Kerrynne Liddle (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Community Affairs References Committee's report into excess mortality—item 2 on page 9 of today's Notice Paper. I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

How timely is it to stand here and talk about mortality, particularly for Indigenous Australians, when in this very chamber we just saw the Greens and the Labor Party vote down scrutiny of Indigenous affairs in the next Senate estimates? That would be how you define hypocrisy. Excess mortality has a number of drivers and leaves its greatest impact in remote Indigenous communities. As the report notes, rural Australians are more likely to die at a younger age than their metropolitan counterparts.

The rate of avoidable deaths and the burden of disease increase with remoteness, and remote communities have less healthcare infrastructure to deal with it. It's why COVID, one of the key case studies in the report, was more deadly outside cities than inside cities for Indigenous Australians—1.5 times as many Aboriginal people died due to COVID-19 as non-Aboriginal people in major cities, and 3.7 times as many died in remote and very remote areas. According to the Royal Flying Doctors Service, there was a 25 per cent increase in priority 1 aeromedical retrievals post COVID-19.

The Albanese government at Garma, an Indigenous cultural festival in the Northern Territory, talked of economic development with almost no reference to the confirmation that week that the four Closing the Gap targets that were worsening have continued to worsen under his government. In the past year another target is no longer on track.

Let me take you through that data. The four targets going backwards are suicide, adult incarceration, children in out-of-home care and children commencing school developmentally on track. They're all going backwards. You've got to note, though, that it's been going backwards since 2022, the election of the Albanese Labor government. They're so far backwards that youth incarceration is up 11 per cent, adult incarceration is up 3.5 per cent, suicide is up 9.4 per cent, children enrolled in preschool is down 2.6 per cent, and children developmentally on track on commencing school is down 1.2 per cent. That's a reason for scrutiny, I would say. The coalition will always focus on practical action and on the greatest areas of need in remote and regional Australia over Labor's symbolism.

Since appointment as shadow minister for Indigenous Australians in May this year, I've travelled to communities to hear and see firsthand what matters most to them. In the Kimberley, there are high rates of mental ill health. Suicide rates are so much higher than everywhere else in Australia. Forty-two per cent of Kimberley children are developmentally vulnerable, more than double the state average. Family violence is more prevalent there than it is anywhere else in Western Australia, and overcrowding persists.

Crucially, that area has one of the worst rates of foetal alcohol spectrum disorder in the world. In the remote township of Fitzroy Crossing, one in eight children suffers from it. In Katherine, where I visited just over a week ago, the numbers are not much better. With respect to dental health, 80 per cent of children presented with decay, missing teeth or filled teeth. Across two months last winter, eight women from the Big Rivers region around Katherine were killed as a result of family and domestic violence.

Excess mortality and these terrible outcomes are closely linked. Everyone else seems to know about social determinants of health except the Labor Party and the Australian Greens. Why is it that you don't understand? That is why there needs to be scrutiny of bureaucrats and of those organisations that get funding from the Commonwealth so that we can determine why it is these numbers keep going backwards. It is greater scrutiny that's required, not shutting the door on scrutiny. You've helped no-one today, Labor.

Last month's Productivity Commission report—well, that had a lot of data in it. It's a big read, but, essentially, all it tells you is that this has gone backwards under Labor, and, today, you blocked scrutiny about why that's happening.