Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Health Services and Indigenous Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On a day when thousands of people will read the Hansard and remember it as the obituary of the Gillard government it is appropriate that we also wind up this Indigenous Affairs Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2011 as a reminder of how little has been achieved in the last four years under both Prime Minister Gillard and Prime Minister Rudd. This small piece of apparently insignificant legislation has a very important schedule within it which we on this side of the chamber do not support. This is the effort to effectively delegate the appointment of important statutory appointments to secretaries and deputy secretaries within the department. In particular it refers to the Coordinator-General for Remote Indigenous Services.

When history is written we will see that this government effectively inherited parts of the Northern Territory emergency intervention but did very little to build upon it. This administration will be remembered for criticising when in Central Australia the lack of consultation but then when back in mainstream Australia criticising other elements of it and talking tough. This government will be remembered for not having a consistent position on the intervention and not being able to follow up and improve some of those investments to ensure we actually gained results. This administration will be remembered for not keeping count of the money spent in Central Australia and for allowing runaway expenditure in housing. This administration will be remembered for putting out promises of consultation in 2008 and then on a quiet day in 2011 having more consultation. This administration will be remembered for making virtually no difference in attendance at school and virtually no difference for community safety. But, on the plus side, this administration will be remembered for generating an enormous amount of paperwork, for generating an enormous amount of local plans administered by keen and committed officials who in the end are thwarted by the failure to take a new look at the challenges of Central Australia. It was important today to hear the member for Grey making a valuable contribution about the fact that, in the APY Lands in particular, things are getting worse. We will read about it in the mainstream newspapers and in this chamber we will wring our hands and we will be concerned about the dreadful outcomes, but at the end of our public lives what will we look back upon apart from some fine speeches on the topic?

The question is: what are we going to change? The problem has been identified so many more times than I can count and we have done reports on what needs to be done so many times, but now, given the chance for some legislative opportunity in this space, we have been presented by this administration with nothing more than the attempt to shift the appointment of significant statutory positions down to the department. It is hard to understand what drove someone from the current administration to draft such legislation. When faced with the squalor and the dysfunction the response was to say, 'Let's design a bill that is going to change appointments of independent statutory positions and hand them back to the actual departments they are meant to be monitoring.' It is hard to understand that we have an administration that has said, 'Let's take that independent coordinator-general and place them in an office right next door to the departmental officials they are meant to be monitoring and let their staff be appointed by that very department they are meant to be policing.'

The coordinator-general position looked, on the face of it, completely reasonable. The job of that person was to monitor, assess and advise on the cutting of red tape—on the efficient delivery of services. Who could argue with that principle? But instead of supporting this position and ensuring that it actually made a practical difference we are presented with legislation over the last month that devolved and effectively passed on the responsibility to appoint the position to the very department that is meant to be policed. What do you do when that happens? It is obvious. If the person who is monitoring is mixed in with the monitored then you keep getting more yes people and you have effectively a neutered coordinator-general.

This area of Indigenous affairs is simply too important to do that. Our time in this place is too short and our opportunity to change what is happening in most parts of Australia—urban, remote and regional—is too precious to lose. To simply hand that job back so that effectively, with the greatest of respect, senior departmental officials are picking the person who actually polices them is not good enough and someone needs to say, 'Stop! Let's not do that; let's keep some responsibility with that minister.'

I want to give a few examples tonight of the damage that has been done by weakening the coordinator-general position. It is well known and publicly recorded that the coordinator-general has written correspondence about the difficulties of that position—first in June 2010; again in frustration in August 2010—and this correspondence is vigorously concealed from public view. When this correspondence is sought the response is simple: 'These are working documents that cannot be shared.' I just ask: what forms of policing of the efforts in Central Australia in particular are so sensitive that they cannot be shared with the public? Even you, Acting Deputy Speaker Sidebottom, would have to agree that this information being publicly available is truly important. There is nothing to be gained from hiding the truth. An example of this weakening of the coordinator-general position is that six-monthly reports have become increasingly diluted and weakened and we get this almost distant perspective as though one is looking through a bus window at the problem.

