Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In continuation, let me say that there are very important measures in the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Bill and in the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory (Consequential and Transitional provisions) Bill. They deal in particular with the issue of alcohol related harm to Aborigines in communities in the Northern Territory. We all know that there are some very heavy drinkers in the Northern Territory, and not just Indigenous people. We also know there are a lot of Indigenous communities that are strictly dry; there is no alcohol allowed. Despite that great diversity, it is important that we try to have appropriate Commonwealth and Northern Territory alcohol licensing laws which are aimed at reducing alcohol related harm to Indigenous peoples.

There is a terrible consequence, for example, when pregnant women drink alcohol, whether they are Indigenous or not. We know that foetal alcohol spectrum disorder can be a consequence of women drinking when pregnant, and there are significant numbers of Indigenous children who are now at risk or who have in fact become victims of FASD. I want to commend communities such as the women of the Fitzroy Crossing area in Western Australia, who have tackled the issue of alcohol themselves and have, through local empowerment and local education, tackled the heavy drinking that was once of almost historic proportions in their community. Now they are tackling the issue of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, and I commend that community.

I also need to stress that there needs to be cooperation and coordination between the Territory and Commonwealth laws in relation to all alcohol selling and allowing of consumption of alcohol. It is important that the current alcohol restrictions in Aboriginal communities are appropriate and that they are reviewed from time to time. Of course the main focus should be the strengthening of alcohol self-management plans to bring about local solutions, focused on harm minimisation, for Aboriginal communities. I mention again places like Fitzroy Crossing, in Western Australia, that are great role models for self empowerment for making real gains.

This legislation also includes land reform measures that enable:

… the Commonwealth to make amendments to Northern Territory legislation relating to community living areas and town camps to facilitate voluntary long term leasing, including for the granting of individual rights or interests and the promotion of economic development.

This is an issue which the coalition tackled quite some time ago. We know that communalism is a very important traditional way of life for Indigenous peoples, but it has disadvantages in the 21st century. Often a young couple or, indeed, a long-established family needs to have some capacity for long-term leasing of their homes. They need to have security of tenure and they need to be able to gain bank loans using assets that they might have in community settings. This is an important area of work. These measures will enable:

… opportunities for private home ownership in town camps and more flexible long term leasing including for business activity in community living areas.

We have to normalise life for Indigenous peoples who aspire to the same economic opportunities as others in this country.

Finally, these bills have food security measures which try to improve access to fresh, healthy food through remote community stores. I am shocked whenever I go to remote communities and see what is on the store shelves. Often there is only processed food that is usually well past its shelf life and is at exorbitant prices. I look around the communities and see young children suffering the consequences of poor nutrition, children who have not seen fresh fruit and vegetables in a very long time. Anything we can do to improve food security measures for these Indigenous communities we must pursue. So while we need to amend these bills to make them better I do support their overall thrust.

Stephen Jones (Throsby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In introducing this package of bills to the House, the then Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs spoke of the government's vision and objectives that are driving us in our plan to close the gap on Indigenous disadvantage. She said:

A stronger future, grounded in a stronger relationship between government and Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory.

A relationship built on respect for Australia’s first peoples, for their custodianship of the land, for their culture and for their ongoing contributions to our shared nation.

This is a respect that is about much more than sentiment. It is about the approach we take to our work, and the approach we take to working together.

This is the approach we took to consultations after we first came into government.

These conversations revealed the depth of hurt felt by Aboriginal people by the sudden and rushed implementation of the Northern Territory Emergency Response.

And informed our amendments, including the reinstatement of the Racial Discrimination Act in the Northern Territory.

I can find no finer words with which to enter this debate on this important package of legislation.

I am very pleased to speak today on the Social Security Legislation Amendment Bill 2011 and associated bills. Together, these bills form a part of the government's next steps in the Northern Territory, undertaken in partnership with Aboriginal people and the Northern Territory government. The Gillard government is working with Indigenous people to improve services in areas such as health, education and housing, as part of an unprecedented effort to improve life expectancy and opportunities for Indigenous people. Ending this unacceptable disadvantage will take time. It will also require a sustained effort by all governments and by businesses, not-for-profit organisations, Indigenous Australians and the wider community.

The Closing the Gap report tabled in this place by the Prime Minister recently shows that the foundations are now in place to build lasting changes right across the country. Progress made so far, as outlined in the report, includes the fact that we are on track to meet the under-five mortality target, with a continued decline in mortality rates for Indigenous children—falling by 48 per cent from 1991 to 2010 across the three jurisdictions in which long-term comparisons are possible. That is something I am sure all members in this place would rejoice in. Overall Indigenous mortality rates have declined by 36 per cent from 1991 to 2010 in, again, the three jurisdictions for which reliable data are available for this period. Indigenous children are doing better at school, with strong improvements in NAPLAN results for Indigenous students in seven of the eight areas in which we can assess progress at the national level. Again, I am sure that these are improvements all members in this House would rejoice in.

The introduction of these bills follows extensive consultations, as the minister set out in her second reading speech, with the Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory on how the Australian and Northern Territory governments might work with Aboriginal people to expand their opportunities and build stronger futures for themselves and their children. In the consultations, Aboriginal people said that getting more children to school, increasing the number of Aboriginal people in local jobs, improving housing and reducing alcohol related harm were the communities' top priorities.

The Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory package of bills is one element of the government's response and continued commitment to meeting these top priorities. The Stronger Futures Bill provides that the Northern Territory Emergency Response alcohol restrictions will be continued and strengthened. It also provides that alcohol management plans established by local communities be directed at minimising alcohol related harm. The bill also provides for the Commonwealth to require the Northern Territory Licensing Commission to provide reports to the Commonwealth minister on levels of alcohol related harm and the impact of policy measures in the Territory. Getting this information ensures we are able to make the right policy decisions in the future. The bill also provides for a joint Commonwealth and Northern Territory review to be conducted in two years from commencement of the Stronger Futures legislation. The review will examine the impact of the Stronger Futures and Territory strategies to address alcohol related harm. This will allow both governments to continue working together to make real progress. The member for Murray spoke about her experiences in relation to some of the stores in the area covered by this legislation. It goes to the issue of food security. A consistent message in the consultations with the minister and the government and in evaluations was that the remote community stores have improved over the past four years. They are now offering a healthier range of food and are generally better managed. We will continue to improve licensing arrangements for community stores by replacing the current system, in which the only remedy for noncompliance is licence revocation. We will introduce, through measures in this bill, daily penalties for noncompliance of up to $2,200 to encourage stores to improve their performance and improve it quickly. Licensing will be more clearly focused on supporting food security in remote communities. In the future a community store will be required to have a licence to operate if it is an important source of food, drink or grocery items for Aboriginal communities.

The Australian government has made a clear commitment to negotiating voluntary long-term leases in the area of housing and land reform and will not be extending the compulsory five-year leases acquired under the original NTER legislation. The Australian and Northern Territory governments will continue to negotiate leases with Aboriginal landholders that will enable the Northern Territory government to manage housing in remote communities. The aim is to enable the Aboriginal landholders of town camps and community living areas to have the opportunity to make use of their land for a broader range of purposes, including economic development and private home ownership.

We are also taking steps, through the Social Security Legislation Amendment Bill, to make improvements to the Australian government's measure on improving school enrolment and attendance through welfare reform. The social security bill will amend the income management legislation to allow referrals by recognised state or territory authorities to trigger income management. In the Northern Territory people could be referred for income management by the Northern Territory Alcohol and Other Drugs Tribunal. The social security law amendments will apply to all people on income support in the relevant areas on a non-discriminatory basis.

Income management is a key part of the government's commitment to ensuring that welfare payments are spent in the best interests of children. It provides a tool to stabilise people's circumstances, easing immediate financial stress while limiting expenditure of income support payments on excluded items, including alcohol, tobacco, pornography, and gambling goods and activities.

