Barnaby Joyce (New England, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do look into my conscience about how I deal with one of the largest communities, one of the strongest proportions of Aboriginal people in an electorate in Australia, which is in New England. There are vastly more Aboriginal people in my area. They call themselves Aboriginal, so I will say Aboriginal. There are more Aboriginals than farmers, to be quite frank. I win the booths, and I suppose, in a little way, that is because I grew up in an Aboriginal area. My children, my sons, still go to the state school, which is a black and white school and always has been. We really love it. That's our community. We've known each other for generations, so this is very close to my heart.

What always worries me is we seem to throw an inordinate amount of money—I'm a white fella, obviously; I'm not pretending to be anything else but that—towards things that don't have any efficacy, that don't actually result in people's lives changing. Sometimes I genuinely believe we have sort of a political correctness about trying to deal with issues that are so self-evident when you live there. In my time I've lived in Werris Creek, which has a strong Aboriginal community; Moree, and obviously we all know about that; and Charleville, St George and Danglemah, where I grew up and where I still am. Up the road is Woolbrook, and it was like Canberra; Aboriginal people from Gympie to Dubbo would come into those come into those areas. My childhood was spent growing up with Aboriginal people around me. They certainly had an effect on how I saw the world.

What I don't see in the administration of this—I bet you right from the start that it's administered down here in Canberra. That's the first step it gets wrong. If you want to deal with a problem, put the administration and the bureaucracy in the areas where the issue is. You get up close and actually understand it a lot better when it's outside your back door. Look for those within communities, especially when kids go off the rails, who have the capacity to bring them back.

I might bring attention to someone that we are involved with, BackTrack and Bernie Shakeshaft, a great guy. I think one of the predominant things of that—it's overwhelmingly money that's given by charity. Bernie does a great job. A lot of the young fellas, the blokes, come down to our place and do cattle work. I'm just a passive observer; the other guys are the role models. That is one of the big things. In so many communities, young guys don't have good male role models. They don't grow up in an environment where they have a reference point of a man who is strong and decent and hardworking and has guardrails of how they exist.

I'm not going to name them, because they'll get very upset if I do, and I have to go work with them, but the one thing I always note when the guys are working with these young fellas is they don't muck about. They're not pushovers. They have a very strict code about how things will work, right down to ablutions. At half past seven, you're in the saddle, and that means at half-past seven, you are in the saddle. When you go back to the ablutions blocks at night after you've finished work, there's structure—your towel goes there, your soap goes there, and we all have to use this area, so it must be clean.

At the start, there's always pushback. A lot of people get referred to them from the courts. There's pushback and cheek. Very quickly, they realise that that won't work out in the bush when you're swagging it. In the long term, without going through the rituals of how people are brought into gear, they actually love it. That's because it makes a statement about who they are. They are a man, and they have a position, and they have competency, and they have pride in themselves, and then things work out. We always get frustrated with having a politically correct perspective of sociology and everything else. It way overcomplicates something that can be done by a more targeted investment to the areas that actually work.

Vikki does a bit of work here too for young girls. People will say, 'Oh, you do that; it's patronising,' and all that stuff. No, it's not. It's essential to actually show people how to shop—just saying, 'You don't buy that.' You take them around with a shopping trolley and say, 'This is the stuff you buy, and that's why.' And we'll show them the structure of a house—this is the time you get up and this is the time you go to bed. People stay in the houses with you—just living with a family and seeing the structure of a family. Once more, people say that it's patronising. No, it's not. People love it. They understand that they get a sense of a life they probably haven't lived. But, if we get too tied up in saying, 'Our perspective of what we believe is culturally appropriate, as determined from Canberra, is going to work in Woolbrook, Cunnamulla or Moree,' it won't. What you'll see is the money spent.

I can go to certain areas where they have what they call 'support agencies'. In some of the communities that I go to, 20 or 30 people turn up in cars. They drive around. They chat to everybody or some people, and then they jump in their hired SUV, and off they go. That's it. It costs a lot of money to have those people wandering around. If you go back to the community and say, 'What did that do for you?' the answer is: 'Nothing. It was pointless.' Someone comes in with their clipboard and goes through the ritualistic clatter about Aboriginal issues that they don't even believe or earnestly think. It's just ticking a box about things they are going to say. They don't actually reside in the area in such a form that they can actually grab hold of the problem and follow it through to a conclusion and a solution that they, the people who came in the SUVs, would be prepared to live with.

