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

I seek leave to speak for longer than 10 minutes.

Leave granted.

I want to speak tonight about a few different reports that have appeared in the last week. They address issues that affect Indigenous Australians and indeed all Australians in one way or another. The one that has received by far the most attention in terms of media coverage is the report in the Northern Territory into protection of Aboriginal children from sexual abuse. That report has produced large headlines, as it should. There was some shocking detail in it.

One of the aspects that I find frustrating about the response to the report is that, as the report itself makes clear, there is not a lot in it that is actually new. I have noted comments from Dr Judy Atkinson about the report she wrote in 1989 for the national inquiry on violence, a report she wrote in 1991 for Prime Minister and Cabinet and a report that she and others, including Professor Bonnie Robertson, did on violence, including sexual violence, in communities in Queensland. So, as this latest report says, there is nothing new or extraordinary about the allegations it contains. The situation that it details is extraordinary, but it is not extraordinary in the sense that there is anything particularly new here. The big issue here is: why is this still happening? Why has the situation not changed? Why are we having another report with another round of shock-horror headlines as though this is some brand-new discovery? Why are we continuing to fail? Why is it that Indigenous communities in the Territory and in many other parts of the country are continuing to fail?

As the report also makes clear, we should not kid ourselves that sexual abuse and sexual assault of children and child abuse in general are confined to Indigenous communities or, indeed, confined to remote areas. Nonetheless, it is clear that this is particularly rife in a number of Indigenous communities, along with a lot of other chronic and extreme social issues that need addressing. But I think it is also important that we do not kid ourselves that this is all an Indigenous problem; that we in the non-Indigenous community might have a few people here and there who are the odd ones out but that there is no really serious problem here. As I have said a number of times in this place, and as the Senate itself has acknowledged through motions passed unanimously in this place, there is a serious problem with child abuse in general in Australia—a crisis—and within that there is a serious problem of sexual assault. As I think we all would acknowledge, sexual assault of children is not sexual in the general sense of the word; it is just another form of violence and abuse, just in a particularly shocking and confronting away. We need to keep these things as part of a perspective rather than gazing on them as though through the glass of a goldfish bowl or a fish tank.

A key aspect of the report that I want to emphasise is the significance of the comments at the start of the report that we need to recognise that there is an intertwined problem here of both symptom and cause. Some of the factors that have been identified such as chronic alcohol abuse, other substance abuse, breakdown of community, chronic unemployment and welfare dependency, are both consequences of the dispossession and oppression and violence and extreme suffering and human rights abuses inflicted on Indigenous people and, as well, they generate further abuse and trauma. It becomes a vicious cycle. What we need to do—and this is a simple phrase to say—is break that cycle. We seem to have this need in public debate either to say, ‘It’s all the fault of the individual, and that person has to take sole personal responsibility,’ or we blame historical wrongs and say, ‘It’s all the fault of historical wrongs and recent wrongs, and until we acknowledge that then the situation will not be fixed.’ I do not understand why we cannot hold the two concepts at the same time and recognise that they interconnect. Needing to acknowledge and to try to deal with past wrongs and redress them where possible is part and parcel of dealing with the present-day reality. But that does not mean that you are absolving people who are committing these acts from some degree of personal responsibility. It does not mean that the Indigenous communities themselves do not need to put in the commitment to address these problems. But it does mean that you cannot resolve the problems unless you acknowledge some of the causal factors. Nowhere in the world and in no social situation do you deal with an immediate problem, with a chronic situation, with a serious social issue, without exploring how it came about and trying to address those factors. I think the continual effort by at least some to disconnect ‘now’ from ‘then’, and even from the very recent ‘then’, just dramatically increases the chances that we will be condemned to continue failing to break through this crisis.

The report emphasises that there are no simple fixes and it estimates that it will take at least 15 years to make significant inroads into the crisis. That means concerted and continuing commitment and prioritisation from government at federal level and, in this case, at Territory level, but I would strongly stress at state government level as well. There is plenty of room for criticism at both levels. It is a natural tendency of governments at each level to say, ‘Yes, we can do better, but the other mob are the real problem.’ Let us just put that to one side and accept that there is a need to do better. As is made clear in the report, there is no doubt the resources are there; what is needed is continual and consistent follow-through. Even though it says it will take 15 years, I would remind you that, as I said at the start, more than 15 years ago we had reports saying not very much different from what is in this report. Indeed, this particular report at one stage quotes from statements made by a judge with regard to a case in the Northern Territory back in 1977. So these issues are not new, and acting as though this is some sudden, great expose does not help.