The social security bill also enables the introduction of targeted income management in five disadvantaged communities across Australia, including Playford in South Australia, Bankstown in my own state of New South Wales, Shepparton in Victoria, and Rockhampton and Logan in Queensland. In these communities from 1 July this year income management will apply to vulnerable families and individuals, including parents referred for income management by a state or territory child protection authority; people assessed by Centrelink social workers as being vulnerable to financial crisis—which could include people referred by housing authorities—who are at risk of homelessness due to rental arrears; or people who themselves volunteer for income management.

New support services will also be available to help families on income management get their lives back on track. These include money management skills training to help people better manage the family budget and new Communities for Children services, including in my own electorate in Throsby, which will support parents and their children through playgroups, parenting education classes, mentoring and support groups, and early learning programs. Each of these measures will take effect from 1 July this year.

In concluding I will say a few words about school attendance and school attendance patterns, as outlined in schedule 2 of the social security bill. The government's school enrolment and attendance measure, SEAM, supports parents in their responsibility to ensure that their children go to school. All the best teachers and all the best curriculums in the world are of no use unless children are actually attending their local school. So, under the measure, people may have their income support payments suspended if they fail to enrol their child at school or fail to make every effort to ensure that they attend regularly. Indications to date are that SEAM and the accompanying social work support provided by the government are having a positive impact on enrolment and attendance. This bill enables some local tailoring of these measures too so that the operation of SEAM can be integrated with the Northern Territory government's Every Child, Every Day initiative to support greater improvement in school attendance, and this package of measures will take effect from 1 July this year.

This is a comprehensive package of bills as part of the government's ongoing commitment to working together with communities in the remote parts of the Northern Territory as well as with other vulnerable communities throughout the country to ensure that we are doing our best to provide income support, life opportunities and quality education for each and every Australian child whether they are living in a remote community in the Northern Territory or in the community of Playford in South Australia or in one of the other areas targeted in this package of bills. Income support will be provided to families who are without jobs or who are relying on welfare support, but at the same time we will be delivering what we now call 'tough love'. That is to ensure that the adults in those families to whom the government is providing income support are doing everything within their power to ensure that their kids go to school and that their kids have every opportunity in life—opportunities that perhaps their parents did not have—to get a fine education and to ensure that they are able to participate in the workforce and in the wider community.

This is an important package of bills. I hope it enjoys bipartisan support. I know the report that was delivered by the Prime Minister in this chamber two weeks ago on the closing the gap statistics is something that would be welcomed not only by all right-thinking people in this place but by the community at large. Yes, progress has been made, but there is still much more to be done. I commend this legislation to the House. It is another step in the right direction in closing the gap.

Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to address the Social Security Legislation Amendment Bill 2011 and associated bills. I find myself in the strange position of supporting a bill which subsumes individual responsibility and moves it to the public. It is something of which I would normally be extremely wary but, in this case, I find myself with little option but to support it. I would be the first to say I am not a supporter of the nanny state, where the state progressively removes an individual's responsibilities to make decisions in what the state presumes is their best interests. There are scores of examples where government imposes itself in this manner on the general public, in areas like compulsory superannuation, seatbelts, OH&S arrangements—which are very onerous on business and in some cases discourage them from employing workers—and smoking laws. That is not to say that any one of these laws in isolation is a bad thing; it is just an area where government has taken individual responsibility away.

Even the messages of incentives/penalties that government and bodies of government send people regarding personal health care—things like obesity, alcohol consumption and tobacco use—assume that it is not really the fault of the individual. In the case of obesity or alcohol abuse it is the fast food sellers or the alcohol advertisers who are at fault. We are not very honest with people when we fail to tell them if they are overweight, if they drink too much or if they smoke too much that it is in the individual's power to address the problem. Unfortunately, this comes through much of the legislation that we do in the public healthcare or the public benefit sector.

As I have said, this is not an area that I would normally be drawn to. One of my favourites, as an example of where we fall down in terms of the individual's responsibility, is breakfast programs in schools. I would be the last to say that if kids are coming to school hungry that we should not do something about it, but the downside of that is that as soon as we provide this assistance to the children we are absolving parents of their essential responsibility, which is to feed their children before they go to school. I know of a small middle-class country town where the local school had two or three children coming to school who were hungry, and the school felt it had to do something. It addressed the problem and put in a breakfast program but before long it had 20 or 30 children coming to school for the breakfast program. You have to try to strike a balance between the public good, the child's good and the individual's responsibility. That is not to say that any of these programs are necessarily good or bad, but we need to consider this when we make decisions—as we are with these bills—about absolving individuals of their responsibility and trying to put state pressure on them to achieve social outcomes. For me, the threshold is where the individual's actions impact on others, particularly children.

Today, we are debating that area where we are using the strength of government to manipulate people's welfare income to achieve outcomes for their children that they may not otherwise necessarily take. The Howard government's intervention in the Northern Territory has always had its detractors, and normally it is couched in terms of offending human rights. This has always been a poor criticism. The weakness of the intervention was that it further removed individual responsibilities and the ability of individuals to manage their own lives. So while we take this short-term action we must have a clear eye to the future about how we empower people to take back control of their lives.

The intervention's genesis lay in the appalling levels of abuse and neglect within the remote Indigenous communities revealed in the Little children are sacred report by Rex Wild and Patricia Anderson, released in June 2007, where it established that the inability of individuals, parents and communities to exercise their individual responsibilities was seriously impacting on innocent parties—that is, the children. While significant sectors of the Indigenous community and the community generally remain opposed to the intervention, on balance I believe it has been positive. It was essential to take some control of a situation that was out of control.

Until now, these programs have been aimed at Indigenous communities—firstly in the Northern Territory and then to trial sites in Western Australia. Parts of the program, namely, the income management procedures, are to be rolled out in five new communities in mainstream Australia. One of these is in South Australia in the Playford City Council area, within the federal electorate of Wakefield. It is about time. One of the chief criticisms of the intervention has been that it was essentially racist. There is no reason for it to be so. If the programs are good and the right thing to do then, surely, where the same triggers exist—I mean anywhere; not just in the Northern Territory and not just in the city of Playford—the same measure should be appropriate.

There are also provisions to extend and refine the Northern Territory programs and include the School Enrolment and Attendance Measure, or SEAM. I support these moves too. But my question to the government is: if now, after 4½ years of operation, the programs are to be extended and refined, if the assessment is that the programs are of net benefit to the communities and if the Northern Territory intervention has been a success, then why have the programs not been rolled out just over the border into the APY Lands of northern South Australia? For all intents and purposes, these communities are one and the same people who live in the southern sectors of the Northern Territory.

You are well aware, I know, Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, that the northern lands of South Australia are in my electorate. It is confronting, every time I go there, to see the disadvantage that these people operate within and how difficult it is to get kids into the schooling system. I accept that there has been another raft of public moneys going into improving housing. Certainly, the schools are at a very good level when you look at their amenities. Their health centres are also very good. And yet in so many ways we seem to be going backwards.

School attendance in these communities is one of the great concerns that we have. We have the difficulty of children not rolling up on time in the morning or not rolling up on a specific day but we also have another great problem in these communities: the influence and impact that cultural practices such as sorry days are having on communities. If a community was having a period of sorrow 100 years or 200 years ago, that period would only have been for a limited amount of time because the body would have had to be disposed with. Now we can have bodies stuck down in Adelaide for weeks at a time, with communities in sorry camps. We have children hundreds of kilometres away from their homes in sorry camps.

Traditionally, anything over 20 kilometres or 30 kilometres would have been out of that community's reach. With the way that they live their lives now, sorry days are having a much greater impact now than they would have had 100 years or 200 years ago. That is one of the reasons that school attendances are so bad throughout the lands. It is not necessarily that the kids are not rolling up on any specific day, although I know that we have issues with that as well. Some compulsion from the Commonwealth such that to get welfare payments your children should attend school is well overdue.

