Bob Debus (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—Today I am pleased to announce that the government will provide an additional $6.3 million to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal services to help them meet the extra demand that they are facing. Indigenous Australians remain one of the most disadvantaged groups in Australia and experience high rates of contact with the legal system. This will allow providers to purchase properties in regional and remote areas to help them attract and retain staff. In Western Australia, for example, the average rental for a property in Karratha or Port Hedland is more than $1,000 a week and in some locations rental properties are only available to people employed in the mining industry. The funding I announce will provide:

• $2.75 million for the Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia
• $515,000 to Aboriginal Legal Service (NSW and ACT)
• $800,000 to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service (Queensland South)
• $895,000 for South Australia’s Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement (ALRM)

all to purchase or upgrade property to provide accommodation and offices for staff.

The ALRM chief executive, Mr Neil Gillespie, today welcomed this additional funding. He said that in addition to purchasing properties in remote locations, the funding will also help attract ALRM staff to regional and remote centres. This funding is on top of an additional $300,000 that will go towards meeting the immediate demands of child protection as a result of the Mullighan report into child abuse on the APY lands. There is also an extra $140,000 for computer upgrades for all of these services. A further $900,000 has been set aside for the expensive Indigenous cases fund. This fund is administered by the Attorney-General’s Department and allows any legal service to apply for extra funds for expensive or high-profile cases.

This is the second round of one-off funding announced by the Rudd government. In April this year an extra $4.9 million was provided to help ease the financial pressures that many legal services have been facing. It included:

• $2.4 million for much needed capital expenditure on office accommodation requirements and the installation of air conditioning, particularly in rural and remote areas.
• $1 million for the Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia, which is facing increased workloads as a result of the work of the Indigenous Justice Taskforce in that state. That funding was in addition to $300,000 already provided to the Western Australian Aboriginal legal service.
• $1 million was provided to service various community courts including Murri, Koori and Nunga.
• The expensive Indigenous cases fund received an extra $500,000.

The government understands the pressure many service providers are facing. Aboriginal legal services provide an essential service to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. They play a unique role in the provision of culturally appropriate services to meet the legal advice and representation needs of their clients. As I have said, Indigenous Australians remain one of the most disadvantaged groups in Australia and they continue to have absolutely unacceptably high rates of contact with the law and justice system. As a consequence, those providing legal assistance are operating in an environment of very heavy demand upon their services. Solicitors and field officers in these legal aid agencies work long hours—often in remote locations—travel lengthy distances in the service of their clients, and the services they provide go beyond simple advocacy in court. Those lawyers are required to also be social workers, linking clients into Centrelink or housing or family and community services departments. They are required to be diagnosticians, directing them to appropriate health professionals, and career counsellors, steering them into appropriate rehabilitation and employment services. Tragically, by the time these clients finally access legal assistance, those additional support services are often required at an emergency level. Often the defendant’s life has unravelled so far that the burden remains for the solicitor to sort out the crisis when that person appears before court.

That is why this government is committed to closing the gap on Indigenous disadvantage; to achieve targets in health, education, affordable housing and employment. Community safety and access to justice are also important elements in overcoming Indigenous disadvantage. Eleven years of neglect by the previous government has left this government with a lot of catching up to do. It cannot be done overnight, and there are always competing demands for funds, but both the Attorney-General and I will be working with our state and territory colleagues through the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General to promote the consideration of Indigenous and mainstream legal aid as well as community legal centres, and to promote the consideration of Indigenous law and justice issues by all governments.

I ask leave of the House to move a motion to enable the member for Sturt to speak for six minutes.

Leave granted.

I move:

That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent Mr Pyne speaking for a period not exceeding 6 minutes.

Question agreed to.

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to follow the Minister for Home Affairs and I thank him for his courtesy in allowing the opposition to continue the practice of responding immediately to the ministerial statement. It is unfortunate, however, that the minister felt the need to make a partisan attack at the end of his ministerial statement. For 11 years the previous government had Indigenous affairs front and centre when it came to its policy priority areas. Addressing disadvantage in Indigenous communities should be an area where a bipartisan commitment to solving the very real problems is put before any petty politics of the day. But a partisan approach to Indigenous affairs is unfortunately what we are coming to expect from this government—the same government that announced a bipartisan war cabinet on Indigenous housing in order to get great headlines but then excluded the opposition from any real involvement and declined to make use of the very capable services of the Hon. Mal Brough. Further, it is remarkable that the minister accuses the previous government of providing insufficient funding to this area when the Attorney-General’s Department portfolio budget statement in the minister’s own area clearly shows that funding to output group 1.7—Indigenous law and justice and legal assistance programs—has been cut by $12.9 million from last year. This $6.3 million in one-off funding is really playing catch-up to the reality that this area is not able to cope with the required efficiency dividend.

It is a fact that petty partisan politics will never solve the problems of Indigenous disadvantage in Australia, and with that in mind the opposition welcomes this funding boost of $6.3 million to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal services to help them meet the extra demand that they are facing. The Commonwealth began providing funding to Indigenous legal services in 1971 when the Liberal government of the day first provided a grant to the New South Wales Aboriginal Legal Service. In the decades since, programs providing legal services to our First Australians have been expanded and built upon to the point that in 2007-08 the government was making outlays in the area of $336.9 million.

This is a group of Australians who the minister rightly described as experiencing unacceptably high rates of contact with the law and justice system. The previous Howard government’s philosophical approach to this issue is summarised in a 2006 document entitled Policy directions for the delivery of legal aid services to Indigenous Australians:

The primary objective of the Legal Aid for Indigenous People program is to improve the access of Indigenous Australians to high-quality and culturally appropriate legal aid services, so that they can fully exercise their legal rights as Australian citizens.

Commonwealth support for legal services takes a number of forms, including legal aid for Indigenous Australians, community legal services and pro bono services, grants of financial assistance to Aboriginal legal services and family violence prevention legal services for assisting Indigenous adults and children who are the victims of family violence or who are at immediate risk of such violence. There are also prevention, diversion, rehabilitation and restorative justice programs to divert Indigenous Australians away from adverse contact within the criminal justice system, and law and justice advocacy activities for the advancement of the legal rights of Indigenous Australians.

These are important responsibilities within the Commonwealth’s range of activities. We must work closely, as ministers in the previous government attempted to do, with our state and territory counterparts. I note that $300,000 of the money announced by the minister today will go towards meeting the immediate demands of child protection as a result of the Mullighan report into child abuse on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands—otherwise known as the APY lands—in my great home state of South Australia. The opposition particularly applaud this funding, and we hope that it will spur the Rann government into immediate action, in contrast to their approach that has been thus far characterised by interminable delay, followed by promises of action, followed by a great deal of media activity and sound bites, followed by nothing.

Four years ago, the Rann government promised to embark on a radical intervention in the APY lands. Nothing came of it. After I visited the APY lands in 2006 with the then Minister for Health and Ageing, the member for Warringah, we proposed immediate responses, which were met with indifference by our South Australian government counterparts. Upon receiving the Mullighan report, Premier Rann said on 5 May that he would need another three months to plan the detail of his response and some 12 months to move extra police into the area. It is not good enough and the South Australian government needs to lift its game.

In relation to the other $6 million of grants which the minister has announced, I would like to place on record the opposition’s support for the various programs which these grants will be supporting. In welcoming the minister’s announcement today, may I say that the opposition hopes that in future the government will stop using Indigenous disadvantage as a political football. The only way we can improve the lot of our First Australians is to work together.