Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I say at the outset that the Democrats abhor the sexual abuse of children. We want something done about it, and we want it done urgently. We wanted it done urgently last year, and the year before that, and 10 years before that. That is the point I want to make today: this is not a crisis which has arisen in the last five minutes or even in the last six months. And it is not a crisis about which the Commonwealth knew nothing. It is an ongoing neglect of a problem which has been around for a very long time.

By all accounts, action is being taken. Doctors, nurses and Army personnel have moved into Aboriginal communities, and that is not a bad thing. It is appropriate for children to be examined and for medical assistance to be provided where necessary. It is appropriate to turn so many dysfunctional communities into places which are safe for children, for women, for those who have been subject to abuse in the past, and to turn the situation around.

The legislation that we are dealing with today—the Social Security and Other Legislation Amendment (Welfare Payment Reform) Bill 2007 and related bills—as well as for the rest of this week and next week, is part of the government’s response to the Little children are sacred report by Pat Anderson and Rex Wild QC. It is just one report in a very long line of reports that have been presented to this government. I have lost count of the reports, on various websites, that outline the horrible abuse that has been taking place in these communities.

Like so many others, the Anderson and Wild report is nuanced. It is wise. It demonstrates a deep understanding of the complexity of abuse in communities that have suffered for a very long time from the processes of colonisation: processes such as land grabs, stolen children and the fundamental lack of respect and racism from the dominant white culture in this country. But their report did not call for a declaration of war. It did not call for the Army and the police to be sent in in the first instance. It did not call for the jackboot approach to this problem, with all of those reminders of domination and crisis. The report called for a thoughtful, consultative process that stood some chance of achieving meaningful short-, medium- and long-term change.

I have listened to the debate so far, and I have not heard anybody say that there is no need for change. No-one is questioning the need to act. The plight of Indigenous children and the dysfunctional communities are a national disgrace. They are an international disgrace. Countries around the world point to the way in which we have failed Indigenous communities, and they have pointed to the fact that they are akin to the Third World in every possible imaginable way. So, whether we are talking about poverty, housing, health status or educational or economic status, our Indigenous community has a problem of huge dimensions, and it has had for a very long time.

Living standards are appalling. Many in this chamber will have been into many Aboriginal communities in the course of our work on inquiries into health or education in Indigenous communities. So we are reasonably well informed on this issue, I would argue. We have been to and seen the worst of them. And we have seen some good ones as well. I am not suggesting that every Aboriginal community is dysfunctional. Many are not. Some are fantastic, and they provide models that should be adopted elsewhere. But it is hard work that gets them there, and we need to find out how to achieve that for those communities that have not got there.

I have been particularly interested in some of the health issues that go with the poverty associated with many Aboriginal communities. Typically, on going into one of these communities—to a school, for instance—I ask about the rate of scabies infection amongst children. The usual response is, ‘Somewhere between 70 and 80 per cent of our kids will have scabies.’ I remind the Senate that scabies is a Third World disease. It is a mite that gets under the skin and causes insufferable itching and pain and has long-term effects on the major organs of the body. It is probably responsible for a lot of the very early deaths that we see in Aboriginal communities. And guess what? It is actually easy to fix. There is an ointment which you can rub on a scabies infection which pretty much eliminates it.

We went to a school on Elcho Island. I am not sure, Senator McLucas, whether you were on this delegation, but I will never forget it. I asked the principal, ‘How many of your children have scabies?’ The answer was, ‘Five per cent at the most.’ I asked, ‘How do you do it?’ and he said: ‘We close down the school twice every semester’—it might have been for one or two days; I forget the details exactly—‘and we go out into the community with the clinic, with the teachers, with the kids and with the families, and we make sure that anyone with any sign of scabies receives the ointment treatment. The dogs are cleaned up. The bed linen is cleaned up. We do this on a regular basis in order to keep that rate down.’ In other places, I have been told: ‘That is impossible. We can’t do anything about it. It is not a problem that can be solved.’ And we have taken no notice of that. We have not used the best examples and said, ‘This is what we should do to avoid the problem.’

Otitis media is another infection which causes children to become deaf, which makes it impossible for them to learn in school. It is why they wander off. It is one of the reasons that they are often not there at school; they cannot hear. That is because of a simple infection that we have eliminated in our society, but we apparently cannot find the wherewithal to go out and do it in Indigenous communities. We have heard about petrol sniffing. The exploitation of children in petrol sniffing is a dreadful blight on our society, in my view. It is the same with alcohol abuse. Why is there so much alcohol up in the Northern Territory? It is because a lot of people are making big profits from it. So there are things that we can do, and we are long overdue in introducing the policies and the actions that would improve the wellbeing of our Indigenous populations.

The Little children are sacred report joins a long line of reports that found evidence of child sexual abuse in every one of the 45 communities visited in the Northern Territory. The report identified poor health, alcohol and drug abuse, unemployment, poor education and housing, and disempowerment as contributing to the violence. Housing is critical. Even on Elcho Island, we were told that there were 18 to 20 people in every single household. To keep such an environment clean and healthy, much less provide meals on the table for people, is obviously an absurd proposition. If we do not solve the housing problems then we are never going to get to the child abuse problems, the health problems or all of the other problems that arise in these communities, where overcrowding just makes life impossible. Imagine your own house with 18 people in it. It does not bear thinking about, especially as these houses are quite small.