The acceptance of income management is varied. I know many are implacably opposed. I met with the National Congress of Australia's First Peoples a few weeks ago and they are opposed. However, as the member for Grey I regularly visit remote Indigenous communities and as part of that work have met in the past with representatives of the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women's Council, which covers communities encompassing 350,000 square kilometres in Central Australia and straddling three states. I well remember the points that they made to me. Essentially, they said: 'We didn't want income management; we were totally opposed. But now we don't want you to take it away.' That is because it has empowered women to stand up for themselves and their families. One of the great strengths and weaknesses of Aboriginal society is their tradition of sharing whatever they have. However, as community structures have broken down in these remote communities, the tradition of sharing has become simply agreeing to demands from dysfunctional members of the communities to supply them with food and money for drugs and alcohol.

When I met with them, the women told me this: 'Now when people come to the door and demand food we can say, 'You cannot be hungry because you have the same food as me.' That is because part of their welfare cheques under income management cannot be spent on alcohol, drugs, cigarettes or other non-essential items. It must be spent on the essentials: food and shelter. While, as I said earlier, I am very reluctant to endorse laws that take away personal responsibility, unfortunately there is a tipping point at which it affects others in the community—namely, the children—and at that point you have to take a stand and be counted. My observations in the communities where this resistance is strongest is that the male population is much more strongly opposed to income management than the female population. I point out that these are still very much male dominated societies and the males with influence in the society have a fear of the unknown.

I endorse the government's moves in this area. I hope that they are going to make a difference. Of those of us who are in these communities and face these issues on a regular basis, none are foolish enough to say that this is the answer and that it will fix the problem. It is not that simple. If the problem was that easily fixed, it would have been fixed 40 or 50 years ago. We hope that this policy will make a difference. In the medium term and the longer term, if it does provide the circuit breaker, we also have to find mechanisms to re-empower people to take control of their own lives, get back on track and make the decisions for themselves to give them the lives that the rest of Australia basically take for granted. As I said, this is not just an Indigenous issue. I am pleased to see this roll out in another five communities within Australia. If those circumstances exist there, so should the solutions.

Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I speak in support of the Social Security Legislation Amendment Bill 2011, the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Bill 2011 and the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory (Consequential and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2011. At the beginning of this speech, I pay tribute to the Hon. Jenny Macklin. She is an extraordinary parliamentarian and a wonderful minister. I have had the privilege of working with her as chair of the caucus social policy committee for the past four years. She is the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Minister for Disability Reform. She has a wonderful heart and a tremendous work ethic. I pay tribute to her for the extensive consultation that she has undertaken in relation to this matter. This legislation comes as a result of the incredible hard work that she has put in to consult with men, women and communities across the length and breadth of this country.

I support this legislation because I believe that it will make a difference in the lives of people in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory and in communities across the country. Indeed, one of the areas of income management happens to be in your electorate, Deputy Speaker Livermore, the federal seat of Capricornia. I will speak about that later.

The legislation lays out the approach that we are going to take in relation to the Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. We are committed to closing the gap. We have a history of taking action and implementing reforms. I noticed the Prime Minister's recent speech on the annual report on where we are up to in terms of closing the gap. We have in place some very strong aspirations and we have backed that up with serious commitment and serious funding, and we are making a difference. We are delivering real and measureable outcomes in these Indigenous communities across the country, not just in the Northern Territory.

More than 90,000 additional jobs have been won by Indigenous Australians over recent years. Indigenous unemployment has fallen from 31 per cent to 16.6 per cent. Infant mortality rates in South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory have fallen by 36 per cent. Indigenous workers across the country are taking action in Northern Territory and Queensland in the fight against chronic disease such as heart conditions, diabetes, foetal alcohol spectrum disorder and mental illness and against other problems in these communities. We have seen an improvement in retention rates for Indigenous young people completing year 12. It is too low at 47 per cent, but it has increased from the 30 per cent that it was in the early 1990s. It is not good enough yet, but steps are being taken. We are making a difference, we are making gains, but it is not easy after many years of disadvantage and difficulties. There is no doubt whatsoever that there is a long way to go, but legislation like this will make a difference. With the support of Labor and coalition governments across the length and breadth of the country, and with the goodwill of Indigenous and other communities, we can make a difference. We are looking to improve housing with about 4,700 new or refurbished homes across Indigenous communities across the country since 2009. We are looking at hundreds and hundreds of refurbished homes in the Northern Territory—about 1,400 by June 2013. This is the largest ever remote housing investment in the Northern Territory's history. We are making a difference because we believe in helping. On this side of politics we believe that helping our brothers and sisters is not an optional extra, it is not an aspiration, it is not a handout—it is a help up. We want to make sure that we can deliver real gains in that regard. We are determined to close the gap in relation to Indigenous disadvantage.

The object of the stronger futures legislation is to make sure we build safer communities in the Northern Territory. We want to make sure that children go to school. We want to make sure that housing is decent and affordable. We want to make sure that alcoholism is not a scourge on these communities in the future. Too often, men and women have continued to drink alcohol to excess. Women often drink during pregnancy, resulting in FASD difficulties for their children. There is too much domestic violence in these communities, too much criminality, too much conflict, too much dispute and too many marriage and relationship breakdowns. There is simply not enough goodwill evidenced in the past by governments of both persuasions—not enough commitment of funding, not enough determination to tackle these issues. The legislation before the House, particularly the stronger futures legislation, deals with real, practical measures to tackle alcohol abuse, with making sure that we have more nutritious food and better food security in these remote communities and with assisting economic development in the town camps and community-living areas in the Northern Territory.

In the Social Security Legislation Amendment Bill we have five new sites announced, including Logan, which is adjacent to my home city of Ipswich, and Rockhampton in Queensland. We will see amendments made that involve income management. That can be triggered by referrals from state and Territory organisations. I can imagine these organisations are very keen to be helping people who are vulnerable, who are suffering from social and economic disadvantage and who are in need of a helping hand to manage their financial affairs. There are school attendance plans under the social security legislation. I was interested to note that the government's Improving School Enrolment and Attendance through Welfare Reform Measure, known as SEAM, which other speakers have referred to, was mentioned recently in a press release by the Hon. Jenny Macklin, the Federal Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, as well as by the Hon. Peter Garrett, the Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth. They mentioned the 2010 evaluation of SEAM report and made the point that, under SEAM, parents who do not respond to attempts to ensure their children are enrolled in and attend school can have their income support payments suspended. This has been trialled in 14 communities in the Northern Territory and 30 schools in Queensland. It is important that children turn up to class. It is important that children are literate and numerate. It is important to their educational outcomes and to their future financial security that that is the case. Children who do not complete school end up regularly engaging in miscreant behaviour.

That is why the report Doing time—time for doingof the Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, of which I am the chair, noted so many Indigenous juveniles and young adults involved in the criminal justice systems around the country. The tragedy is that Indigenous juveniles are 28 times more likely to be in detention than non-Indigenous juveniles. Indigenous juveniles make up more than half of the detainee population on an average day. Indigenous young adults are 15 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Indigenous young adults. If you are an Indigenous woman you are 35 times more likely to be hospitalised by partner abuse than a non-Indigenous women. There are real problems in these communities. This is not some esoteric, theoretical problem; these are real problems in families and in individual and community life in our country. It is in our backyard, it is in our neighbourhood, it is in our community—and we cannot ignore it. That is why in the report that the Hon. Peter Garrett and the Hon. Jenny Macklin mentioned the point is made that SEAM was successful in ensuring that all children of school age, who were involved in the trial, were enrolled in school and alternative education programs in 2010. There was an increase in participation: SEAM students increased their participation from 74.4 per cent to 79.9 per cent in the Northern Territory and from 84.7 per cent to 88.7 per cent in Queensland, my home state. There were other indications that the SEAM program is quite clearly working. The report also found that after social workers from Centrelink contacted families students were less likely to miss school—that is, less likely to be engaged in truancy.

