Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

There is no ambiguity about the support that I would hope comes from all members of this chamber on the importance of making sure the next generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children has the same economic opportunities and advancement that every other Australian child has. We want them to go on and get a good education, to grow up in a healthy and safe environment and, more importantly, to then mature in a way that enables them to live out the best of their lives.

There are many institutions that seek to do exactly that, from the many social support organisations in cities and rural and regional areas throughout schooling—I know this has been a big focus of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policy for a long time. In fact, without wanting to verbal him, my good friend Mick Gooda says that if we do something to make sure we address the challenges of the next generation—even if it means recognising the limitations of what we can do today for those alive—we will materially improve the future for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people hereafter. I agree; he is a good friend of mine. The Tudor family established the Melbourne Indigenous Transition School to ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children have a pathway to live the best of the opportunities of our country. That is central, but one of the things that's clear is that the best way to deliver change, the best way to advance the interests of the next Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander generation, is to work on the ground and in the community.

The thing that disappoints me about these bills, the National Commission for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People Bill 2026, and the National Commission for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Young People (Transitional Provisions) Bill 2026, is that—as with so many of the things this government seeks to do—they create another bureaucracy. Rather than looking at empowerment in the community, they look at how they can impose another central, big-government, big-Canberra solution on communities that need to be built from the ground up. That's the challenge so many of us have with these bills.

We know the data and the consequences of decades of Canberra thinking it can tell Indigenous communities how they should live their lives and imposing solutions on them rather than empowering them. We know full well that there's already a commissioner for children at the Human Rights Commission. I have served as Australia's Human Rights Commissioner. There is already a commissioner responsible for children. There is already a commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. These bills are some sort of admonishment, saying they're not doing their job. They are. They're working as hard and as diligently as possible. But we know that we have to support community based solutions to empower communities, rather than support Canberra to impose its solution without any sense of direction or clarity about how to improve people's lives.

If this government was really serious about improving the welfare of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, particularly in community, it would revisit its demonisation and targeting of the healthy welfare card, which went a long way to stopping the abuse of alcohol within communities. It is particularly setting children up for failure right from the outset because of the spread of fetal alcohol syndrome. Unfortunately, this government's record on these issues is not as good as it would like it to be. There's a reason there are still so many problems around closing the gap for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

Let's be under no ambiguity about this: it is a disgrace that we still have the scale of the gap that exists for our Indigenous and First Nations people. We absolutely should want them to live out their best lives. But when the government deliberately strips apart a pathway to stop the abuse of alcohol and drugs within a community, without any recognition of how it harms those most vulnerable, it has its priorities wrong. It cannot be solved through the imposition of a new commissioner or a new bureaucracy from Canberra thinking they know best or there is a better way they can impose on community. That's the challenge of this bill. It doesn't create the structural solutions that we need—

See this speech in context