Dr LAWRENCE (10:49 AM) —This is an opportunity not only to look at the specifics of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Amendment Bill 2005, which confirms the abolition of ATSIC, but to ask what the government is doing with Aboriginal affairs and how well it is doing it. It is obvious that the abolition of ATSIC is a fait accompli, whatever this House does, because it has been stripped of its assets and responsibilities even though the replacement structures are not complete at this stage.

From accounts that I have had from within the Indigenous community, the transition to the new administration has been painful and fragmented, especially for Aboriginal staff—and, by the way, there will apparently be fewer of them after this transition. It was put to me recently by a senior public servant that the government’s actions, at least at the public level, have been characterised by a pretty muddled analysis and this so-called ‘change methodology’. I would have to say, though, that there appears to be a gulf between the government’s spin on what is happening—and particularly the Prime Minister’s spin—and what the Public Service is actually doing. I hope to return to that a little later, but I think it is timely today, as we are being asked to endorse such a huge step, that we issue a report card on the government’s performance on Indigenous affairs.

This government has been in power now for nine years, it has won four successive elections and in the area of Indigenous affairs it has had a very clear agenda which breaks with the values and approaches of previous governments, both Labor and coalition, and moves toward what the government calls ‘practical reconciliation’. We have also seen this occur during a period of strong economic growth and growth in Commonwealth revenues, so the capacity to make a difference has certainly been available to this government. In addition to that, there has been a very considerable willingness by state and territory governments, all Labor as it happens, to cooperate with the Commonwealth government to make a difference in this very important area of national public policy. The states and territories have been willing partners in discussions and in the so-called COAG trials, where governments agree to their responsibilities.

It is almost five years to the day since the Prime Minister signalled, after a very divisive and painful debate, that the previous approach to reconciliation was dead—after the marches and so on—and that the government was now firmly embarked on a path of what he called ‘practical reconciliation’. This, clearly, was intended by the Prime Minister to remove what he called the ‘symbolic elements’ of reconciliation as an important focus for public policy. The Prime Minister wanted everyone, as he put it, to lower their sights and not ‘make demands on the other that cannot be realised’. Presumably he was talking about an apology and recognition of the fact that the Aboriginal people were the prior owners of this land and had been dispossessed. Matters of that kind were not to be mentioned in future.

Although it was implicit in his determination to abandon any discussion of a rights oriented reconciliation approach, the Prime Minister first used the phrase ‘practical reconciliation’ at the national launch of the National Indigenous English Literacy and Numeracy Strategy on 29 March 2000—in other words, almost five years ago. I discovered that the term was subsequently used by the government in 34 press releases and radio and television interviews during 2000. It was meant to be embedded in the public consciousness and distinguished from the broader concept of reconciliation based on Indigenous peoples’ rights.

It is fair to say that practical reconciliation, apart from pointing in certain directions, has never been explicitly defined as public policy. It is simply meant to contrast with what the Prime Minister calls ‘symbolic gestures’ like the recognition of prior ownership, an apology to the stolen generations and the ‘black armband’ view of history. It is a deliberate attempt, in my view, to strip Indigenous disadvantage of its historical and social context. It is not possible to understand the position of Indigenous people in Australia today without reference to the past and without reference to the social circumstances of their lives. So I find practical reconciliation a very peculiar exercise.

Practical reconciliation appears simply to mean that the government’s policy will focus on practical programs which directly address deficiencies in health, education, employment and housing—they are the areas that have been pointed to—of Indigenous people in Australia. In other words, it is what governments are supposed to have been doing at a national level at least since Federation. Certainly it is what the Commonwealth parliament should have been doing since 1967, and what state and local governments should have been doing since their inception. It is no different from what citizens expect, in other words. But it has also been promoted more broadly as a means of addressing problems such as truancy, alcoholism, family violence and the high rates of imprisonment. Apparently, simply providing services in these areas will solve all the problems.

While the concept is flawed—and I will return to that in a moment—I think it is reasonable to judge the government by its own standards. After nine years in government, and five years with the very explicit policy of practical reconciliation, what does the score card look like? As is always the case in Indigenous affairs, it is very difficult to get contemporary data—there is always a lag. And you always need to look at both inputs and outcomes—in other words, what resources are deployed and the results of that deployment. Part of the urban mythology and the Hansonite claims—some of which were incorporated into this government’s thinking—is that Aboriginal people get more than their fair share of the resources of government.

It is also said that solving the problems that Aboriginal people face is not just a question of money—indeed, the Prime Minister has said so on a number of occasions. Of course, that is true in one sense, although the government seems to think that government largesse will work for families in middle Australia. We certainly saw that at the last election. I think we should ask whether the most disadvantaged people in our community should get fewer resources in real terms than those of us who enjoy good health, superior education, relatively secure employment and a high standard of housing.

