Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Women) Share this | Hansard source

In 2008 the then Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma, made a statement in a speech in Brisbane. He said:

Back when Mick Dodson was Social Justice Commissioner in the early 1990s he referred to what he called the ‘industrial deafness’ of the Australian community. By this he meant the phenomena whereby the Australian community had become so accustomed to stories of Indigenous disadvantage that they had become immune to it, and came to expect it.

Over the past decade, the community and government have come to believe that this situation is intractable, too difficult to shift and for some people, the fault of Indigenous peoples themselves.

And at some point, as a nation we stopped believing that equality of opportunity for Indigenous peoples was a realistic goal. And so we stopped trying to achieve it.

In 2008 he made that comment to all of us. It was indeed a challenge, because what we had to do as a community, white and black together, was to say that we were not going to stop trying to change it. Out of that came the Closing the Gap statements.

Out of that challenge came the expectation that there were issues that we could look at clearly and truthfully; we could identify that there is a gap and we could see what we could do together to end that gap in our community. That continues to be the focus of what we do each year when the parliament, as together, talks about what has happened in closing the gap in the previous 12 months. The original theory was that by 2030 we would close the gap and there would be genuine equality, particularly at that time around the issue of health. The genuine focus of the original Closing the Gap process was around ensuring that we would have health equity. To achieve that, there was an acknowledgement that the social determinants of health—education, employment, living standards, safety and opportunity—would be able to be identified and, as we have heard through the contributions this morning, truthfully assessed to see how we could work to ensure that we could make a difference.

There was never an intent of charity. There was never an intent to have some kind of focus in our community on helping people along, on giving people some help along their way to achieve equality. Closing the Gap said that we as a nation expected that everybody in this community would have equality, and we knew—the data was there in 2005, 2006 and onwards—that there was not equality in our community. The reality is that in 2015 there is still not equality. When the report came into our parliament in the previous sitting, leaders of all the political parties got together and said that we had not done well enough. We had information that, on the guidelines that we faced at the time, there were only two on which we were meeting the expectation to achieve equality by 2030. That has caused a great deal of consternation in the community. In fact, my friend Jackie Huggins, in her analysis of what is happening in Australia at the moment, said:

… we do see that there is lack of engagement, not a general commitment to the needs and the aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in their community.

…   …   …

I've worked for many decades now and I can't remember such a low point in our history where our people on the ground are just not getting the services.

That indeed is the telling factor of the Closing the Gap situation as it exists now. We have the challenge now, 10 years down the track, of assessing how far we have gone and what we hope to achieve. It is a pretty sorry process that we face at the moment.

Previous contributors have commented about the way the program is operating now. But I am looking back at the previous Closing the Gap processes in this place, and I have spoken in a number of these sessions. I had a quick look at some of the things I talked about in previous times, one of which was eye health. Tonight upstairs in this place, Vision 2020 is talking about international eye health. In looking at how our aid program can make sure that people in developing countries can achieve effective eye health, we acknowledge in 2015 that one of the original aims of the Closing the Gap program was to identify trachoma in Australia. It was one of the original processes. Where are we 10 years down the track? On the data we have been able to find, we are actually going backwards in this area. We are not effectively looking at the eye health needs of the community. We have a national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health program signed up to by all people in this parliament, but we are not achieving something that was clearly identified 10 years ago as one of the things that had to be faced immediately. Are we actually saying that we are not achieving it? We are not even quite saying that. We are saying that we need to do more. We need to move forward. But I do not think we are meeting the challenge that was laid down to us earlier. So I put that into one box. We have not met that process.

Another element of Closing the Gap is incarceration and imprisonment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia. In last year's session on Closing the Gap, I talked about the need to have justice targets in the program. We still have not got overall commitment in this parliament to effective justice targets in our Closing the Gap strategy. We do have the data. This is one area where the data cannot be questioned. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people are 14 times more likely to be in prison than non-Indigenous young people. We have the alarming statistic that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are 34 times more likely to be hospitalised as a result of violence and 11 times more likely to die as a result of family violence. In this case, there is a clear indication that there is a challenge to ensure we have safety in our community, and we are not meeting that target. In fact at this stage we still have not acknowledged in the parliament that there should be justice targets. Our side of the chamber believes there should be. This has not been taken up by the government of today. The community is saying this is something they find to be most important. The parallel report again this year highlights that we need to look at justice targets.

We hear from Aboriginal and Islander people that they want to be engaged; they do not want to have programs imposed on them. There seems to be reluctance in some areas to acknowledge that—even though, consistently through the rhetoric, we talk about working together and working cooperatively. My understanding is that Closing the Gap is a cooperative process where, together in our community, we accept that there needs to be change and we identify how we can ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, citizens in our country, have equality of health. Wrapped around the issues of health come all those other things that I mentioned—housing, safety in community, education, employment opportunities. All of these things wrap together to achieve a whole, which is what people were hoping for in 2005, when Tom Calma said:

It is not credible to suggest that one of the wealthiest nations in the world cannot solve a health crisis affecting less than 3% of its citizens.

That was the challenge. We had the opportunity to ensure that we look at our programs, assess those programs, analyse the data and once a year one of the clear commitments is that the parliament then has an opportunity to review what has occurred and to re-assess how we go into the future.

Again, I do not see this as charity; I see this as a genuine challenge to all of us because we have to accept that there must be equality of opportunity and we must accept that there has not been. We have made the commitment together that we would move forward and accept the challenge to close the gap. It cannot simply be rhetoric—in fact, there is a fabulous quote about the breakdown comes between the rhetoric and putting action into place in the community. When we made the commitment to close the gap, it was not just about fancy words and making people feel better. I acknowledge that that can be a trap people fall into: you can have wonderful rhetoric without making change. We have the opportunity in reporting to parliament to ensure that there is a clear analysis and an opportunity to make change. If we do not accept that, we have failed.