We create good social norms and build safer communities by building up families. Family is the bedrock of our community, and that is important. That is why so many of these reforms are so critical to families. Alcoholism is a really bad thing. About one in 10 Australians suffer from alcohol abuse. Anyone who has experienced alcoholism in their family, as I have, has seen the impact on family life, on a person's capacity to complete school and on relationships. It results in ostracism for many people. It results in financial deprivation. It often results in abuse—psychological and emotional—in family life. It results in real disadvantage for young people. Alcoholism is a really bad problem and the Northern Territory, on all the evidence, is a problem area. I was interested to see in some reports that were coming out of the Northern Territory that in the Northern Territory alcohol consumption is far greater than elsewhere. The Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Bill 2011—alcohol proposals regulation impact statement/post implementation review made it really clear that the problem of alcohol consumption in the Northern Territory has not gone away and in fact is very much there. According to that report, in 2007 it was estimated that 88.7 per cent of non-Indigenous adults in NT had consumed alcohol in the previous 12 months, compared to 84.6 per cent of the rest of Australians. But it was worse when it came to Indigenous people. It really is a problem. I commend everyone to have a look at that report, because you will be absolutely stunned at the impact of alcohol consumption on people's lives and upon the problems that are clearly there in the Northern Territory.

The World Health Organisation makes it plain that harmful use of alcohol is a global problem which impacts not just on individuals and families but on the social development of whole communities. The whole of the Northern Territory has been afflicted by these problems. The problem is the pattern of drinking and the volume of drinking. The volume of drinking in the Northern Territory amongst Indigenous people is very, very high. The problem is also the pattern, where a father gets hold of the money and then consumes alcohol, passes it on and gets the partner or wife involved, regardless of whether she is pregnant or otherwise. This can result, of course, in a child suffering from foetal alcohol spectrum disorder and other kinds of problems.

I am pleased that, arising out of the Doing time report, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs is looking into foetal alcohol spectrum disorder. I happen to be on that committee, and we have had a number of hearings, particularly in North Queensland. You can see the impact of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder on the lives of those people. There are a lot of things we can do in terms of prevention, assistance, income management, advice, counsel, education and mentoring. I mentioned education before, because education is really important for our young people and for people in the Northern Territory.

I am going this Friday to some seminars with an Indigenous lawyers association in Brisbane. I am very interested to see how they are going. Josh Creamer is a very well-known Indigenous barrister in Brisbane. I talk to Josh and I know him through a mutual friend, Sharon Murakami. They are having a meeting to talk about how they can provide friendship and fellowship to one another. There are very few Indigenous people—not enough—in professions around the country. I want to have a situation where an Indigenous young person from a remote community can have the opportunity, as Josh has had in his area, to work and practice as a barrister. Mentors like that can make a difference, but education is the key. Making sure that kids get to school is absolutely crucial.

I want to talk briefly about income management and why I think it is important. It has been successful elsewhere. We have seen this in Western Australia since late 2008, but we have also seen the importance of contact through Centrelink. Centrelink is a really important organisation throughout the country, as I saw after the floods in my electorate. In the future, in places like Rockhampton, Logan and, I hope, my area of Ipswich, we will see the referral of parents who just cannot cope, who are vulnerable to financial crisis, to Centrelink for income management. We want to make sure that the people who volunteer for income management, people who are struggling, can get the help they need. We want to make sure that children get every opportunity.

The legislation before this House deals with the Northern Territory. It deals with a lot of things. It deals with housing, food, land tenure, alcohol problems and education. This is a whole-of-government approach. I will finish where I started, by commending Jenny Macklin, the Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. She is a great public servant to this community, and this legislation is testimony to her commitment to Indigenous people around the country.

Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Social Security Legislation Amendment Bill 2011, the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Bill 2011 and the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory (Consequential and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2011. This is important legislation because it concerns the most disadvantaged people in our society of Australia, and that is remote Indigenous Australians, particularly those in the Northern Territory. I have said before in this chamber that, if we come to this place with the aim of doing good work for the nation, we must keep the plight of Indigenous Australians high on the agenda. This legislation does that and it allows us to discuss not only the particular measures being put forward here but, more broadly, the issues which are confronting remote Indigenous Australians.

There are three particular measures contained within the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Bill. The first and the most important one is a provision, in essence, to strengthen the alcohol measures, particularly by giving the federal minister additional powers over alcohol abuse in the remote communities of the Northern Territory. Anybody who has visited the remote communities of Australia, be they in the Northern Territory or elsewhere, will know that alcohol is absolutely the poison that runs through these places. It is debilitating to these communities. It destroys families. It creates violence. It prevents children from going to school. It is completely and utterly destructive to these communities. Alcohol consumption is also the highest predictor of Aboriginal people going to prison.

The speaker before me mentioned some statistics, and I will mention some more. Within Cape York, a community which I know well—and I am sure the situation would be similar in the Northern Territory—between 50 and 80 per cent of people above the age of 16 drink at hazardous levels, according to the WHO definition of hazardous. It is a remarkable figure and it is a figure which the World Health Organisation has seen nowhere else on the planet. In fact, it is four times higher than the next highest figure, which is for South Africa. That is in the Cape York communities data taken from several years ago and documented in the justice study in Cape York. I am sure it is replicated in other wet communities across remote Indigenous Australia.

This is an absolutely important and essential issue which we must tackle directly as a problem. It is not good enough for people to say that this is just an indirect consequence of racism or an indirect consequence of dispossession. I do not believe that. I believe that people might start drinking in part due to that, but over time it has become an issue in itself. It is now such a vast issue in these places that we must tackle it directly, head-on— not as a symptom but as a problem in its own right. Noel Pearson has been talking about this and has raised this issue for many years, and he is a former boss of mine. He says there is a very definite correlation between access to grog and the level of harm, and the less access to grog, the less harm. There is an absolute correlation between the two, he says, and I have seen that for myself as well. You go to places where they have got on top of the grog, you go to the dry communities, and they are fundamentally different from those places where the alcohol still runs through the community like a river. So we must start looking at the supply, and the alcohol management plans are an important part of restricting supply of alcohol.

Before the human rights lobby jumps up and down and says, 'What about the right to drink?', I say, 'What about the rights of the children in those communities and what about the rights of the sober grandparents who are frequently holding the places together?' That is who we should be thinking about when we are thinking about this legislation before us and we are thinking about additional measures to strengthen these communities. We must cut the supply of alcohol, and this bill before us will assist in putting in place strong alcohol management plans to address it.

At the same time we must address the cash side of the equation. It is one thing if you have your own job, you are earning your own money and you want to go and spend it on booze. Go for your life. But frequently it is the broader Australian community, through our taxes, who are funding the alcohol habits occurring in these places, and that is something we need to be more persistent and more aggressive about. I do not think any Australian citizen expects their tax dollars to be going towards subsidising someone's alcohol problem and causing the social breakdown of communities. Some sensible measures have started to be put in place, measures such as income management, which is starting to be rolled out in many places. I think that is a good thing, and it can be rolled out further where there are significant problems such as alcohol and other abuses.

I move now to the second measure, having briefly addressed the issues in relation to alcohol abuse. The second measure in this bill concerns land reform. In essence, this allows for longer term leases so that people can have, hopefully, home ownership and it allows for longer term leases so that businesses can set up premises with the security of knowing that they will not be ejected from their premises at any time soon. Again, this particular measure is a good measure and it is in the right direction. But these measures have been painfully slow to come into being across remote Indigenous Australia. We have been talking about home ownership now for probably a decade—in this parliament through the parliamentarians who were here before I was elected and certainly through the leadership of people like Noel Pearson, Warren Mundine, Wesley Aird and others who have been strongly advocating for home ownership opportunities in the remote communities.

Home ownership is important not just because it would facilitate people achieving something which they want—to own their own property—but because it actually empowers individuals. It gives responsibility back to people so that they can take care of their own housing. That is something which is missing in the remote communities. In most remote communities people are disempowered and have very little opportunity to make their own choices in relation to housing. If they want to build a new room, they cannot just go and do that. They have to go to their local council and lobby and hopefully there will be some government funds to enable them to get a bigger house. This is fundamentally an issue about individual responsibility and about empowering individuals to take care of their own housing needs.