The foetal alcohol spectrum disorder study called the Lililwan Project, phase 2, needs an almost, in governmental terms, insignificant amount of funding to move into its next stage and the coordinator-general himself is unable to encourage that to happen. In the report we just read that this would be a desirable step to be taken because the coordinator-general cannot say anything more than that. My great concern is that what the coordinator-general says and writes is actually controlled by the very department that he is writing about.

If we move to Queensland, my state, we have the national priority area of working with communities that need help most. In the COAG initiatives every state had to choose communities. We saw six chosen in Queensland. It effectively excluded 13 others from that high bar of achieving services in remote communities similar to what you would find in mainstream communities of equivalent size in rural and regional Australia. The Queensland government effectively escaped this entire process by naming four communities that were already part of the Cape York initiative. So four of the six communities were already two years into a fairly intensive and well resourced process. So that was again a massive missed opportunity to give the other 13 communities that desperately need this support an opportunity to be part of this COAG initiative.

When we look across at South Australia, almost daily in our mainstream newspapers the reports are about the dysfunction that has led to breakdowns in community safety, lack of attendance at schools, poor turn-up to health clinics and failure to improve health outcomes. All of these issues are begging for someone who can truly cut through the red tape, but instead we have someone who is being intertwined, no, bound by that very same red tape.

For most of 2011 the Kimberley has been in the spotlight for all of the wrong reasons. It has been a suicide spike of great concern. It is reaching the point where there is a suicide every other week and parts of the Kimberley have descended into a suicide-funeral spiral, where no sooner are we leaving a funeral and another suicide is recorded. The great tragedy of this is the inability of non-health professionals to recognise early those sentinel signs of distress that can lead to suicide. We were promised action by this government, but too often the definition of 'action' is a press release followed by stakeholders desperately trying to divine exactly what the press release means. Typically, money is involved but there is no guarantee when it will arrive. So we have been waiting for that suicide prevention money to arrive in the Kimberley. I have heard almost every excuse known to public service as to why that money is still not there. Let us go through them. The first one is that the framework is sitting on the minister's desk. The next one is that it is under consideration and it has already been presented by departmental officials—that it is only a sleep or two away from being cleared.

We have had the Mental Health Commission waiting on additional detail before they would sign off with money. In the end, we now learn that this entire four- or five-month period since the suicide spike was reported has been devoted—wait for it—to formulating an expert advisory body, as if the public health science of suicide is not already recorded, as if meta-analyses have not been performed, as if we have to effectively co-opt a new group of experts to analyse this problem all over again when we have impressive, diligent, hardworking Aboriginal medical services and divisions of general practice just waiting to roll those resources out. And do you think that the coordinator-general has been separated enough from the federal departments to be able to make that happen any faster? The answer is no. That should be the litmus test of the functionality of a coordinator-general.

We have a single opportunity to turn now to the minister on the other side of this chamber and say, 'The political legacy of these four years can be nothing or it can be something that generates change.' At the moment, the great lessons learned in Cape York have not been disseminated around the country, for no good reason. Sure, we trickle in enough money to keep that study going, but we should take the basic precept of consultation—which we all agree is important but can never replace action—an agreement within communities and an agreement within family groups on positive social norms and fund them to occur. We need to look at the Centrelink system and stop potentially making individual payments that lead to perverse outcomes. We need to end the process of paying people whether they send their children to school or not, because this is the rule of law in Australia and we simply need the methods to ensure that those rules are adhered to in the Indigenous communities. They are called local implementation plans, and we have ROCs and GBMs and a range of other departmental officials who make sure that they are completed.

A local implementation plan, when signed off, allows communities to find their own priorities, from community safety to health to child safety to environmental health and housing. But most of these have not even been signed off. We have been waiting for months. The reason they are not signed off is quite simple: the coordinator-general cannot compel anyone to do it. These documents have, again, become commissioned to dusty piles of previous documents that effectively change nothing. The people who are in power in many of these communities have an overriding incentive to leave things pretty much as they are. We see matriarchs who are not empowered; we see children not turning up to school; and the health results are obvious.