The Prime Minister was right when he said that anyone who had read the report would be horrified by that level of abuse. And, yes, people have been horrified by all the reports that they have shown that level of abuse. Everyone wants to save children from abuse, whether they are Indigenous or not. So it is good in many ways that the government, in coming out in the way that it has, has finally highlighted the appalling reality for many Aboriginal people. That situation, as I said, is not new, and many reports previous to the Little children are sacred report have made similarly shocking findings and called for similar urgent action.

Aboriginal women were calling on governments to address violence back in the mid-1980s in investigations commissioned by the Commonwealth and the state governments. The 1988 report of the rape of a 17-month-old Aboriginal child in a Cape York community exposed the widespread nature of child abuse in Indigenous communities. A task force was established, comprising 50 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women who consulted widely and who produced a report with 123 recommendations across nine areas. I ask the government: what happened to those recommendations? How is it that it is almost two decades later and they appear not to have been picked up or acted upon?

Again in 2003, Indigenous family violence was placed on the agenda following an impassioned plea by Mick Dodson, Chair of the ANU Institute for Indigenous Australia. The Prime Minister convened a summit with 15 Indigenous leaders to discuss the issue and identify a way forward. One of the proposals put to this summit was the need for a national Indigenous children’s wellbeing and development task force. What happened to that task force? Who knows? But that task force would have included representation from all governments and from Indigenous organisations. The proposed goal of this task force was to develop a package of measures to reverse the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in child protection and their underrepresentation in early childhood and other essential health and education services.

In 2004 the Council of Australian Governments agreed on a national framework on Indigenous family violence and child protection, which had six principles: safety, partnerships, support, strong resilient families, local solutions and the need to address the cause. Alice Springs Crown Prosecutor Nanette Rogers released a report last year describing a culture of violence and abuse of women and children. In response, Minister Mal Brough called for an urgent summit with the leaders of the states and territories to draft a national plan to eliminate this violence. An Intergovernmental Summit on Violence and Child Abuse in Indigenous Communities, involving ministers from the Australian government and all states and territories, was held in June 2006. So what happened to the outcomes of that summit? Yet another summit; yet another talkfest—where are the results from it?

The promise of $130 million from the federal government on the condition the states and territories matched the dollars was focused on law and order. There is a report from the Child Sexual Assault Working Party, which contained representation from FaCS, the former Department of Families and Community Services, which outlines a coordinated response to child sexual assault in the Top End. I seek leave to table this report so we can get it on the record as one of the many reports into this issue.

Leave granted.

As I said, FaCS was involved in this working party and outlined a coordinated response on children in the Top End. But all of that was forgotten when it came to the announcement that suddenly we must do something—the minister claimed the Northern Territory had not acted so it was time for the Prime Minister to step in.

The latest report, Little children are sacred, contains many recommendations on what action needs to be taken—in fact I think there were 97 recommendations altogether, only two of which the Prime Minister mentioned in his announcement, and they were: schools providing food programs and boarding schools. Neither of those appear to be in the legislation we are dealing with here, and they seem to have dropped off the agenda. So none of the recommendations has been picked up in the way that they were presented in that report.

So there is information out there and it has been out there for a long time. We do not need more talk; we need to act on the basis of evidence and the best possible advice. That is why people are questioning what the government is doing. At the present time there is no suggestion that the input of Indigenous people will be taken seriously in all of this. Why is the government taking this particular action right now and why is it taking the action at all? What does the work permit system have to do with child abuse? What do the five-year leases have to do with protecting Aboriginal children? The government has not adequately answered those questions. This leaves people to assume that there must be another motive; that this is yet another excuse to attack Indigenous people and to take away some of their very hard fought-for rights. They are not peripheral questions. The government’s motivation shapes the action it takes and will affect the community’s response to government actions.

How can it not be seen as a headline-grabbing, election-year fix designed to wedge Labor when these problems have been known about by governments for years? Aboriginal leaders and many others have been asking for action over the entire life of the government. I ask the minister to explain, when he gets a chance, just why it has taken so long. And why is the government’s intervention flying in the face of the comprehensive approach recommended by the very report that has finally prompted the government to act after more than a decade of neglect? Pat Anderson, the co-author of the Little children are sacred report, has been reported as saying:

There is no relationship between all these emergency powers and what is in our report.

And that they:

... feel betrayed, disappointed, hurt and angry - pretty pissed off all at the same time.

The government’s record of throwing children into refugee detention centres suggests that the government’s concern about the wellbeing of young people in general is very recent. Child abuse is a difficult area for policy intervention wherever it occurs. Remoteness and the greater relative scale of these issues in Indigenous communities are additional barriers for policy intervention. But vulnerable children should not be used as a political tool, and legislation that contains ideologically inspired measures unrelated to the protection of children increases cynicism and undermines any good that might come from government action.

Many people are asking: what is the logic in the proposal to remove the permit system whereby Aboriginal leaders decide who can come onto their land? Surely that will only enable non-Indigenous paedophiles to have easier access to Aboriginal children. Yet we understand that non-Indigenous paedophiles are a significant part of the problem.

Our children deserve our best efforts. The principles and strategies for effective action are known and the evidence for what will work is available. But there does have to be change, and that will only happen if Aboriginal people are listened to, respected and fully involved in the planning and the strategy. So rather than sending in the Army and the police—they are surely part of the action—we need long-term commitment so that we do not again walk away from Indigenous communities after a talkfest or after that initial assault. We need to have that commitment and it needs to be clear that that is what the government is about. The last thing that should happen is that after the next election we drop all of this and another report in a couple of years time finds that nothing has improved.

Debate interrupted.