Mr GARRETT (9:57 AM) —I have heard a number of heartfelt speeches on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Amendment Bill 2005 from members on both sides of the House. Some of us have our own experiences of Aboriginal communities and the difficulties that they face. The question that we have to ask ourselves is: do these experiences colour our views and lead us to make judgments about what would be good policy for Aboriginal communities or are our views simply a function of our different perspectives, even our ideology? I would assert that it is the latter which is driving the representations and comments that have been made in this House.

I want to acknowledge the many Aboriginal communities, their elders and traditional owners that I have known and visited and made friends with. I want to welcome and acknowledge the relationships that those people have extended to me over time. Like most other Australians of my generation, I had no exposure to Aboriginal people when I was growing up. I had little understanding of their culture, of their history or of their experiences. Most of what I knew about Aboriginal people I had either learned at school or read in a newspaper or seen on television, and I would suggest that that is probably the case still for many Australians today and even perhaps for some people in this House. But for a period of some 25 years my exposure to Aboriginal people and their lives has deepened and grown and my understanding of their situation has changed. Like others here, including the member for Lingiari, who represents Indigenous people, I have had contact with Aboriginal communities over time and I have built up, I hope, some understanding of the conditions and the experiences that they endure. Yes, I have seen first-hand the toughness of Aboriginal life. Yes, I have seen first-hand the poverty in many Aboriginal communities. Yes, I have seen first-hand the paucity of the provision of what we take for granted—the supply of drinking water, good housing and decent health services.

But it was a High Court judge, Justice Brennan, who made the observation which fundamentally drives this debate: that it was Aboriginal dispossession as a historical fact that made possible the conditions that we in modern Australia enjoy. The mainly unencumbered development of modern Australia came about as a result of that dispossession. That too I have come to understand. Ironically, it is the subsequent granting of rights to land—a righting of the original wrong—which is now seen by the government and some commentators on the Right as the root cause of the problems that Aboriginal people face. What a perverse distortion of history. What a malevolent understanding of what Aboriginal people have been through up until this time.

Most recently we have seen commentary from the Right, and I will explore it in some detail as I speak to the House, about the conditions faced by Aboriginal people in remote communities. I refer to the Hughes-Warin paper which was reported in the press recently. It contained a number of assertions about Aboriginal health and Aboriginal communities. The guts of the Hughes-Warin paper was to assert that the longstanding failures in relation to Aboriginal people, which we all acknowledge, understand and want to address in this House, are due directly to the so-called ‘Coombs experiment’ in allowing Aboriginal people to gain some control over their land and assert their traditional rights—an extraordinary assertion on their part. They assert that the poverty that Aboriginal people face and the difficulties that they experience in their community are directly attributable to their actually securing rights in the first place. That is an extraordinary assumption. It suggests that the fact that Aboriginal people do not hold freehold title to their land and are not in the westernised petite bourgeoisie is holding them back. In some ways it seems that Aboriginal people not having a white picket fence around a house, title to land and policies that permit that to happen is a way of explaining the poverty that they have to live with now. I want to assert most strongly in the House that the reasons Aboriginal people are living in poverty now are complex but that many of them can be attributed to past actions of governments on both sides of the House.

The Hughes-Warin report contained a number of errors which I would like to set straight on the record as I speak to the House. The first is the assertion that health statistics are worse in remote areas than in urban areas, but Hughes and Warin provide no evidence. This suits the Coombs thesis basis but, unfortunately, in the body of their content they do not provide any evidence for the assertion. They assert that NACCHO, the umbrella organisation of Aboriginal community health services, was inspired by the barefoot doctors of Mao Tse Tung’s China. This is completely wrong. It is historically incorrect to make this assertion. Aboriginal community-controlled health services, as members of the House know, came into being as a result of a strong social movement amongst Aboriginal people who were seeking to have greater control over their lives and to have control over the provision of health services. That is a historical fact. To assert otherwise is mischievous and does a great disservice to those pioneer Aboriginal communities who sought to have health services in their own locations and on their own land because they were facing such great problems.

