Page 3577 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 12 October 1994
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In describing the action of tabling this or any other report as constituting a significant milestone, I think the Chief Minister rather overstates the case. When you conjure up a mental image of a milestone you think of a solid object that spends eternity sitting in one place telling passers-by just one thing. I hope that the Chief Minister does not intend that to apply in the present case. Some of the actions that the report announces may indeed be important points on a journey, although I wonder even about that; but you cannot call the mere tabling of it a milestone in the sense in which the Chief Minister used the term. Maybe a traffic delay sign, "roads work in progress", might have been better.
Members should not allow the size of the report to impress them. In its 206 pages the report not only tells us what the Government claims that it has done - I use the word "claims" advisedly - to implement the 339 recommendations of the commission; it also regurgitates all of them in their entirety. Of the residue, much is repetition, mixed with sighs of relief, I would imagine, that the matter is for the Feds or for the States or for the Northern Territory. It is as if the Chief Minister is trying to overwhelm us with verbosity in the hope that, after a few mind-numbing pages, we will not look too closely to find where the meat is. Perhaps the next report in the series can cut the cackle and leave out the irrelevant bits.
It is appropriate, I think, to divide the achievements claimed in the report into four groups: What the Government probably would have done anyway in the normal course of events; what it did not have to do anyway because the recommendation has no application in the Territory; what it has done badly; and what it has yet to do. The first group - what the Government would probably have done anyway - covers actions affecting all Territorians, whatever their ethnicity, such as aspects of police and corrective services procedures, and things about which the Government need do nothing more than make motherhood statements. I suppose that it is fair enough for the Government to report that certain actions have the effect of implementing segments from one or more of the royal commissioner's recommendations, but it would have been more honest had the report identified actions taken as a direct response to them - not only more honest but also a more accurate picture of what the Government has actually done to address the issues in the report for their own sake, rather than based on some other motivation - and it would have needed fewer trees to come down to provide the paper.
Group two - what the Territory does not have to do because it does not apply here - hides an important consideration that is highly relevant simply because of factors that do not apply here. Few, if any, of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in Canberra would match the profile of the people the royal commissioner made recommendations to help and protect. I acknowledge that perhaps some of the Aboriginal people living in the ACT at Jervis Bay just might fit the profile. Canberra has no Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander fringe dwellers. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living here are significantly more advanced economically, educationally and socially than those living on the fringes of small townships in remote parts of Australia, or even further away from a community infrastructure, such as in their homeland centres. This does not mean that the Territory can get off lightly in what it does to implement the recommendations.
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