Better tenure is also vitally important for business development because, as most people in this chamber will know, you will not get business development and you will not get sustained economic growth anywhere in the world unless you have security of property and security of contract. They are two preconditions for sustainable economic growth. And in the remote communities presently across the Northern Territory and indeed across Australia there is very little security of tenure to allow businesses to start and to allow businesses to thrive. This measure will go some way towards addressing that and I hope that means we will soon be able to have good security of tenure so that businesses can thrive in these remote locations.

This takes me to the third provision, which relates to food security. In some respects this measure perplexes me and frustrates me—that we in this parliament have to be debating provisions about food security and about opening food stores in places far removed from where we are in the nation's capital, thousands of kilometres away from the remote communities. It relates to the land security issue. If there were land security and places where private enterprises could open up easily and meet the demand which exists, we would not have to be having this debate and this conversation over this particular measure. Then you would get a local entrepreneur who might say, 'I just might open up a small food store and service the local 1,000 members of this community.' That is how it should occur. We do not stand here debating the local community stores in downtown Canberra or in downtown Knox, where I am from. Nor should we be debating the community stores in downtown Wadeye or Aurukun. Unfortunately still, while land security issues are not fixed, we have to address this and, because of that, I reluctantly support the measure in front of me.

In the last few minutes remaining I will touch on some broader issues. Even with these measures in front of us I do not believe we are addressing the fundamental problem confronting remote Indigenous communities—that is, that we have a policy of subsidised disengagement. For 40 years we have had an implicit Indigenous policy in this nation of subsidised disengagement where, in essence, we pay people and support them to live in a place of their choice regardless of the economic viability of that location. We need to move away from that to a position firmly based on economic engagement in the real economy, where people are fully educated to be mobile and to exploit the opportunities which present themselves right across Australia. That is the main game, in my view, which we as a country still fail to be serious about. We need to be serious about tackling head-on welfare dependency and subsidised disengagement. No group of people on the planet will prosper in a welfare economy. It does not matter who you are, what your cultural background is, or what your skin colour is. No group of people anywhere on the planet has prospered in a welfare economy. Indigenous people are no exception, yet we still have policies which create incentives for people to remain in remote communities rather than to be mobile, accepting jobs located elsewhere across Australia.

This is not a foreign concept to many remote Indigenous Australians. Speak to the older Indigenous Australians and they will tell you that 30 or 40 years ago they worked in Rockhampton, Mount Isa, up in Cape York or over in the Northern Territory. They followed the jobs, but that is not happening any more in part because our welfare system has a 90-minute rule which says that people do not have to look for a job if it is more than 90 minutes from where they reside. That means people in remote communities do not have to look for a job. So you have fully able-bodied people graduating from high school who go straight onto welfare queues. After two or three years on welfare, they will be further weakened and debilitated. At the very least, the able-bodied people who graduate from school should have to leave their communities to get a job. We do not do a service to those individuals, to their families or to the Australian community by continuing with the policy of welfare dependence in remote locations.

I strongly support the alcohol measures in this bill and I support the measures targeted at providing greater security of tenure. But, most importantly, we still need to address welfare dependency, which is rife.

Barry Haase (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It gives me a great deal of pleasure to speak to the Social Security Legislation Amendment Bill 2011. The first item I would like to address is the statement from my colleague the member for Aston. I agree with 99.9 per cent of everything he said, apart from the oft repeated phrase that no-one in any culture makes a future out of welfare. I can assure him that in the seat of Durack there are many environments where individuals make a great deal of money out of welfare. They are all responsible for taking money out of Indigenous pockets and putting it into white pockets. They rub their hands together with glee every time there is another welfare policy devised by federal government. We have ample evidence to suggest that only a minimal number of projects—out of the many which have been amply funded by the federal taxpayer—have made a substantial difference to the ongoing welfare and future direction of Indigenous people across Australia. That is the issue we need to address in our debate in this place.

Listeners and viewers would be well aware that in opposition we have very little control over the policies proposed by the government. This proposition alone simply gives further carriage and guarantee to propositions put together by the Howard government. Had many of those propositions not been watered down so severely in the early days, I suggest we may have been a little further down the road of progress, a little further down the road of giving back self-esteem to Indigenous people in engaging with Western society and moving forward removed from the necessity of the welfare paddock.

Jackie Dann from the West Kimberley in a paper years ago said, 'Release us from the welfare paddock. You are destroying our culture, you are destroying us as individuals.' So true were his statements, but so little has changed if we speak of the period since the late 60s. Yes, we have addressed infant mortality in a very powerful way. Yes, we have addressed life expectancy in a substantial way. But if you go to the readily found examples you will find no great improvement in housing, no great improvement in school accommodation, no great improvement on education attained when concluding formal education and no reduction in incarceration. We have too much knowledge of the failure of individual Indigenous people and their collective communities and to date we have too little evidence of high achievement, except in some outstanding cases for individuals. It is that collective that we in this place are responsible for assisting and directing.

Much has been said recently about closing the gap, but is there among departmental personnel who reside in Canberra a great wealth of knowledge about and commitment to that very decision to close the gap? I ask a very rational question: what motivation is there for a department exclusively responsible for the wellbeing of Indigenous people to solve all the problems associated with the welfare of Indigenous people? I believe that people with foresight, vision and a sound mind might look to a future where government departments all over this nation specifically responsible for Indigenous affairs and their advancement install a sunset clause on the very existence of their agencies with a guarantee that those employees would move to other departments, without being disadvantaged, at a particular point in time—a particularly point in time not measured by achievement but by a fixed date in the future. Everyone would be pressured to work to a conclusion that was satisfactory because they would know that the task was to be finished.

It is a rather severe point that I make but, until such time as there is a major shake-up of existing Indigenous policy in the areas of housing, welfare, education, health et cetera, what are we going to find that will act as a catalyst for change? Many interested in the subject will know the intervention across Northern Australia was such a catalyst. It was a very necessary change that was brought about by a shocking report that revealed abuse of the youngest and most vulnerable in Indigenous communities. That was in part a catalyst, but it is quite obviously not enough because not enough change has taken place. Is it the fault of those employees of departments who are responsible for making contact and are very concerned that they need to cement those relationships face to face with a friendly embrace? Is it the fault of the individuals at a higher level for delegating the employees to particular tasks? Is it the responsibility of yet higher authorities for developing these one-size-fits-all solutions? I suggest it is a combination of many of those aspects, but basically we have a condition that I call box ticking. Many people that are removed from the day-to-day shock and horror of Indigenous communities find it very easy to scurry into these communities, consult briefly, tick some boxes and go back to comfortable suburbia. It does Indigenous people no good. It does our reputation as legislators no good. It does nothing to improve the status and reputation of so many government agencies.

In my electorate of Durack, where approximately 14 per cent of the population are Indigenous, I see replication of agency visits on a day-to-day basis. A stream of white Falcons or Holdens make a beeline to communities. They all consult; they all tick the box; and they all leave again.

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

Seagulls.

Barry Haase (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My colleague reminds me the ones that fly in on a regular basis are more aptly referred to as seagulls. Indigenous people are sick and tired of them. They are sick and tired of being told that the task is easy—nominate, volunteer, participate—and then, because that particular program fails, the individuals involved are criticised for being worthless. The tolerance of members of remote Indigenous communities wears thin. They have been tested, trained, put over the hurdles, cajoled and accused time and time again.

