Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

We are all aware of the statistics on health and housing in Aboriginal communities: a 17-year gap in life expectancy, high levels of childhood mortality and morbidity and high levels of death and disablement from predictable diseases—for example, ear infections and trachea. You hear stories all the time about children going to school but that there is not much point because some of them have such severe ear infections that they cannot actually hear what they are being taught. It is no wonder that they get bored and do not want to be there. There are countless reports about housing conditions, where between 15 and 20 people live in a three-bedroom house with one bathroom.

There is also report upon report and strategy upon strategy. These issues have been around for a long time. They have not suddenly eventuated because Mr Brough has become the minister and has gone out to a few Aboriginal communities and because the media has suddenly decided, yet again, for a short space of time, that there is a crisis going on. That crisis has been going on for a very long time, as is articulated and is evident from the figures that I have just gone through, and they are just the tip of the iceberg. We have continued to have a cycle of knee-jerk reaction, crisis, piecemeal approach and extremely short term funding—funding cycles of 12 months, for example. Yet again, just today I heard about another example of a funding program that was proposed for 12 months. The difference is that the organisation that was being offered the money said: ‘No, we’re not going to do it any more. You think that we can fix this problem in 12 months.’ They cannot, so they refused to take the money. I say: good on them; send the government a message.

I was also at the ANTaR forum this morning and Tom Calma gave yet another excellent presentation. He talked about the strategy on violence that was released in 2004. That strategy was a good one. That strategy talked about the key things that need to be done. But, guess what? It is not being implemented. There is a bookshelf full of reports not being implemented. The reports talk about the bad statistics, but nothing is being done. The government has missed an opportunity yet again, this year, with the budget. It handed out billions of dollars of tax cuts without addressing housing. You only have to open up the latest report by Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma to see how much funding is needed to address Aboriginal housing in this country. What is the figure? It is $2.1 billion. And what do they get? A measly amount in the budget.

It is the same with health. Even to bring Aboriginal communities up to the standards of non-Aboriginal communities, the estimate is half a million dollars a year. Money is given back as tax cuts to people who do not really need it. If they were asked, ‘Would you rather invest this money in Aboriginal communities so that we can close the mortality gap of 17 years?’ and if they had a true picture of what was going on and the impacts in those communities, I would bet that a lot of people would say, ‘Yes, we want that money spent in those communities.’ There is always this approach: ‘Let’s turn around and blame the service deliverers’; ‘Let’s blame ATSIC’; ‘Let’s get rid of ATSIC’. We all know ATSIC delivered only one-seventh of the money that was going to Aboriginal communities. And there is: ‘Let’s blame self-determination, community empowerment and capacity building. They just haven’t done it, so it’s not our fault that they’re still suffering from significant disadvantage.’ That was never the intention of self-determination, community empowerment and capacity building.

Of course, the proposal never was that everything would be handed over and heaped on the shoulders of Aboriginal communities for them to deal with it alone, without government support, without the support of the agencies and without delivering the services that every other Australian expects. Aboriginal communities expect, and have a right to, the same sort of service delivery. They have a right to equality of health and equality of housing conditions. I again turn to Tom Calma’s work as the Social Justice Commissioner. The plan he has put forward is for Aboriginal Australians to reach equality within a generation. His plan puts through a series of goals and benchmarks that we should be meeting over the next 25 years to ensure that an Aboriginal child born today has the same health and housing standards as non-Aboriginal Australians. But, let me tell you, if we do not start addressing that point now, today, Aboriginal Australians will still be suffering the 17-year mortality gap—or we might have narrowed it slightly; maybe it will be only 15 years. They will still be suffering that 17-year gap unless we start addressing the gap now. We are talking about generational change. (Time expired)