Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also want to start with an acknowledgement of all the Indigenous members and senators in this place, who make a terrific contribution to this parliament.

I guess the thing that comes to my mind is that Australia has been a great country, and during this year we have performed better than most other places on earth. But this has not been a good country for Indigenous people. Of course, the apology was a terrific thing, a great gesture. It took too long to be given but it was part of a rebalancing of our history. You can go back to the sixties and look at what Stanner said about the great Australian silence. I think that there's still a lot of that around today, that there is a certain blindness or deafness about some of the misery, frankly, that exists within this society. It is one of the most important issues for us to be thinking about as a parliament. The issues are complex—if we had all the solutions we would have solved the problem some time ago—but people are required to think about the issues. My sense is that too few Australians know Indigenous people. I think it's a problem of proximity: there's not a lack of care but there is a lack of proximity. That has been my observation. In New South Wales there are around 300,000 Indigenous people. I've tried to travel around the state, out to Brewarrina, Bourke, Kempsey, Nowra. I talk to the people in Redfern quite a lot. The issues are complex, but I think the Closing the Gap refresh this year is a genuine attempt to formulate listening into a policy framework, rather than doing without consultation. That is, let's hope, a significant improvement.

But there is a need for us to do more beyond refreshing the Closing the Gap targets. The Closing the Gap targets are terribly important because they speak to this disparity. Over the last year, yes, there has been a pandemic, but there have also been significant protests in the United States: the Black Lives Matter movement. People in Australia have said to me, 'Well, that's an imported movement; that has nothing to do with us here,' but then you look at the data and the comparisons on incarceration and on lifespan. The issues are more acute in Australia than they are in the United States. The Closing the Gap targets—Closing the Gap 2.0, you may want to call it—are heavily focused on these bread-and-butter issues. They are focused on education; they are focused on employment; they are focused on reducing incarceration. I think that is good. There is much hope that this Closing the Gap 2.0 will work. It has to work. It is very important that the government put the resources into it to make sure that it does work, because that is a very important national issue for us to spend our time on.

The other issue that has been spoken about today—and I think there have been some very good contributions in the House as well as in the Senate—is the question of a voice to parliament. It was in the Uluru statement but it was, of course, a policy idea that was around before the Uluru statement was released in 2017. This is the idea that you would consult Indigenous people on laws and policies which impact them. Indigenous people are the only people in Australia who have a whole slew of laws especially made for them. There is no other group in Australian society that has so many laws on our statute books: native title, land rights, heritage protection, Indigenous corporations—the list goes on and on. So I think the idea that you would have a system of consulting people on their special laws is a very good idea. This is something that we are progressing. This is something on which Senator Dodson and Mr Julian Leeser produced a detailed report in the last parliament, and we are now following the recommendation to deliver a voice through co-design. In the last few weeks, the report from Marcia Langton and Tom Calma was released for consultation. That is an important process of this government.

I think that Mr Rudd did a very good thing for the country. This is an important thing, first, to maintain. I'm very, very mindful that closing the gap 2.0 must work. It is a serious refashioning of that agenda, and it's very important that the resources and the effort are put into that. Beyond that agenda, I think this voice to parliament is something that we should do. It's a good idea, it's a fair idea, and I am personally committed to it.