It is important to acknowledge the various components of the recommendations that have been put forward. It is natural for all of us to pick the recommendations that we like, and I note the government doing that as well. But we need to look at the whole package of recommendations, we need to hold all those concepts, because there is no point just targeting alcohol, for example, if we do not target other areas. The range of key areas that were addressed, such as alcoholism, poverty, housing, stress, health issues, substance abuse, gambling, pornography, chronic unemployment, the inadequacy of responses by government agencies, lack of rehabilitation of offenders, the way the justice system works and education itself, all need to be worked on together and they have to be a package.

The key part of the recommendations that I want to emphasise is what this report puts upfront: that, in talking about the responsibility of governments—whether federal, state or territory—that is not to say that government has to fix it all and the community can just sit back and say, ‘Why hasn’t the government rescued us from this?’ Of course, the community has to take leadership; unless the community is involved in, driving and working at these solutions, government cannot do it. Government cannot fix things in isolation. But, the reverse applies: communities cannot do it without resourcing and social, political and public support, and governments cannot do it without genuine consultation with the communities involved.

There is quite clear emphasis at the very start of the recommendations in this report that all the solutions and actions have to be done in genuine consultation with Aboriginal people in designing initiatives for different Aboriginal communities in their different settings. The report quotes a former Liberal Aboriginal affairs minister saying that one of the things we should have learnt by now is that you cannot solve these things by centralised bureaucratic direction. I would have thought that was something that particularly a Liberal government would have a natural affinity with. Centralised bureaucratic fixes imposed on communities from above rarely work in any circumstances. Mr Cheney said: ‘What you need is locally based action, local resourcing and local control to really make changes.’

He points to the irony that the traditional bogeymen, if you like, in engaging with Indigenous communities in the past, mining companies, are doing better in many cases working with local communities and addressing some of their issues and supporting them. That is not a universal statement, but there is no doubt that there are a growing number of success stories here and that is because they have the flexibility to manage towards outcomes locally with those communities. I think there are a lot of lessons we can learn from that.

I would like to emphasise the importance that this report gives to education at all levels. It does not mean just making sure that kids go to school—important though that is; it is about training people at the local level to have the skills to work on these issues with people in their communities and get respect recognised at a community level, as well as the ability to carry out research at a community level to follow through to see what is working and what is not. It is ridiculous that after so many decades of reports and inquiries these things are still not being done consistently, comprehensively and in consultation with affected communities and with adequate resources. That to me is the real shame here.

There is no point in just taking a demonising approach. Obviously, we must continue to strongly condemn any sort of abuse of children, but simply demonising a group of people, particularly Aboriginal men as a group, will just further disempower them and further break down community confidence and perceptions at a local level in Indigenous communities and will further engender a sense of hopelessness. You have to do a number of things at the same time. It is difficult to carry out but it is not difficult to conceptualise and attempt to do it. I really want to emphasise that all the recommendations in that report are a package and that they all hang together on the basis of consultation and adequate resourcing carried out over a prolonged period of time.

I also point to the reports tabled in the Senate yesterday and in the House last Thursday from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma. He has just released his social justice report and his native title report. The social justice report includes an appendix with a summary of the Social Justice Commissioner’s main findings and messages on family violence and abuse in Indigenous communities from 2001 to 2006. These things have been reported, they have been provided to the parliament and to the wider community time and again over the years. There might not have been the political optics and hooplas surrounding the specifics of the Northern Territory situation and some of the associated drama and disputes but the facts are there and they have been reported to us. The suggestion that we have to act suddenly, as though we have just discovered something, is again shown to be absurd by the fact that the commissioner’s own report gives us a summary of what he has been saying.

