Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

No, it will not. You are right, Senator Kemp. You have indeed listened to me once again. As I said, I will not be here and neither will you. Can I suggest that your not being part of this prolonged inquiry is a massive chance for this committee to actually operate in a constructive way, because your record, particularly on using Indigenous people for opportunities to score cheap political points and smear people, is one that is clearly on the record in this chamber. And you are doing it once again right now. Thank you for being true to form and proving my point. It also demonstrates that instantly giving the chair of the committee to a coalition senator, regardless of who it is, is not necessarily the best way to guarantee that the committee can do its job effectively.

I welcome the fact that the Senate will decide to have a comprehensive examination of regional and remote Indigenous communities. I very much urge whoever serves on the committee to do all they can to make it a constructive, non-partisan series of inquiries and reports over the 2½ years for which it will be operational. We do need to remember why it is that we are doing this. We are doing it to try to improve the situation for Indigenous Australians. We are not doing this, I hope, to try to provide a rolling opportunity for political point scoring and ideological wedge making in regard to the Indigenous affairs policy debate. Unfortunately, we are still seeing that from time to time in this chamber and we are still seeing it from time to time from some in the mainstream media. Indigenous peoples deserve far better than that.

If there is one area where all of us in all political parties have failed comprehensively across the board decade after decade, it is in our approach to Indigenous Australians. This inquiry and the committee itself will be a big test of whether we have managed to evolve beyond that and whether we are mature enough to do our jobs responsibly. I hope whoever serves on the committee is able to do that. One way of improving the chances of it doing that is to pick the best person for the job of chair—it is a bit of a novel concept, I suppose—rather than just handing it automatically to a coalition member.