Let us look at the solution that Hughes and Warin suggest in their paper, and I think we know where this is going. The solution of course is an implication that privatised health care will produce better health outcomes for Aboriginal people. Again there is no evidence, but when we look at other countries we discover in the United States of America, where privatised health care is prevalent, a health system that is amongst the most expensive, inefficient and inequitable in the world. This is a health system which specifically does not deliver health outcomes to the poor and does not deliver health outcomes to Indigenous people. I have had the very great privilege of spending an enormous amount of time in the United States, including time with indigenous communities in that country, and I can assure you that their health system, thus privatised, does not provide better health facilities and resources for aboriginal people. Under privatised health care in the United States, the poor, which regrettably often means the indigenous, miss out.

Hughes and Warin argue the case that the Aboriginal health situation in remote areas was caused under the Coombs experiment by ideology, not by practice, but they do not provide any evidence for that either. On the question of the general history of Aboriginal communities in remote areas, particularly those in north-east Arnhem Land, the Hughes-Warin report chooses to leave out the most important parts of the historical record which explain why conditions are the way that they are today. In east Arnhem Land earlier decisions which were taken by the government and by mining companies that wanted to seek access to the bauxite reserves in Gove left out Aboriginal people. The agreements were between the governments and the mining companies. Aboriginal people historically have sought to become party to those agreements, but they were not party to the agreements, and the decisions were made without their consent. Aboriginal people attempted through the courts, for example, to stop alcohol entering the region. Again they were prevented from asserting control over their lives and health. The town of Nhulunbuy, in Arnhem Land, was built against the wishes of the Indigenous people. When the Northern Territory land rights act finally came into being, the mining leases in question were specifically excluded from the legislation. That is a series of deliberate decisions on the part of governments of the day and mining companies to ensure that they achieved the outcomes that they wished while at the same time denying Aboriginal people the opportunity to enter into negotiations on an equal footing to seek the sorts of outcomes that they wanted, which naturally enough included control over their land and some say in the actions that were being taken that would impact on their communities and health.

What is the subsequent story of this history? It is loss of land and of control over land. It is loss of control over the provision of alcohol. It is high rates of violence, social dysfunction and very poor health indices in that community. But these were the very factors that led Aboriginal people to seek to assert more control over their situation and move out of these town centres. Members on both sides of the House would be aware of the history of the homeland movement and the outstation movement. That came about as a consequence of decisions taken by governments of the day and mining companies, not as a result of Aboriginal people not having freehold title to their land. Recent attempts by Yolngu women in the north-east, especially attempts to restrict access to alcohol, are still unsuccessful, not because they do not own their homes but because the Northern Territory Liquor Commission chooses not to take their issues seriously.

If we examine the status of these homeland communities at the current time, we have some 20 outstations where people are happier, people are healthier, people have control over their lives, people are moving forward and people are not mired in misery. This has been made possible, incidentally, by the land rights act. I offer the view that the current direction that the government is taking us in and current developments in the Northern Territory seem fairly clear. There will be a winding back of the land rights act under this government—you can be certain of that—and yet it is the existence of the land rights act that has enabled people to go out into these communities and to these outstations and assert some control over their lives and build happier futures for themselves and particularly for their children.

I recommend to members who have a serious and genuine interest in these issues much of the documentation of the history that I am reporting to the House. There is a series of Film Australia documentaries called Yirrkala Film Project, by the filmmaker Ian Dunlop. Nancy Williams has written a book, The Yolngu and their land. It is available through the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. If people take the time to understand the history of what has happened in this part of Australia, they will recognise that the issues cannot be dismissed with an ideological wave of the hand and assertions about the so-called Coombs experiment.

But there is something else that I want to refer to in the Hughes and Warin approach, and I spoke to it briefly in the House the other day. That is the throwing around of terms like ‘living museums’ and ‘land socialism’. It is just another form of stereotyping, but it is sophisticated and subtle in some ways because it really attempts to blame Aboriginal people for two things: their aboriginality and how it works its way through in culture, and the history to which they have been exposed. At one level it is distinctly unfair; at another level it is really insidious. The Hughes-Warin report is unwilling to come out of these stereotypes and unwilling to consider the evidence of the health and education skills and development that have come about in areas where Aboriginal people do have a degree of control over their lives, where they are actively determining their futures and where they are working hard to achieve a decent life for their kids. Why weren’t the outstations and the success that they are having mentioned in the Hughes-Warin report? It simply did not fit the thesis, so it was not mentioned.