If you look at the data you will find what really is the case: in Indigenous affairs fewer resources are devoted to more serious problems. For example, work by Gavin Mooney, an economist who works in this area, shows that, on average, Australians use Medicare funded primary health care to the extent of just over $530 a year. The people in Double Bay—one of the wealthiest Sydney suburbs, for those who have not noticed—use more than $900 worth of Medicare services. Meanwhile, in the Kutjungka region in the Kimberley, where the Aboriginal people are among the sickest in Australia—and, indeed, globally—they use only $80 in Medicare primary health care funds per year, largely because of the shortage of general practitioners in that region. Although it is fair to say that some of them have occasional access to services from the relatively poorly funded Aboriginal Medical Services, they do not benefit from the generously funded private health insurance rebate which goes principally to those on middle and high incomes.

If we look at the broader picture of resources devoted to these problems we find that from 2000, when the Prime Minister formally introduced practical reconciliation, the Indigenous budget has increased by 26 per cent. That sounds very generous until you understand that over the same period, total expenditure by the Commonwealth for all purposes increased by 23 per cent. As one commentator put it, far from indicating a desire to fund effective and practical measures, expenditure on Indigenous programs ‘just held its head above water.’ Indeed, over the last two years it has increased at a lesser rate than total expenditure.

When the funding is disaggregated, the picture is even more disturbing. For example, the total Commonwealth education budget has increased by 42 per cent since 2000-2001, the year practical reconciliation was announced, while the Indigenous education budget has increased in that period by just nine per cent. In an apparent attempt to address this discrepancy, the education minister promised recently that expenditure in Indigenous education will increase by 23 per cent between 2005 and 2008. Again, that is a welcome increase but it is little different from the 20 per cent increase in total education expenditure planned for the same period. I will say more about health in a minute.

When it comes to measures of performance based on outcomes, as a baseline we should be aware that Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander people die younger than citizens in China and the rates of some illnesses, for example trachoma, are among the world’s worst. The incidence of end stage renal disease in some parts of remote Australia is 20 times greater than in the general population and is doubling every five years.

We should also note that other countries, such as New Zealand and Canada, are doing much better than we do on key indices of Indigenous wellbeing. I am trying point out that there is plenty of room for improvement. We are not talking here about differences at the margin. On the key measures of life expectancy and illness rates, there appears to have been little or no improvement since this government took office—and certainly not in the last five years, since practical reconciliation became the policy framework. In some areas the rate of improvement—slow enough as it was—has declined, and in some areas there have been declines in the quality of life for Indigenous people in absolute terms.

I want to return for a moment to health because it is so fundamental to improvement in many of the other indicators. I indicated earlier that the amount of money that we are spending on Indigenous Australians is actually pretty low in absolute terms and certainly in terms relative to disadvantage. It needs to be remembered that Indigenous people have less access to health services altogether than the general population and receive fewer visits from a wide range of health professionals.

The Commonwealth Grants Commission, for instance, reported in 1988-89 that for each dollar spent on health services for non-Indigenous people only $1.22 was spent on Indigenous people despite their appalling health status. Again that sounds like there is a margin in favour of Indigenous people, but it is worth noting that that figure was calculated before the full impact of the private health insurance rebate was factored in. It needs to be said too that a disproportionate amount of those funds is spent on public hospital services, patient transport, mental health institutions and government administration and research, and less is spent on primary health care.

Recent work done by the health ministers and the Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing, as it was then, shows that adjusting for the extra cost of remote service provision and poorer health status significantly reduces the purchasing power of these funds—we need to recognise that it costs a lot more to deliver services in many parts of Aboriginal Australia. Indeed, when you look at that, the expenditure is approximately $2,500 per capita for non-Indigenous Australians and just $1,200 per capita in real terms for Indigenous communities. So we are looking at a position where they use fewer services and fewer funds in real terms are spent on their needs. The current health care agreements do not really make any specific allowance for the costs of meeting the needs of Indigenous citizens.

I think it is fair to say that all of us in this parliament would want to hope that problems of the magnitude that I and other members have outlined would have by now provoked an urgent and coordinated response of an appropriate scale. Clearly the scale is not appropriate, there is no sense of urgency about this government’s actions and there is certainly very little coordination. Sadly, given the willingness of the states to cooperate, we should have seen the state and federal governments galvanised to act in concert and set aside their differences. It is not as if, ultimately, the number of people involved is huge.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up 2.4 per cent of the population in total—approximately 460,000 people. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has identified just over 1,000 discrete communities, most of them geographically separate from other population centres. So the scale of the problem, given Australia’s wealth, is not enormous.

