Mr GARRETT (9:46 AM) —I rise to speak on the Indigenous Education (Targeted Assistance) Amendment Bill 2005. I note, as my colleague the member for Banks did, that the net effect of the bill, which is to provide new tutorial assistance and a transfer of VET funds, is a decrease in appropriations to Indigenous education by nearly $4 million. We note with some regret in the House that that represents a lessening of funding in this particular area of Indigenous education. The question that we need to ask ourselves in this House, which we are asking ourselves fairly constantly, is how we can make a commitment which is long term, genuine and meaningful to Indigenous people, particularly in the area of education.

A lot of water has passed down the river in relation to Indigenous issues over the past nine years. Amongst other things, we have had a stolen generation inquiry, a Bringing them home report, the establishment of a Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, the disbandment of ATSIC and the introduction of SRAs by the Howard government. We had Michael Long marching from Melbourne to the national parliament. I want to comment on a couple of those things as I go through my time in the House. The first comment is that it took Michael Long standing up and deciding that he was going to walk the roads of Victoria, New South Wales and the ACT, joined spontaneously by some fellow members of his community and others in a support group, to bring back onto the agenda the question of the status that Indigenous people have in our country and to shine a light on the government’s progress so far.

I commend again, as I know other members have in this House, Michael Long’s very honest, very open and very deliberate action of simply following his heart in deciding to come and seek a meeting with the Prime Minister. He recognised that the Prime Minister had said at the beginning of his previous term that he wished to place the issue of Indigenous people’s progress and status and the outcomes that they face in terms of poor education, poor health and the other damning statistics that we know too well right at the front of the agenda. Michael Long and many others, myself included, felt that it had not been placed on the agenda. As a great sportsperson and a great representative of his people, he simply got up and began that long march from Melbourne to Canberra.

The Bringing them home report and the establishment of a Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation continue to focus people’s minds on the question of reconciliation and what it means. As we know, the government has decided to introduce the word ‘practical’ before reconciliation. I have to say that I was very pleased to walk only last weekend, on 28 May, in one of the best attended reconciliation marches that still take place in this country. I am referring to the Australians for Reconciliation Chifley Committee, who sponsor the reconciliation march in Mount Druitt. The major sponsor was the Blacktown City Council and it was subtitled ‘walk this way on Dharug land’. This was a march for reconciliation that began before the famous marches across the bridges some five years ago, and it still goes to this day. I think all members in the House would have been gratified to see the number of Aboriginal people, members of councils and local politicians but also an entire range of that very diverse ethnic community from the Mount Druitt western suburbs area of Sydney. I want to assure the House that reconciliation as it is understood by those communities is still an issue that they take very seriously, and their commitment to it was made very real to me by their marching on that Saturday afternoon. I commend the organisers and the Chief Opposition Whip, who was responsible for organising that day.

Once the Prime Minister had decided that he would not apologise formally on behalf of the government in this parliament, the spirit was sucked out of Aboriginal people around this country. The idea of an apology was not new. It has been much debated. It is something which parliaments in the state jurisdictions had had no problem in formally moving to, which local councils had had no problems in formally moving to and which none of us, frankly, had had any problems moving to in our personal lives. As I recall, some of the reasons that were given as to why there should not be a formal apology by the leader of the government in this House related to issues such as compensation and other matters. They were really straw men to cover what was basically a refusal on the part of the Prime Minister to simply say that he was sorry. Now the debate has moved on, and people have moved on—not because it is not important to them any longer but because they realise there will be no turning at this particular point in time from the Prime Minister.

So National Sorry Day has become the National Day of Healing. I commend the organisers of the National Day of Healing, including Senator Ridgeway, for recognising that, if there is an obduracy on the part of the leadership of this nation, it is up to the people to find other means, other ways and other language to continue the forward process of engagement and discussion with Aboriginal people and non-Indigenous people in this country. A national day of healing, in my view, is an entirely appropriate way of doing that.