The opposition is proposing an amendment to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Amendment Bill 2005. It is a straightforward enough amendment: it extends the life of the ATSIC regional councils by some six months. That is in line with the recommendation in the report of the Senate Select Committee on the Administration of Indigenous Affairs which was tabled in the parliament on Tuesday, 8 March. But, again, when we look at the history of this proposed amendment, we discover that there was in fact some agreement, and it appeared that the government, in the form of Minister Vanstone, was going to be reasonable about the amendment and consider it. But at the last minute there was a change of mind. Apparently this happened at the very highest level, in the office of the Prime Minister. It is a great shame because this is basically a moderate and reasonable proposal that the opposition has put up. It is also practical, because it maintains the right of Aboriginal people to have some form of voice.

The history of ATSIC has been chequered—there is no question about that whatsoever—but, at the same time, the fundamental issue of Aboriginal people having access to a representative body lies beneath that. If we were to judge our representative bodies around this parliament, whether they were local councils, elected bodies in different states or state governments of Liberal and Labor persuasions, on the basis only of the leadership that they had at a particular point in time, and we had discovered that there were deficiencies in that leadership, would we then throw away the principle of democracy and representation as a result? I do not think so, and yet that is what is happening here in this parliament. It is greatly regrettable.

When we consider this question, we have to look at two main issues: is the government fair dinkum about Indigenous health and Indigenous issues, and has the government got it right? Let us look at fair dinkumness first. We could characterise the position of Australian governments on Indigenous issues for a number of years after Federation as basically being in sync with one another. There was a form of bipartisanship—and I think particularly about former Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the Liberal government Fred Chaney, but there are many others. Members on both sides of the House would be aware that there was a sense that both the Labor Party and the Liberal and National parties had some idea of moving forward in tandem in trying to address this issue, which I do know members on both sides of the House feel genuinely serious about.

But there has been a distinct move from that bipartisanship and it has happened under the Howard government. Mr Howard has been Prime Minister for nine years. At the beginning of his previous term he committed himself to redressing Indigenous disadvantage and said that his term in government—his previous term, not this current term—would be judged by his capacity to do that thing. Yet that term did not deliver for Aboriginal people. Not only that, but the objections to the directions of Aboriginal policy which had been a part of bipartisanship were thrown overboard by the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister contested the decisions in Mabo and Wik. The former Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the National Party, Mr Fischer, pursued a vendetta against the High Court—an irresponsible vendetta, it has to be said, at the time—on the basis that the historical record was being righted and that Aboriginal people were going to get some legal entitlement to land that previously had been theirs. That was the position that the government of the day took, and it was a shameful position.

Members will remember the scare campaign that was run around Australia—the pictures of maps that were shown on national television and the idea that was promoted that pastoralists and farmers would not be able to have access to their properties. There was an amount of disinformation bandied about, particularly by senior ministers on the other side of the House, in order to deflect and remove a grant of rights that had been conferred upon Aboriginal people by the High Court of Australia.

It is to the great shame of those opposite that they embarked upon that course—and even more so because it was a great waste of energy. Pastoralists, Aboriginal people and communities have been able to sit down and to work creatively, constructively and cooperatively. They have been able to provide for Aboriginal people to assert their access and their ability to recognise that they do in fact have something called native title but that it will not in any way impede the rights of pastoralists in their capacity to carry on their business in the way they wish to. But, no, there was a hullabaloo about native title. The world as we knew it was going to end, and Aboriginal people, who for some 200 years had had nothing, were going to be preventing us from having what we wanted.

It went on from there. The reconciliation process, which is essentially a symbolic process—I certainly agree with it; I think symbols are important—was undermined. Then we got into the issue of the rewriting of history and the black armband view of history. The views of the Prime Minister and of those members opposite on that are well known. It is said that history is written by the winners and that it may be attempted to be rewritten by the vanquished as well. But I think the fundamental point to all of this is that the leadership necessary to show both generosity and understanding towards the problems that Aboriginal communities face has not been in evidence when you consider the history. (Time expired)