Senate debates

Wednesday, 15 August 2007

Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Welfare Payment Reform) Bill 2007; Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill 2007; Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs and Other Legislation Amendment (Northern Territory National Emergency Response and Other Measures) Bill 2007; Appropriation (Northern Territory National Emergency Response) Bill (No. 1) 2007-2008; Appropriation (Northern Territory National Emergency Response) Bill (No. 2) 2007-2008

In Committee

10:56 am

Photo of Chris EvansChris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

That is the core of your argument, Senator Bartlett. In fact, the Little children are sacred report draws attention to that—it is the first tenet of it. In my view and Labor’s view, there is a direct relationship between the poverty in which Aboriginal communities exist and the problems of child abuse. Some people like to try to run an argument that there is some sort of cultural reason why there is child abuse in Aboriginal communities. I do not accept that. I do not think that all Aboriginal men are abusers of children. I think that the reputation of Aboriginal men has been terribly damaged by this whole debate. What we do know is that reporting of Indigenous child abuse has reached a level that requires action and acceptance that child abuse in many Aboriginal communities has reached almost epidemic proportions, so we need to act.

Some people say that more police would solve the problem. I do not think that is right. I think that you have to attack the underlying causes of the poverty and the lack of hope and the dysfunction in these communities. That sort of dysfunction occurs in other communities that experience poverty. It is not an Aboriginal issue; it is largely a function of poverty: lack of employment, lack of education opportunities, lack of hope, lack of housing, lack of access to health care et cetera. Those things are fundamentally at the root of these issues. All governments stand condemned for their failure to invest sufficiently in supporting communities with the basic infrastructure which most people regard as a right of citizenship. Labor do accept that there is a very strong linkage between housing and infrastructure and the dysfunction of the communities, which includes child abuse. We do accept that.

Senator Bartlett, your focus is more on the question of whether one needs to deal with leases to intervene, but, fundamentally, you have to accept that. And if you accept that then you accept that you need to take action. If you want to take action in an urgent manner, it seems to me that you need to provide the ability to deal with those issues quite quickly and in a decisive way. This causes the Labor Party great difficulty in respect of what that does to the rights of Indigenous people to their land. That is the hard bit for Labor. I concede that.

We have had a huge commitment to land rights over many years. We see the relationship of Indigenous people to land and their rights to that land as being at the core of their culture, at the core of the recognition of their dispossession and at the core of their way forward. We do not accept the conservative demand for people to be driven off their land and made to integrate in capital cities in Australia as the solution to Indigenous disadvantage. We defend the right of Indigenous people to access their land, to land rights and to native title rights. In these measures, we interfere with that relationship to the extent that the government seeks to take control of the leases. Labor will be moving an amendment, in conjunction with the Democrats, to ensure that the enjoyment of those native title rights and access to land for culture et cetera are not interfered with. The amendment will ensure that these measures do not prevent people practising culture and observing cultural practice that requires access to the land. This is a very important amendment, which I think Senator Bartlett will be moving shortly.

However, Labor accepts that there is some need to interfere with the leasing arrangements in order to facilitate measures aimed at addressing the chronic failure in housing and infrastructure in these communities. You will not deal with child abuse merely by providing education, more police and some of the other measures. They are all important but, in the end, you have to deal with the poverty. It is about 20 people living in one house and their children being unable to get to sleep at night because of the pressure from the number of people living there and because of the breakdown of the social norms. This is where I do agree with Noel Pearson: there are fundamental problems with alcohol and drugs that have actually broken down Aboriginal social norms. This is not Aboriginal behaviour; this is the effect of alcohol, drugs and the loss of the social norms in Indigenous communities. Many Indigenous communities function perfectly well and their children are safe because there are established social norms. The relationships and controls in the communities that are normalised allow people to live in peace, not to be fearful or subject to violence and child abuse. It is in those communities where the social norms have broken down that the problems exist. They also exist in European communities where alcohol and drugs are rife. We get more incidents of violence and child abuse in non-Aboriginal communities where the social norms are broken down.

