family and their land and sea. There has to be a recognition that the senior people in these families need to have more say but also carry far more responsibility for the conduct of their family members. But the last thing we want to be doing, as I've said before, is expropriating out these kinds of decisions to community councils or non-elected bodies or government officials or land councils, for goodness sake. These decisions need to be with the families themselves, or we are absolutely certain to be beset by more failure.

Australians living in remote Australia know it's a complex environment. They don't need us talking about it like we're giving a Close the Gap speech once a year, particularly from an opposition spokesperson for the Labor Party. This speech would have broken thousands of hearts around the country, simply because of the lack of vision, the lack of understanding about how it is out in remote Australia. We understand, in mainstream Australia, having lived in business conditions for five centuries, that two-thirds of businesses don't employ anyone. We know that 95 per cent of them fail in the first two years. We know that only one per cent of businesses employ more than four people. Just switching on the business switch alone doesn't solve any problems; it's a series of options that come together to provide opportunities.

If you're a young Indigenous person at high school right now in remote Australia—and you could be a fair way from home—I challenge you to talk to your community leaders, like the one you just heard speaking before me, and say: 'What is your plan for my community? Where are the jobs earmarked for me on my country?' I understand you don't all want to be rangers and dot painters—and I don't dismiss Aboriginal art in any condescending manner; I'm saying that young Aboriginal Australians don't all want to be painters because they tell me that. They want the full range of economic opportunities. To deliver those opportunities to remote Australia takes ingenuity, planning and making unique arrangements, but I want to say one very clear thing: the cost of a better running system is a fraction of the status quo with the enormous social, housing, incarceration, health and education costs that we currently bear. Noel Pearson has said that so clearly. There is only a way out of this causal web of dysfunction if people like the member for Barton can put their speaking notes down and actually identify a community where the conversation has to be led, guided, by senior Aboriginal men and women on how everyone has something to do.

As a government, you can't step into the lives of every family. I know as a doctor I can't kick a door down to go in and deliver public health, but to have a mature conversation begins with both major parties recognising the failures of the past. I've said already that 27 years ago I had my first experience living in a semidesert community in the Northern Territory, on and off for 15 months. Twenty-seven years prior to that, just up the road, at Daguragu and Wave Hill, the land was handed back in that symbolic moment with the then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. You'd have to say, Deputy Speaker, there have been a few moments since when we all hoped for change. We all hoped that then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology was going to make a difference. I've tagged it enough times in things I've said: more practical, less symbolism. I'll continue to stand for that in public life and ultimately will be proven correct. No-one's saying symbolism isn't important, but too many of us have used it as cover to get away with not changing anything on the ground. It's hard. There are special interests and divided responsibilities. Money flows in, primarily from these social service and welfare payments, and, in a single pass, that non-Indigenous dollar shoots back out of the community, usually through the local store, through buying goods that aren't manufactured in the community and not cultivating or encouraging any services for Indigenous people in that community are delivered by that community themselves.

What we've created is a unique economy in remote Australia where the residents make no goods that their fellow residents want to use, they deliver no services privately that anyone is prepared to pay for, and we're left with publicly funded welfare and imported cheap goods that are dumped into the store as a way of siphoning welfare back out of these communities as fast as possible. In the absence of any value adding, in the absence of any vertical integration, in the absence of any multiplier effect, this is the most corrosive economic model we could have imposed on our First Australians. We have managed to do it and we give lip service to how passionate we are about changing it. But we are yet to have, even in one community—save perhaps the Cape York work and the Cape York Institute—one conversation about how we might change that. We are yet to have one conversation that looks forward five years, identifies the children in high school or even finishing primary school, and says: 'We are a town council, we are a land council. My job today is to provision for those young people five years from now. Where will they work, study, train? How will they orbit out of their community when they need to? How do we account for a culturally safe employment arrangement where, should they need to return to their communities, they can?'

If I had my way, every Indigenous Australian leaving a remote community would have in their hand a flight ticket back to their community to use at any time social requirements mean they need to return urgently. We have to be flexible around the importance of family in Indigenous Australia. It is something that we in the mainstream are yet to grasp. If you talk to mining companies, they'll say, 'We put 20 on but we're lucky to get three to show up.' Well, start having the conversations about having an Indigenous-friendly system that allows these workers to be confident to go to work and stay at work. We have way too many yellow hi-vis vests, way too many payments that aren't being attached to employment. (Quorum formed) This is probably a good time to wind up as well. I will just say that this trial, which effectively provides a minimum wage type employment— (Time expired)

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