I point to the 10 key challenges, The first is ‘Turning government commitments into action’—and this is government at all levels. The second challenge is ‘Indigenous participation’, which is ensuring there is genuine Indigenous participation and consultation. The third is ‘Supporting Indigenous community initiatives and networks’ and the fourth is ‘Human rights education in Indigenous communities’, which is about communities becoming more aware of basic fundamental human rights. They are part of the education message I spoke about in the other report.

Another challenge is ‘Don’t forget our men and don’t stereotype them as abusers’, which I have just spoken about. Others are ‘Look for the positives and celebrate the victories’ and ‘Re-assert our cultural norms and regain respect in our communities’. There are different ways to do that depending on some of the history and some of the realities of the different communities. Again, I am talking about communities within major cities as well as remote areas. Another challenge is ‘Ensure robust accountability and monitoring mechanisms’, which means ongoing assessments of how the projects are working and maintaining that continuing commitment. Another challenge is ‘Changing the mindset’ and that is about a change in the mindset of government from an approach which manages dysfunction to one that supports functional communities. To quote the commissioner:

Current approaches pay for the consequences of disadvantage and discrimination. It is a passive reactive system of feeding dysfunction, rather than taking positive steps to overcome it.

We need to reorient our system of service delivery to one focused on building functional health in communities rather than reacting. It is a bit like prevention rather than cure. Finally, ‘Targeting of need’ is about ensuring that programs are targeted to address need and overcome disadvantage rather than just maintain the status quo.

Flowing on from that, I note some of the recommendations in the Social Justice Commission’s report. There are only a small number of them but there is a lot of detail. They address some of the problems with the current arrangement for Indigenous affairs, which include the absence of what he terms ‘principled engagement’ with Indigenous peoples. I have not had time to read the full report yet so I cannot pass an opinion on whether it is principled engagement, but I would certainly say that there has been a lack of adequate and meaningful engagement and that in itself causes the efforts that are made to be less significant and less effective than they otherwise should be.

I will use one example that we have been talking about in the Senate this week concerning the lack of any meaningful engagement even where there are positive opportunities, and that has been the government’s decision to remove the Indigenous representative from the board of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. That position was working well for Indigenous peoples in many parts of the coastal areas of Queensland and it was removed without even any discussion with them about it. That is just one example of a structural inability in so many parts of the bureaucracy to comprehend what the hell it is they are actually doing.

I would like to finish off by pointing to another report which was launched just today. It ties in with some of the recommendations and points made in the Social Justice Commission’s report. It celebrates the successes and points to the positives. It was a brief report launched today by ANTAR, Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation, on success stories in Indigenous health. This is very important because it points to the fact that in amongst all of the bad news there are success stories. We certainly should not ignore the bad news and sweep it under the carpet because it is awkward. We need to confront it. It is very easy to focus on the shocking and the awful and the horrible, creating an impression that it is just too overwhelming and too difficult. That can be very disempowering and create a feeling in people that there is just no point in putting resources in, that it is just too hard—let us spend money on something else.

What this does show is that money well-spent has very good outcomes. The booklet details examples from around the country, and I am pleased to see a couple of examples there from Queensland. There is the Family Wellbeing program through the Apunipima Cape York Health Council based in Cairns but working over the cape, and the mums and babies program through the Townsville Aboriginal and Islander Health Service. They are just a couple of examples, and there are some others from pretty much all around Australia. There are plenty more on top of that of course that could have gone in. This shows that there are not only success stories but that there are already in place programs and mechanisms that we can feed resources into.

We all know that the Australian Medical Association and groups like Oxfam, ANTAR, GetUp! and plenty of others have called for an injection of $400 million a year in new funding. That is what would be needed to bridge that gap in Indigenous health and bring it back towards non-Indigenous Australians in terms of the level of health. We have had suggestions that we cannot spend all that money, that it would just be wasted, that you have to put in place the structures and all that. Certainly you want to make sure that the money is well directed but this shows that the places to direct it to are already there. You can work in through the programs that are already working, expand them further, build on the success stories and feed and resource them. The mechanisms are there. The avenues are there. The reports are there—and not just these reports in the last week but reports going back decades. Missing are the willingness to work together and the political commitment to drive that through consistently over years and years, and not just through the media cycle let alone the electoral cycle, and to provide resources. We know that the resources are there. We know that commitment and energy are being put in at community level. What is needed is the political will on top. (Time expired)