The weakness in this package is the failure to deal with those things. They are much more difficult. Like all emergency interventions, you can go in and stabilise the situation but then you have to build for the future. You have to deal with the next stage. We are going through that in Iraq at the moment. Winning the war was easy; winning the peace is the hard bit. I am not sure that the government understands just how big a challenge this is going to be, and that is why I think the minister is guilty of simplistic solutions on occasions. These things will be much harder than I think he realises. Also, it gets back to Senator Bartlett’s point—which is a key one—that there has to be not only consultation but also Indigenous ownership of the solutions. Without Indigenous ownership these measures are not going to work. You have to build trust; you have to build ownership of the solutions.

While we support the emergency intervention and the stabilisation of communities, the way forward has to be owned by Indigenous people. I am not sure the government have got that. They have not got it in the past. I am not sure that they understand it now. All the international experience tells us—and Noel Pearson has written very convincingly on this stuff—that Indigenous people have to own the way forward and that big government is not the solution to the problems in Indigenous communities. However, we can make a serious contribution to stabilising those communities by providing the conditions by which people have the opportunity to live without fear, without violence and without their children being subject to child abuse.

Senator Bartlett, we fall slightly to the other side of the line in terms of these measures because we think they are important. When I was talking to the doctor at Wadeye I was trying to understand what a future Labor government could do in terms of health initiatives to improve the health of the children at Wadeye, and he said: ‘Build better houses. Build more houses.’ I had expected that someone from the medical profession would run the argument of more doctors, more nurses and more medical facilities. People tend to focus on their area of expertise and their needs—and there is a need for all those things—but he actually said that housing was at the core. He said that if you have more houses there will be fewer people living in the houses and that if you have better quality houses, with better sanitation, a lot of the things that bedevil those communities will be overcome. That is the starting point. So Labor accepts that housing is at the core. The Anderson-Wild report entitled Little children are sacred also said those issues were central.

We have a very strong commitment to land rights. We are reassured that those rights will not be altered by the measures in this legislation because of the fact that the government has not gone down the 99-year lease path. We had serious concerns about that. The five-year leases do come to an end. That it is a temporary measure in that respect gives me some reassurance about the long-term Aboriginal interests in the land. The fact that the underlying title of the land remains in Aboriginal hands is one of the reasons we are able to support these measures. Senator Bartlett rightly points, as we have also done before, to the concerns and the cynicism in Indigenous communities about the land measures, particularly because of the agenda Minister Brough and the government have run over the years: opposition to native title and to land rights, the push on 99-year leases and the claim that private housing is the solution to all woes. I understand that Aboriginal people are worried that that is part of the agenda. This is why the review is important and why the failure to build trust with Indigenous communities and their leaders on these issues is a weakness.

Fundamentally, housing and infrastructure do have an impact on the way the community functions, as well as opportunities children have and risks they are exposed to. Housing and infrastructure are fundamental—they are building blocks. Police and social workers et cetera will do so much, but unless you change the conditions of poverty under which people live, those measures on their own will not be enough. I make the point and I agree with Senator Bartlett that, in the long term, that will not be enough either. You need to deal with the social norms—dealing with the grog and the drugs will be part of it, but that will not be a lasting solution. People will get access to those things down the track. You have to build social norms and you have to build Aboriginal ownership of solutions and the way forward. Although I understand Senator Bartlett’s concerns, we think this is fundamental to the approach.

Following this debate, I want to ask a couple of questions about investment in housing. I am concerned that there is a lot of money for administrators and for white officials to go into communities, and I want to be convinced that there is a lot of money on the ground going into housing. I know how expensive repairs are in the Northern Territory, as they are in the north-west of WA, so I have a number of questions I want to ask.

Fundamentally, we think the attack on housing and infrastructure is critical to the emergency response and we accept that there is a proven need to intervene in the leasing arrangements to facilitate that emergency response. We do not think that it needs to be there in the long term and we do think that the government needs to justify ongoing action in terms of the interest in the land. The five-year sunset clause gives us comfort, but we will also be holding the government to account to make sure that interest in the land is not maintained any longer than is necessary to stabilise the situation and that we will allow Indigenous communities to take back control of their land as they build on the opportunities that, hopefully, will be available for them to lead safer lives.

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