Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Liberal-National Party made a commitment as follows before the election:

The coalition will continue the current level of funding expended on Closing the Gap activities.

That commitment did not actually last beyond one budget. In fact, it did not even get through one budget. The Prime Minister's claim to be the Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs has been exposed as a hollow platitude. His budget of broken promises has gutted more than $530 million from programs that support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. For weeks now, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs has been running around the countryside claiming that it is nothing more than a simple efficiency dividend. On Friday, that feeble story finally unravelled when his own department was forced to admit that the half a billion dollars in savings would come from programs, not the department at all. So it is program funding cuts, not departmental cuts. It is not an efficiency dividend at all. Even if we were to accept the pathetic attempt of the minister to water that down and say it is an efficiency dividend, it would mean for the Commonwealth department responsible for Indigenous Affairs there would be an efficiency dividend of 4.5 per cent, much higher than the 2.5 per cent applied across other portfolios. Senator Scullion has given ironclad guarantees that cuts will not be impacting on front-line services, but that also unravelled on Friday. They will be. I look forward to him explaining that to people across the country.