My issue with this is that I get a sense of another lot of money about to be kicked out the door, and the actual determination of an outcome, your KPIs, won't be there. I get a sense from this that it's driven from Canberra, not from community. I get a sense that it's just a gathered heap of politically correct terms and bromides that have to be said. Yet, for the kid growing up on a backstreet in Tingha—the heritage from the Bassendean missionary—will their life be better? I don't know—probably not, I presume. I base that on so many of these other programs. They've been going on for decades, and their lives don't change.

But I do find a whole heap of people making a bucketload of money down here from them. I find that. There's no doubt about that. You see the departments. That's why, in certain areas, the cynicism builds up. The biggest Aboriginal community in my area is Tingha, where Nathan Blacklock and Preston Campbell came from. Only 15 per cent of them voted for the Voice. Why? I think it was more of a pushback. They're so cynical now that they just don't think that these things are really going to make a difference to their lives. So let's look for what works. Let's look for the backtracks that work.

I'll give you something that works brilliantly in our area but they never did again. One of the great mechanisms for advancement—once more, going back to guys—of Aboriginal guys in more north-western New South Wales and even southern Queensland, right down to Dubbo, is something that was created by the state. It works, and it's called Farrer Memorial Agricultural High School. It's the second-biggest boarding school in Australia after St Joseph's College, Hunters Hill. So many Aboriginal boys go there and become men. Later on you see them in very successful and fulfilling lives wherever they need to go. They go into trades. Some go to uni. It works. Whatever is happening at that boarding school in Tamworth, it works. So why do we just do it once?

By the way, why is there only a blokes one? Where's the girls boarding school that does the same job? Where is it? I used to terrorise my daughters, saying that, if they played up, I'd send them to Mount St Bernard College up on the Atherton Tablelands, which a lot of kids from the Gulf came into. That always pulled them back into gear. That's sort of doing a similar thing up there, but we need a girls one—and don't make Farrer co-ed. That's where they're going to try and head off to. It works very well as a boys boarding school. Leave it as a boys boarding school because that works. It gives them a collegiality with guys off the land, with Aboriginal kids from Walgett and Moree and Saint George coming in there. It's good. It has proven success. The only thing we're missing is one for girls, where they have a boarding school and do the same thing, bringing in, quite frankly, poor white kids from farms who can't afford to go away to school—the family budget doesn't go that far—and also Aboriginal kids. I bet you that'll work as well. If you bring those sorts of ideas forward, you're going to get so much support, even in regional areas. We'll say, 'Yes, that's great.'

But what we'll see here is that you'll announce this and it just won't turn the dial. It will just be 'here comes another SUV with another clipboard and another person who'll turn up and go through all the welcome to country stuff and say all the right things'. They'll wander around, people will have a chat to them, then they'll jump back in their SUV and off they'll go. That's it—followed by another SUV that'll be here tomorrow.

I want us to close the gap. I think it's incredibly important. I think we have a huge moral responsibility to do it. I just call on this parliament to find the things that work. Put aside your political correctness. Stop believing that there's something magical, that one human being is so fundamentally different to every other human being that they work through a whole different set of genetics. They're not. They're people. Human beings are human beings and want to be treated with respect, want to feel secure, need guidance, need a male role model, need a female role model, need to be respected, want to have dignity in their lives, with a job that's worthwhile, and don't want to be categorised as 'oh, well, you believe that because I'm Aboriginal then this is the sort of life I have to live because you think that that this is the place I have to live'. I might want to live in the centre of Sydney. I might want to be an accountant. Double-up on your successes and be a lot more circumspect about coming up with another yet another Canberra program which will have all the bonhomie as it goes out the door but, if you reflect on it in 10 years time and say, 'What did that achieve?' will have some minimal success but will be a very short story.

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