I understand better than anyone, having worked in both state and federal governments and having had ministerial responsibility, including for Indigenous affairs, just how difficult this can be and that there are considerable obstacles to action. For instance, a lot of the sources of the problems and the policy solutions inevitably cross program boundaries: environment, housing, infrastructure, employment, education and income support. A lot of people descend on these communities with policy prescriptions, and there are often multiple funding sources and accountability requirements, which have made life very difficult for Indigenous communities. All levels of governments are involved and responsible but often none of them takes real responsibility. There is too little accountability, too little planning and too little coordination.

A relatively recent House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Committee Affairs had Professor Ring tell them:

I could go further into some of those difficulties, but I think it is fair to say—and I give the federal government, and the state governments who were working with them, credit for this—that they did understand the need for a whole-of-government approach to try and break down some of the silos and barriers and to work with local Indigenous communities to achieve better outcomes. Everybody understands that that is absolutely essential for progress in this area.

We have heard from various spokespeople from government, public servants and ministers, about these whole-of-government responses. They have worked with state governments to establish so-called COAG trials where everyone looks at the problems, identifies priorities and tries to put resources to solving the problems identified. With the demise of ATSIC we are talking now, however, about a new mainstreaming of Indigenous service delivery and we do not entirely know what that means at this stage. Apparently it is going to involve the reallocation of ATSIS Indigenous specific programs to a number of mainline departments, and the funds in many cases have already gone out there.

Recently Peter Shergold, the Secretary to Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, explained this ‘bold experiment’ as he put it as a key example of ‘whole-of-government responses to Australia’s priority challenges’. If it were that, I would certainly give it a tick, but I am not certain that that is the way we are going. He suggested that the eight COAG trials would give a glimpse of what could be achieved through collegial leadership, collaborative government and community partnerships that recognise the distinctive needs or difference of particular communities.

He stressed five characteristics in that approach. The first was collaboration: all government departments and all levels of government working together to ensure better outcomes, cooperation from the top to bottom, single shopfront Indigenous coordination centres to be established over time and entering into shared responsibility agreements—and I will return to that briefly if I have time. The second was identifying regional need. A tripartite approach would be agreed by Commonwealth and state governments and communities to ensure appropriately different consultative and delivery mechanisms. Who these regional consultative groups will be is anyone’s guess at the moment since they are being abolished with this legislation. The other three principles he mentioned as important in this bold new experiment were flexibility, accountability and leadership.

The cooperation between the Commonwealth and the states in breaking down the silos certainly needs to be welcomed, but the important thing to bear in mind is that there are some serious problems with so-called ‘mainstreaming’ and the shared responsibility agreements. While the government indicated in its election platform that it would spend $3.1 billion on Indigenous specific programs, in real per capita terms, as I indicated earlier, this is probably little different from the past. As one of the commentators has pointed out, it is unclear how the billions of dollars of the identified backlogs in housing and infrastructure and other community facilities will be filled. A lot of the resources allocated to new initiatives are very limited indeed, and there will be pretty fierce competition for those resources.

The shared responsibility framework in the COAG trial suggests that the sign-off could take many years. It is going to take time: you sit down with communities and work out the priorities and what governments at various levels should be doing. There could be a very significant difficulty, I think, between the Commonwealth and the states. The COAG trials have been very slow to move, and significant resources have been put into making them work. We have not yet seen any full evaluation of them before the government is now embarking on a whole lot more of these shared responsibility agreements. I must say I was dismayed to hear recently one of the same public servants indicate that many of these shared responsibility agreements will be around single outcomes because otherwise it will not be possible to get any results. That smacks to me of the need for publicity rather than the need for improvement, because most of these are very significant and complex problems.

That takes me back, in the couple of minutes I have left, to this whole question of practical reconciliation. The problem with practical reconciliation as it is constructed by this government is that it is a partial solution, even given the future as mapped out by the shared responsibility agreements. The Prime Minister has been quoted as saying, ‘Progress has been made in practical reconciliation in closing the gaps.’ He has made that claim already. He has said, ‘There are still big gaps and disadvantage, but we have made progress in the areas of mortality, high school retention, TAFE enrolments and some progress in literacy.’ But work done at the ANU shows very clearly that the data do not bear out this claim, unfortunately. It is simply not true. At least during the first two terms of the Howard government, the data to date suggests that indeed in some areas we may be going backwards. The main gains for Indigenous Australians have been very small increases in home ownership and post-secondary qualifications. But, compared to the rest of us, the absolute gap in some of these areas is growing.

In some senses the term ‘practical reconciliation’ invites us to simply look at Indigenous disadvantage, but it also invites us to compare Indigenous Australians with the rest of us, and the Prime Minister has explicitly done that. The problems we are talking about are not simply practical problems that can be solved with good intentions and sufficient funding. They go much deeper than that. You have to address the physical, psycho-emotional and social needs of Indigenous people. In closing, I want to draw the House’s attention to some research which will be published shortly that shows very clearly that, for instance, those people who have been separated as part of the stolen generations, and the children of those people separated, have far poorer health and social circumstances than the rest of the community. (Time expired)