I, along with other colleagues, was in the Great Hall last week for the launch of the National Day of Healing. I was deeply moved in some ways by the tragic circumstances of that event. Members in the House will recall that one of the speakers invited to address the National Day of Healing was Christine Jacobs, an Aboriginal woman from Western Australia, who was tragically killed in a car accident in Canberra on the evening before the event. I join with many of my colleagues, the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in recording my sympathies for her family, and I note that her daughter, Tamara, who is some 14 years of age, was able to stand up and read her mum’s speech.

For me, that Tamara was actually able to get up in this place and speak her mother’s story was an encapsulation of the bravery and the courage that Aboriginal people continue to show. It was a story of survival. It was a story of healing. Christine had suffered, as many Aboriginal women have suffered, through the course of her life not only the effects of disadvantage and alienation within her community and the social dislocation that takes place as a result but also the deeper effect, which her daughter spoke of quite eloquently, that this has on people’s emotional and psychological wellbeing. These things are not necessarily that easy to measure but they are definitely there.

The word ‘healing’ is entirely appropriate when you see an Aboriginal woman in her late 30s or early 40s—I am not exactly sure of Christine’s age—who, because of the conditions that she faced, surrounded by the dysfunctionality that unfortunately and regrettably is a part of Aboriginal communities, finds herself plunged into a deep depression at what is going on in her life but manages to pull herself out of it. She understands that, by pulling herself out of it, she has to forgive both the conditions and the people who were responsible in part for bringing her and her people to this place. She was capable of the apology, personally making that act of reconciliation in her life. Her daughter, Tamara, by reading out her mother’s speech, brought that home to those of us who were sitting in the Great Hall on the launch of the National Day of Healing.

The context is critical for us. One of the other speakers at that event was Professor Fiona Stanley. She would be well known to members in the House. She is an eminent Australian, a former Australian of the Year, who has been conducting a range of research on the impacts that have been faced by subsequent Aboriginal communities following the release of the Bringing them home report—an inquiry into the stolen generation. To summarise Professor Stanley’s findings, which were pretty straightforward, as she spoke to us in the Great Hall: Aboriginal people face disadvantage, which is ongoing and recent; it impacts on their lives in direct ways; and it manifests itself in relationships in families and, in particular, it transmits through families—from parents to children—over time. As a consequence, you cannot look at what has happened historically and think that you can package it up and say: ‘This was an isolated period of our history. We’re now going to wrap it up in a plastic bag and put a rubber band around it. We’re going to put it to one side and we are going to move on.’ ‘Move on’ has become a euphemism for not recognising the implications of what happened then and how that translates into the lives of Aboriginal people today. We do not move on at all until we recognise that very important fact.

When we look at what is needed in relation to Indigenous education, everybody in the House agrees that there are no easy answers. We acknowledge, as my colleague the member for Banks did earlier, that no government has had the magic solution to some of these questions, and some of the issues are quite profound and difficult. There is the question of the provision of policies, which will mean that you do not have Aboriginal kids leaving school—retention strategies are greatly needed. We need to look very carefully and clearly at the transition to high school, which for Aboriginal kids is always one of the most difficult and sometimes almost impenetrable barriers.

We also need to look closely at the curriculum and the refinements that need to be undertaken. We need to find ways in which the education system and the way in which people are educated, particularly Indigenous kids, has some implication, meaning, context and relevance to their lives. As the member for Lingiari pointed out forcefully in the House yesterday evening, it is also about poverty. Aboriginal kids going into the education system and trying to find their way through it come off a very different base from most other kids in this country. It is hard to believe that Aboriginal kids have to try and find their way through the education system when they are for the most part operating out of periods of either extreme or relative poverty.

In its case for change, the Australian education review, which examined this issue, identified a number of things that we would expect to be identified when considering Indigenous education. The obvious one is the link between the education that Indigenous kids get and the likelihood of their future prospects for employment. There are subsidiary questions about Indigenous people identifying education as something in which to invest. When you are poor it is not necessarily seen as the most important thing to invest your time in or to push your kids towards. The report says poverty means nowhere to study at home, lack of privacy when you are doing homework, and the pressures that kids have on time. Critically, it is not expected that Indigenous participation in the work force will increase significantly even when Indigenous people do graduate.

