Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, I present the committee’s report, incorporating additional comments, entitled Open for business: developing Indigenous enterprises in Australia, together with the minutes of proceedings and evidence received by the committee.

Order that the report be made a parliamentary paper.

It is with great pleasure that I present this report and I present the recommendations in it, which have been made unanimously. I would like to start by acknowledging the Ngunnawal people, the traditional owners of the land on which we meet here tonight. That has been a practice that we have engaged in in all the hearings that we have had in relation to this inquiry.

In all the public policy which has been pursued by the Rudd government in the area of Indigenous affairs, the guiding light has been closing the gap—the 17-year life expectancy gap which exists between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. That gap is underpinned by a range of other gaps—social and economic—not the least significant of which is between the rates of unemployment. The Indigenous rate of unemployment runs at three times the rate of unemployment of non-Indigenous Australians. And we will never close the gap in relation to life expectancy until we come to terms with this unemployment, which is a key indicator of the economic health of the Indigenous community.

And when we dig a little deeper we find another gap that exists—the rate of self-employment amongst Indigenous Australians who are employed is only one-third of the rate of self-employment amongst non-Indigenous Australians who are employed. If you consider this as a proxy for the relative size of the small business sector in Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia, and when you think that small business throughout the economy generally employs more than half of our labour force, it is clear that we have to address the gap in relation to small business if we are going to have an impact on those employment numbers. That really has been at the heart of the inquiry that the committee has undertaken in this area.

But ultimately we have come to a rather empowering conclusion, because this is about Indigenous entrepreneurs engaging in enterprises and hiring Indigenous people. It is Indigenous people helping Indigenous people, and the committee has been enormously impressed, with respect to all the Indigenous entrepreneurs we have met, by the determination they have shown, not only in running their own businesses but in the grander social objectives of providing self-sufficiency for their communities, getting Indigenous people off welfare and providing role models for the Indigenous community.

We have also been impressed by the diversity of Indigenous businesses which currently exist. We tend to think of the strengths in the Indigenous business sector being in arts and tourism—and indeed they are—but during the inquiry we met Indigenous entrepreneurs who were engaged in the selling of car sound systems, in building and painting, and in earthwork contracting.

This was a short but intense inquiry where we had hearings in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Darwin, Kununurra, Perth and Canberra. We are making 15 recommendations which range from better collection of data around Indigenous enterprises and empowering Indigenous people in the negotiations that they have in relation to Indigenous land use agreements, to a better coordination of government programs in this area.

But there are two particular recommendations that I would like to highlight. The committee is recommending the establishment of an Indigenous supplier development council, which will assist Indigenous businesses in getting a better share of private sector procurement. In the United States and Canada such organisations exist, and indeed they came out and we heard from them during the inquiry. They told us that there are 100 corporate members of theirs who would be willing to commit to a similar Indigenous supplier development council in this country. So the committee is recommending that the government provide seed funding for the establishment of such a body, with a review after five years. The second major recommendation that we are making is in the area of public government procurement policy, where we argue there ought to be targets for all government departments on the level of Indigenous procurement. When we are building houses in Indigenous communities it is right that Indigenous businesses should participate in that construction.

I would like to thank all the participants in this inquiry. I would like to thank the deputy chair, Mr Andrew Laming, and I would like to thank all the authors of the submissions that we received. I would like to thank all committee members for their work, including you, Mr Deputy Speaker Kelvin Thomson. I would also like to thank the secretariat for all their work, including, in particular, Pauline Brown, who is expecting her first child in the next week. We wish her all the best.

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

I have said in this chamber before that Fred Hollows came a decade early for mainstream Australia, which was not ready for him, and a century late for Indigenous Australia. In fact, in the generation since Hollows, many would say that we have developed a notion in mainstream Australia that Indigenous conditions and the Indigenous environment are either non-viable or less viable for the free market or for new business. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It is an enormous challenge but, by the same token, what has come from this inquiry is that small things can make enormous differences. And nothing could be more important than recognising the vital contribution that Indigenous business can potentially make to the economic and social sustainability of remote, regional and urban Indigenous communities.

Let me support the chair and the other members of the Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs—and I note that the member for Bonner is here in the chamber tonight. I recognise the enormous amount of travel that goes with any Indigenous or ATSI report, and also the hard work of the secretariat: Anna Dacre, Loes Slattery, Melita Caulfield, Claire Young and, of course, Pauline Brown, who has already been mentioned. Through some marvellous confluence of events Pauline has managed to time the gestational period of a parliamentary inquiry to coincide with her own parental leave, which I understand started this week.

I would like to refer to some of the recommendations that were not able to be mentioned in the short time that was available to the chair, starting, obviously, by acknowledging the important role that Indigenous business currently plays, and the significantly larger role that it could play if we were to collect the data and the information that would enable us to have a better understanding of the current state of this sector—its structure, location and the economic contribution that it makes. Another recommendation is that there is a vital contribution being made right now to economic and social stability, and that business could certainly play a role in that. We are not talking about offshoots of community groups; we are talking about businesses that can operate under principles of the free market.

I would also like to mention that federal departments and all agencies right across the federal government could do well to coordinate their efforts and better understand the way in which agencies are delivering services and how that affects the potential for Indigenous business to take root. It was also recommended that there be further partnering work with CSIRO, particularly in their areas of natural resource management and carbon emissions reduction, which has been so topical in the last five years and which may well lead to commercialisation opportunities for Indigenous communities.

It was also very clear to the committee that there was a need for additional networking and for a better business networking model that takes into account the diversity of Indigenous businesses across states and territories and between regional and urban areas. Certainly it became clear to us that there was a need for a one-stop shop that allows potential Indigenous businesses, and ones that are in their early stages, to have an assigned case manager—we have a model for that already in Austrade—to allow them to obtain mentoring and business-ready skills and the advice they need on establishing appropriate governance structures that can ensure the sustainability of businesses beyond just three months, six months or a year.

It is also very important, as has been mentioned, to examine further the potential for an Indigenous supplier development council to have potential for microfunding, which would allow, particularly in the remote areas, entrepreneurs to establish enterprises, as the committee’s chair has already mentioned, in tourism and the arts in particular, and that we find ways to encourage Indigenous start-up business, potentially through a review of the taxation system—something I am sure the government will be turning its mind to.

In conclusion, it is important to me that I do not finish without mentioning that substantial economic advancement will also require, in our view, a private sector consciousness being developed within Aboriginal Australia. It is vital that it becomes more and more natural to both accumulate capital and take risks. They were important lessons learnt from this committee.

Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! I am reluctant to interrupt the member, but the time allotted for statements on this report has expired. Does the member for Corio wish to move a motion in connection with the report to enable it to be debated on a later occasion?

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the House take note of the report.

In accordance with standing order 39, the debate is adjourned. The resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.