The first step is a coordinator-general who is independent of the very departments that he or she monitors—but at the moment that overview is simply not occurring. My great fear is that we will have, again, six months down the track, another diluted, emasculated report from the coordinator-general that again says, 'Wouldn't it be desirable if this happened; I note that this has not happened.' That is not a legacy to be proud of, but it is already being written—no, it is being carved on the walls—of the achievement of the current administration. At the end, they will turn to Australia and say, 'We appointed a coordinator-general. Look, it was a complex problem and we gave it a red-hot go and every year or two we did a bit more consultation,' but, in the end, the evidence that they do not care for results in Indigenous Australia—no, they care more for inputs than outcomes—is that they continue to govern by press release, that they continue to send a weakened coordinator-general into Central and regional Australia and that they continue to accept reports, raise an eyebrow or two, pick out a good result and then put that back into a press release.

Australia has had enough of papering over the cracks. We have had enough of hiding the reality. Australia has had enough of not telling it how it is. That is all that Australians would ask of their leaders—tell it how it is. That will not happen with a coordinator-general who is in the pocket of the departments that he monitors. It will not happen with a coordinator-general who is appointed by departmental officials. It will not happen with a coordinator-general whose staff is actually appointed by the department. For goodness sake, there should be no fear in this country, with the lessons we have not learned in Indigenous health, in having a truly independent coordinator-general. We will not have one if this schedule 2 is passed, and that is why this side of the chamber will fight vigorously to make sure that the appointment of the coordinator-general remains with the minister, which is exactly where it belongs.

Julie Collins (Franklin, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Community Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Indigenous Affairs Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2011 contains several minor amendments to Indigenous affairs legislation. Some amendments make minor governance and business changes for portfolio bodies under the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Act 2005. That act established several statutory positions that currently have the title 'general manager'. This is the case for the heads of Indigenous Business Australia, the Indigenous Land Corporation, Aboriginal Hostels Ltd and the Torres Strait Regional Authority. To respond to changes in the roles of these positions since they were created, the term 'chief executive officer' will replace 'general manager'. This will reflect more accurately the responsibilities and expectations of these agency heads.

Most other Commonwealth statutory authorities and companies have agency heads with the title of chief executive officer, such as the Australia Council for the Arts, Screen Australia, the Australian Film, Television and Radio School and the Australian Sports Commission. Therefore, this change is an alignment with the mainstream for agencies established under the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Act. It is more appropriate for agencies that have a board of directors, as these agencies do, to be headed by a chief executive officer, in view of a general expectation that chief executive officer is more senior than general manager. The change in title should help the boards of these agencies to attract a higher calibre of candidate for the agency head positions.

Another minor amendment in the bill will remove a redundant reference in a provision that refers to review being available under the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1977. The provision currently mentions two discontinued Aboriginal Hostels Ltd schemes, the Community Support Hostel Grant Scheme and the Student Rent Subsidy Scheme, as having access to this avenue of review. However, the two schemes have not existed for a number of years and we are taking the opportunity to remove the reference, which is clearly no longer appropriate.

The bill also amends the provision for handling of information held by Indigenous Business Australia. This provision has a narrow focus that has in the past prevented information from being disclosed to agencies with responsibility for overseeing Commonwealth administrative practices, such as the Ombudsman and the Privacy Commissioner. The provision also prevented information being given to Commonwealth agencies working on joint initiatives with Indigenous Business Australia and to state and territory agencies seeking to work more closely with Indigenous Business Australia to achieve better outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities.

The amended provision should overcome these difficulties, however the appropriate protection of sensitive information will be continued after the amendment. It is important that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people continue to have confidence in how information is managed. The amended provision will be consistent with established information-handling arrangements that protect information while still permitting the proper work of the Commonwealth and its agencies. Such arrangements can be found in the family assistance law and the Paid Parental Leave Act 2010. The amendments are supported by the Indigenous Business Australia board.

The last measure in the bill as it was introduced would have amended the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 and the Coordinator-General for Remote Indigenous Services Act 2009. This was to allow the minister to delegate to the secretary or a deputy secretary of the department the power to appoint a person to act for short periods as Executive Director of Township Leasing or as the Coordinator-General for Remote Indigenous Services.

During parliamentary consideration of this schedule of the bill some members of parliament have raised issues that require further discussion on operational details. The government will therefore move an amendment to withdraw schedule 2 to enable other elements of the bill to proceed.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.