So there is a set of cascading issues that surround Indigenous education that relates to employment prospects and the capacity of communities that are suffering poverty to get their kids into schools. But also, even if their kids get through school or graduate from TAFE, they are underemployed in the work force. Some 63 per cent, as opposed to some 74 per cent of non-Indigenous kids, succeed in gaining employment. Lack of employment leads again to cycles of poverty, which means a greater likelihood of arrest. In many ways, the link between providing capacity for education and the fact that we have an overrepresentation of young Aboriginal men, in particular, in our prisons is clear evidence of this.

Australia participated in the OECD’s inaugural program for international student assessment. About 500 Australian Indigenous students were assessed and a representative sample of the 15-year-old Indigenous population was provided. The report presented an analysis of the results for Australian Indigenous students in comparison with other Australian students and students from other countries. Its findings would not surprise us, but I will summarise them briefly for the House. Firstly, and most importantly and significantly, Australia’s Indigenous students performed at a lower level than non-Indigenous students in the three assessment areas of reading literacy, mathematical literacy and scientific literacy, and their results were below the OECD means. That is clearly unacceptable to this House.

Importantly, differences were found in the learning strategies, learning preferences and behaviours of Indigenous students compared to non-Indigenous students. This is a key point. It is expensive, challenging and difficult for governments at federal and state levels to find the right mix and number of strategies in order to deal with these very distinct differences, but they are real differences that impede Indigenous education unless they are addressed in a comprehensive and generous fashion. The report found that Indigenous students have less preference for a competitive learning environment—that is something I have experienced when I have travelled to Indigenous communities—and they are less likely to use elaboration and control strategies. I am not sure what elaboration strategies are, but I do know what control strategies are and it is no surprise that they are not particularly likely to use control strategies. They have been used on them often enough in the past.

At one level the argument will continue to be about resources, and the fact that the Howard government is depleting resources in this area is to be noted and condemned. How do we increase engagement with and ownership by Indigenous families? Through education and by involving communities in education decision making. That is a really significant question for the House to address and it is the sort of question that the government should be addressing when it looks at this issue in terms of policy. Those issues include increasing the provision for literacy and numeracy for Indigenous adults. This is something that is quite often left out of the debate. When we talk about Indigenous education it is really about reskilling and educating and about assisting Indigenous adults not only to value education but to have the necessary literacy and numeracy to actually work with their kids in the education system.

I note that the changes to Abstudy made by the government in 2000 reduced access to eligibility to the program for some students who would normally have been Abstudy recipients. At the time the government predicted that this measure would not reduce Indigenous participation. In fact, an analysis of the census figures shows that education outcomes were reduced for Indigenous Australians between 1996 and 2001. This is a pretty poor finding because this was at a time when practical reconciliation was being championed by the government, yet it seems to have failed. Substantial improvements to Indigenous labour force status can only occur when a large improvement in relative educational status takes place. Yet there were fewer kids at that time going through the system and completing their education than the government had claimed would happen once the changes to Abstudy were made.

It is important that support for students in their first year away from remote communities is available, and we acknowledge that it is necessary that that support exist. But that should not be provided in lieu of supporting the communities with proper education, which is the right of every Australian. Education is the key to community development and also the key to community leadership. So the call in this House must be for proper education services to be provided in the community and for the community as well as services to assist Aboriginal kids to go to high school outside their remote or regional communities. Aboriginal communities are provided with public amenities and services with strings attached—sometimes it is called mutual obligation or shared responsibility—but it would be a terrible tragedy if that now became part of the way we examined education. There should not be a different set of conditions or purse strings attached to education for kids in Indigenous communities to the conditions that every other kid in Australia gets as a right.

As was said at the reconciliation workshops earlier this week, there will never be equality for Indigenous Australians without Indigenous children being given equal life chances. How we give those children equal life chances is a central question. A major part of the answer is equal access to education services. Indigenous kids have the same right to the qualitative and quantitative levels of education as all other Australian kids and to special measures to overcome the inherent disadvantages that they currently face, which I referred to earlier. Support for Indigenous children studying away from their communities is a part of that, but it is only a part. It is here that we look closely to the Howard government to see what positive and concrete policies, recommendations and strategies it is going to develop and deliver. At the end of the day education is a key to community cohesion and development and to personal development among Indigenous Australians. On this side of the House we remain committed to that end.