The last time that we saw a quantum leap in the advancement and wellbeing of Indigenous people after the arrival of the First Fleet was probably the arrival of the missionaries across remote Australia. At that point in time education was given. Guidance that was believed to be necessary for assimilation was given. The outcomes of course were much less than the expectations of those missionaries involved, but their intent was great and good and their commitment was great and good. The criticism that they have had heaped upon them since those day is in the main unjustified. I know that in my original patch of Kalgoorlie in the Eastern Goldfields all of the successfully employed and deployed Indigenous people had a solid grounding of education in mission schools—Mount Margaret, Warakurna, Warburton. Further north into the Kimberley there were remarkable institutions such as Balgo, Beagle Bay, Forrest River, Kalumburu. They were establishments that taught. They did not strive for an 18-month or two-year cultural experience to enjoy the romance of it all and then go back home and dine out on it for the next 20 years, which is so often the case today. They were actually committed to the task. They then were often pilloried for their involvement in conditions that were considered unacceptable to the delicate nature of urban dwellers. Today, we are faced with a debate on legislation that is once again going to regulate the behaviour of Indigenous communities. As I said, in the main it is regulation that was introduced by the Howard government as a matter of necessity. It was necessary then, it is necessary now and it should be embraced. Any opportunity to impose more rigour on that legislation should be taken, because as legislators we cannot afford to simply wish to avoid offence. There has been far too much of that on the part of legislators in the past.

My Indigenous friends across the Durack electorate understand discipline. They understand the necessity for rigour. They understand the necessity for their children and grandchildren to get an education. I am speaking in the main of those people who got their education at the hands of the missionaries and got jobs on pastoral stations. Those people absolutely deplore the current situation where sit-down money is paid. There is no rigour in expectations of the performance of Indigenous individuals or collective communities.

There is very little respect for the concept of mutual obligation. There is almost an epidemic condition where people say, 'We may be expected by departments on high to make a performance at such and such a level, but past experience tells us that we will never be expected to reach that level so why should it bother.' That condition and that experience do not teach discipline. It does not teach the individual that they will stand out in a group by putting their shoulder to the wheel and going the extra yard, and being rewarded for it. They will more likely remember the experience of sticking their head up and being noticed, and possibly having their head knocked off, figuratively speaking, because they took the initiative to do something.

All of our policies to date have been more about ticking boxes, presuming that those who are ignorant of the real conditions will accept our platitudes, our cheque-writing and our visitation as something that will seriously contribute to the betterment of Indigenous people. The reality is that it could not be further from the truth. What we need is a number of people who are truly committed to getting a job done, a number of people whose continued employment will depend on their performance rather than their processing of numbers. We need a group of people who understand rigour and the necessity for it to realise great outcomes for communities. We need a group of people who understand that without rigour Indigenous people will have no respect whatsoever for the agents of change that are visiting their communities.

Madam Deputy Speaker Livermore, I know that you know I speak from experience and I speak from the heart, but it is an ongoing and long-term project to educate all the members of this House as to what really should be done and what really is expected in remote Indigenous communities across Australia. The most important ingredient I believe is rigour. That rigour must be found in all dealings we have with those communities. The first step in the development of a human being is education. If we do not get that education right and if we do not make that process attractive for the families of Indigenous children, they will never be engaged in the process of insisting that their children attend school. This legislation will make some small contribution if applied with rigour to ensure that that is the outcome and individuals get their lives back.

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

In wrapping up this debate, I note that it has been disjointed because we are debating the Social Security Legislation Amendment Bill 2011 and the cognate bills, Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Bill 2011 and Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory (Consequential and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2011, together. For those who are listening to this debate and find us hopping from income management in urban Australia to alcohol management in the Northern Territory, the best way I can summarise where we are at is that we have had both an apology and a commitment bilaterally from both sides of this chamber to closing the gap. But, today, this government has brought to this House a series of bills that do little more than duplicate or timidly expand what already exists in the area of alcohol and income management.

In Stronger Futures, the Commonwealth government is duplicating the abilities of the Northern Territory government to make certain determinations around alcohol management. All things considered, that is a fairly timid move into this greatly distressing area. Worldwide, right across humanity, we know that around five litres of pure alcohol per person aged over the age 15 is drunk, and in the Northern Territory it is three times that amount—50 per cent higher than it is for the rest of Australia, more than three standard drinks per person, whether they are drinkers or not, over the age of 15. These are greatly concerning figures that well-meaning groups like the People's Alcohol Action Coalition have emphasised must be addressed through supply reduction. You simply cannot wait for demand changes to take root in the context of complete dysfunction.

Having been warned of this and the important steps that were taken with the Northern Territory intervention, it is ironic that today we are debating transitional and consequential provisions that will end those five-year periods for the Northern Territory intervention and replace them with alcohol plans that, for the most part, are agreed by both sides of this chamber. My great concern is that, with these reforms that run for another 10 years with review at seven and then ultimately reporting at eight years, we will find little difference on the ground at the end of that period. That is why we need to be very frustrated about what is being debated here today.

What has been put before the chamber will make almost no difference to what happens in Alice Springs. It will allow the federal government, if it chooses, to ask an independent assessor to identify whether there are breaches of the Northern Territory act. It will allow the federal government to introduce regulations that will become an amendment to a piece of Northern Territory legislation, in the hope that the Northern Territory does not remove those amendments in their own parliament.

In the grand context of alcohol abuse and in the context of child abuse and foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, this legislation does not take us even a few millimetres closer to a solution. To use that metaphor of the duck gliding across the water but paddling underneath, on this side of the House we have the inverted duck: lots of flapping above the water but no propulsion under the water. No, because this is a government appealing to both sides of the street. We have many people in the House today; we have many of them down from the Northern Territory deeply aggrieved by the Northern Territory intervention and, still to this day, deeply wounded by the lack of consultation. This government has now had five years to do the consultation, but that has not occurred. Sure, there have been chartered flights up, with ministers dropping in to talk and sympathise about the intervention, but there has been little more than that.

On the same side of this debate, this is a government that wants to travel around the rest of Australia and flex its muscle to show how much it has done in welfare reform. So, if you are looking for those little clues, where you talk tough to the rest of Australia and are then very apologetic to those in the Centre who complain, then look no further than this social security amendment. The Northern Territory emergency intervention, flawed as it was in its lack of consultation, rolled out clear indications about reductions in trauma and improvements in school attendance. We have had, thanks to Noel Pearson, the interventions in Cape York that have shown distinct improvements in attendance at school and reduction in presentations to magistrates. We have seen in Cape York, after Family Responsibilities Commission hearings, 50 per cent of people having their income quarantined only to move through the quarantine and come out the other side adhering to the positive social norms that we desire to cultivate all around Australia. These are self-imposed, self-agreed social norms like sending your kids to school, not harming them, paying your rent and staying out of court. They are simple things that most parts of the world can agree on, but we have not gone beyond Cape York at this stage.

Under this government we had a two-year trial in two Western Australian locations: one in the Kimberley and one in Perth. That trial was evaluated by ORIMA, who found virtually no fault in the application of voluntary income management and income management under conditions where child-welfare is at stake. It is almost a no-brainer. As controversial it might have been 10 years ago, even the government's own assessment and evaluation says that it works.

So what does the pea-hearted mob on the other side of the chamber do? They design another two-year trial with exactly the same intervention; having just had the trial evaluated and found to be effective! They are rolling it out in five tiny communities around Australia—that is what we are debating today—which make up less than one per cent of the population. It will not include anyone in the Prime Minister's electorate, anyone in the health minister's electorate, anyone in the previous health minister's electorate or anyone in the Treasurer's electorate. No, this trial involves just five urban communities. Sure, these communities are vulnerable, but what are they going to do there? They are going to allow social workers to determine if someone is vulnerable and, if so, they will be offered the opportunity to have their income managed. We may be dealing with a couple of hundred people in those areas.

There is nothing left that is complicated or controversial about this anymore. We have had years to evaluate this. But this timid step, which is barely forward, just shows a government that is unable to really grasp the issue of welfare reform. In fact, they are being left behind by the community. If you ask them, most of the community would say, 'If you're abusing kids, probably the first thing you should do is quarantine some income, manage it with the assistance of a social worker, and make sure the child does not miss out.' How does this party over here, with its heritage of looking after low-income earners and highly vulnerable in Australia and our community, rest and reconcile that with this piece of legislation that just creeps along with another two years of pilot programs? What would anyone say to the other 99 per cent of Australia, where there is no income quarantined, about people who are either abusing or threatening their kids through poor use of income and government welfare? It is utterly appalling that this is not rolling out nationwide. It is appalling that the rest of Australia is denied that basic service of voluntary income management, particularly for those that have child welfare notifications that come from state governments.

This is beyond being even remotely interesting for researchers now. The proof is in. The government funded research, the government funded evaluations and the time of this chamber, on I admit a day of great distraction, is being consumed moving a bill to allow another two years of pilot programs. The time for pilot programs must surely be coming to an end. Five locations in five tiny suburbs, under these provisions, is nowhere near what is required in a context where it has been evaluated, re-evaluated and re-evaluated again.

I admit that the BasicsCard has had some teething problems in the Northern Territory. It is effectively a value-storing card that is PIN-protected and from which you can only use between 50 and 70 per cent of your income on essential services. But we have reached a point now where there is enough diversity and enough providers that in most parts of Northern Territory there is no problem with the BasicsCard or a need to continue evaluating it. We are moving to the point now where we need greater debate about whether all welfare recipients, in fact all people who are on DSP, on Newstart or on various forms of parenting payment, should be subjected to 50 to 70 per cent income management to ensure that they are spending that welfare wisely. After all, it is government money, and is therefore for the provision of services to family and their children. But, no, what we are debating today is another pilot program.

In the Northern Territory, there are some sensible changes, which will allow the minister to make exceptions where alcohol is being carried over waterways, particularly for commercial or tourism purposes, and that makes good sense. I know also that the Australian Hotels Association's Northern Territory branch have articulated their utterly reasonable concerns about which level of government they answer to. I concede that they would have a concern that the federal government might be acting blindly without understanding the conditions on the ground. But I think the amendments that have been proposed by the member for Menzies are common sense. They propose that the first intervention for the federal government would be writing to the Territory equivalent responsible for NT liquor licensing, indicating their desire to have that particular area independently assessed. That makes good sense. It reduces, to some extent, the duplication that we are so concerned about on this side.

In the Northern Territory at the moment they are simplifying what is going on. Woolworths and Coles have agreed to remove some of their cheapest versions of alcohol. That is right, the flavoured metho is no longer on the shelves in Alice Springs. That has to be a good thing. But, regrettably, there are still licensed premises that sell the cheapest forms of fortified and non-fortified cask wine. We are talking about alcohol priced in the vicinity of less than $1 per standard drink. Most recommendations have shown that if we can raise the minimum for a standard alcoholic unit to $1.20 we are some way towards reducing availability.

We also have the great difficulty that hotels in Alice Springs trade seven days a week—whereas at least we know that shopping centres often are not trading on a Sunday—which means seven-day availability. Centrelink payments can be on any day of the week and that means there is no 'thirsty Thursday' anymore of the kind we used to experience in Tennant Creek. The arrangement was that on the day welfare was provided they would close the licensed premises. It gave mums and primary caregivers a chance to buy food on that day and not have much of it humbugged away into alcohol purchase and consumption. The great concern we have at the moment is that absolutely there is the supply, possession and consumption of alcohol to the degree that will always need alcohol management plans and at times federal prescribing of areas to have alcohol restrictions.

There is no debate about that. The only concern is whether this federal government will work with and give notification to the Territory government. I do hope the minister who has entered the chamber now will consider that well-reasoned amendment, because it simply requires a letter to the NT minister to indicate that the federal government wishes to have an independent assessment, and for a vendor or a business to be given notice and a reasonable chance to respond. And of course there should be a chance for the Northern Territory government to respond if they think that there are financial or other reasons that make it difficult for them to comply or concur.

In conclusion, what we have here is a timid step forward in the great fight against alcohol consumption in Central Australia. We know how important it is, as the member for Aston articulately put it—and the member for Durack has said it is well, as did the members for Murray and Hasluck. Without being trite, there has been a series of speeches given on this side of the House that I thought were insightful. I thought they showed a clear understanding of how things work in Indigenous communities. But all that we have had from the government, from the great party looking after the vulnerable and the poor, were these fairly ordinary superficial responses that this is part of the government agenda to move things along.

Mark my words—with this legislation rolled out, I challenge the government to say whether there will be any change in five years. Is there any change in simply replicating the powers of the NT government in Canberra? Little. This government has failed to actually stand up to the forces that are making alcohol widely available in areas like Alice Springs. They have failed to set up the training arrangements that obligate young working-age Aboriginal Australians to undertake training, and to take jobs when they are suitable. They have failed to engage the people in town camps around Alice Springs, who remain wholly and solely, in many cases, utterly dysfunctional and dependent upon alcohol provision. It gives me the sense that it is a government that has just run out of ideas.

History shall record that this government, when given the chance, could think of nothing more than duplicating the powers of another jurisdiction. This is a government so timid in their moves towards welfare reform that we have had not one trial in the NT, two in Cape York and three in WA fully evaluated at government expense—yet they have announced another five trial sites. This is a government where the warm embrace of welfare reform is nothing more than cold and chilling. Welfare reform threatens the key constituencies of this government and that is why they will do everything they can to make it look like they are flapping wildly—but moving ahead they will not be. No, they will simply announce trial after trial and make glib announcements and give press conferences about the hard work they are doing. But I can assure those at every level in the government that years from now this slow progress will have done nothing for families who struggle with alcohol consumption, for families who struggle with the implications of that, and for the children who need our protection. This government could do far worse than take on some of our recommendations and move far faster than they have

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This bill is an admission of defeat. Clearly, it is an admission of defeat, and all the government can do is just try to suppress the symptoms. That is what is happening here. Unfortunately and sadly, I have had to preside over a town, my own home town of Mount Isa, where we have had 25 suicides—and I think that 21 or 22 of those were first Australians.

In the forum that we had—and we thank the Prime Minister very much for sending up the relevant minister—the locals said that whenever they have a person at risk all they have to talk to are some whitefellas who are entirely foreign to them in every way. They are not people the locals are going to open up to or feel comfortable with. They are not people from the local community. A huge amount of money is going to these people, money that really should be going to the local people. They are not trained, because I do not think that it is an area in which you can be trained. It is an area in which, if you have an ability to relate, it can be of some advantage.

I was quite staggered when I heard about the last two suicides as they were very much middle-class people. They were not people who had come in from the community areas, driven out by the liquor laws into the very bad rabbit warren areas in all of our towns and cities in North Queensland. I asked a person about the problem, a man whom I greatly respect—and I do not know whether I should mention his name, but I will—Chris Squelsh, who works in this area in North Queensland. Chris said, 'If you are a young mother and you get a knock on the door from the police sayingthat your son has been accused of throwing rocks through windows'—and Chris was not referring to any mother but just quoting numerous cases that he had had over the last two or three years—'or if you are a young mother and you have QBuild knocking on your door because you have not paid your rent and giving you one week before they throw you out into the street and your children are crying as they have no food because your husband took all the money and blew it on grog, gambling and everything else, or if you are a young mother and the children's services'—and this is very relevant to this bill—'turn up and say that they are taking the children off you because they are not being properly looked after, what would you do in that situation?' Chris said, 'What would you do when your husband is bringing all his drunken friends over for a party at the house with all the ills that follow on? Would you be out of your mind with terror?'

This bill gives power to further terrorise these poor people. Are we addressing the problems that exist there? If I had the power, I could fix this thing up in 10 seconds in that town. It is simply a matter of separating the 15 people living in a house with everyone getting on each other's nerves and a complete lack of anywhere to sleep even within the house of a night, no air-conditioning and absolutely unbearable heat because the house they built was enormously inappropriate.

All of the land around Mount Isa is pastoral lease land. The government can resume it at any time they feel like and divide it up into one-hectare blocks or smaller. There is no curbing and channelling or sewage required or anything. We are talking about maybe $20,000 at the outside. Then they can build their own houses with CDEP money. Sometimes I feel that I must be a very ineffective person because I have come in here and logically, again and again, put up simply what the people asked for. I was a minister in Queensland. I cannot claim any credit for this. Let me be very specific. Greg Wallace at Napranum said, 'We will get people to work for the dole.' Extraordinarily, he got people to voluntarily work for the dole. He got on 60 minutes, such was the reaction. It is the only time that 60 minutes did two programs on the one issue within two weeks. Noel Pearson's brother Gerhardt—and I should not identify him that way because he is a person in his own right—as CEO of Hope Vale rang me up and said, 'Why can't we use CDEP money to build houses?' Gerry Hand said, 'That is a great idea.' I am not here to denigrate the minister, but I put this idea to the minister again and again. When I put it to Gerry Hand, within two weeks we had the CDEP money mobilised to build the houses. Gerry said, 'What a great idea,' and I cannot help but add that he said, 'That is a brilliant idea; it could not have come from you.' I said: 'No, it did not. It came from a bloke called Gerhardt Pearson, CEO at Hope Vale.'

But that was not the end of the story. I name with great pride my late and great friend Lester Rosendale, one of the most prominent people in Aboriginal affairs in Australia. One of my staff got a job with him because she also had very great respect for Lester Rosendale. Lester and Eric Law, who was effectively head of the department that I was responsible for, got an agreement that all houses would be built by exclusively local Indigenous labour. I was very angry because it was a fait accompli. I was not even consulted. These two senior public servants just took it in their own heads to go off and do it. One was a Hope Vale boy and another one a Cherbourg boy, but both were very senior-ranking public servants. I as the minister was very angry that I had not even been consulted. I said, 'What are you going to do: ask people who cannot even read or write to build their own houses?' They went ahead with it. They ignored me and boxed me into a corner and we built the houses.

That is still not the end of the story. Donnie Fraser, the Mayor of Doomadgee, rang me up and said,' Why can't we build our own blocks?' I had a terrible fight with him which he won. I said, 'All right, 'I will put one or two in as a pilot,' and they were tremendously successful. When we were up at TI a few days ago they said, 'Why can't we access the blocks from the block-making machine at Bamaga?' I said: 'I don't know if it is still going. I think I put it there and that was an awfully long time ago!' But then they produced their own blocks. We only had enough money to build 600 houses, but as a result we ended up building over 2,000 houses from not paying a king's ransom to white contractors. I am not denigrating white contractors—some of them are good mates of mine—but they have to pay people to come in, they have to pay their board and accommodation and, because they are away from home, the people have to be paid a fortune in travel costs. It is week on, week off in half these cases. They are going backwards and forwards all the time at enormous cost. If you do not work with local labour, you double the cost simply because you are flying people in to build the homes.

People will take great pride in their homes. Mossman Gorge is still one of the leading tourist attractions in North Queensland. When I went there every single home had graffiti and worse on the sides and the windows smashed. Some of them were fibrolite and you could look straight in because the fibrolite had been broken as well. The grass was waist high. When they started building their own homes there was not a single mark of graffiti, and they tell me there is still not a single mark of graffiti. All of the lawns are mown down to almost manicure status. They went out and got their own tourist operation. Again, I emphasise that I had nothing to do with it. I say to the minister for the 400th time and I tell the House for the 400th time that there are two simple things that you can do. The people of Australia gave you the power in 1966. And if there were any doubt the High Court gave it to you again in the case of Mabo, Passey and Rice and the Queensland government. They gave you the power to issue title deeds.

I went up there to do a bit of campaigning and, most of all, I desperately needed to know what the position on title deeds was in the Torres Strait. I did not speak—it is pretty rare for me not to get a word in—because people were jumping for the microphone to say they needed title deeds. We did not initiate the discussions; at the two public meetings they initiated the discussions. One meeting was called by the trade union, but they all came along and talked about title deeds. This is so simple. If you issued title deeds at Yarrabah they could borrow money and build their own homes. After all, it is the Yarrabah people's land. People say it is not as simple as that. I found it was as simple as that. I simply sat down. Lester Rosendale had already done it at Hope Vale, and I simply copied what Lester had done at Hope Vale. They said that the only title deeds there, the only privately owned land that is not owned by people of European descent, are because of title deeds issued in that brief period. Everyone thought I would be there forever and these laws would be there forever. Everyone was on island time and they did not do what they should have done, which was to get in and take up the title deeds when they were on offer. Some of them did and that is what they were talking about the other day.

Having returned from the Torres Strait, I cannot speak today without saying—and I have to choose my words very carefully—there is a race of people there that have diabetes in epidemic proportions. I have had discussions with Professor Wronski about this as he was the first person to tell me about it. I went there as minister until 1990 and every meal I had was locally produced: fruit, vegetables, dugong, turtle or fish, with fish being the predominant one. They have fish traps there et cetera. When I went there for closing the gap, I could not work out if the minister goes up there. People were screaming out in rage about closing the gap; the gap is widening into a gulf. We went there on a closing-the-gap delegation—what a joke. I felt so ashamed and embarrassed to return there. Not a single thing has been implemented or done to overcome the problem. Joey Masbi from York Island screamed out and his brother or cousin Thomas who runs the bus said: 'Joey is dead right. AQIS is starving us.' By AQIS he means the Fisheries Management Authority and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority which are enforcing things to please the Greens and get the support of the Greens. It would be nice if Minister Macklin would listen to what I am saying, but I do not suppose she listens to any of the first Australian people either.

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

The member for Kennedy is reflecting upon the minister. I call him to account.

Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The minister is not interested in listening to these people who are dying of diabetes because they have no fresh fruit and vegetables. There is no employment there. You will not let them build their own houses. You will not give them the title deeds so they can do it for themselves. (Time expired)

Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Disability Reform) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank all the contributors to this debate. We are looking at three bills: the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Bill 2011, the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory (Consequential and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2011 and the Social Security Legislation Amendment Bill 2011. The bills together form part of the government's next steps to tackle what are unacceptable levels of disadvantage still being experienced by far too many Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. We are determined to take these steps with Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory and, of course, with the Northern Territory government.

It is all about making sure that we can build a stronger future for Aboriginal people and with Aboriginal people in the Territory. It is also very clearly about making sure that Aboriginal people can live more independent lives, lives in safer communities without violence and the terrible effects of alcohol abuse, where children are healthy and eat healthy food, where children go to school every day, where parents go to work and where families can live in decent housing.

I think all of us know that the gap is the widest in the Northern Territory. All of the data and all of the research tell us that. That is why this legislation is in front of the House today in the way that it is. We know that if we are to achieve real change for Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, it is going to take a long period of intensive work and significant investment. The situation does still remain critical. The measures in these bills tackle substantive problems and barriers. Some of the measures are very strong. The measures are designed to be fair. A lot of people have been consulted before decisions which will affect them have been made. It is very clear that if we are to work together in the way that we have outlined in the introduction of these bills, in the debate today and in the way in which we want to work together, none of us can walk away. All of us know that have to continue to work very hard to turn what are very difficult and critical situations around. I will shortly be moving some minor amendments to the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Bill to clarify the intention of the bill. These amendments will clarify that part 4 of the new act, relating to food security, has effect notwithstanding one existing Commonwealth law—the Competition and Consumer Act 2010—rather than despite Commonwealth laws generally.

I thank the opposition for their support today and indicate that we will be supporting the amendments that I understand they will be moving.

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

The question is that this bill be now read a second time.

A division having been called and the bells having been rung—

As there are fewer than five members on the side for the noes in this division, I declare the question agreed to in accordance with standing order 127. The names of those members who are in the minority will be recorded in the Votes and Proceedings.

Question agreed to, Mr Katter, Mr Bandt and Mr Wilkie voting no.

Bill read a second time.

Message from the Governor-General recommending appropriation announced.