Page 3579 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 12 October 1994
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customs and traditions to enforcement, judicial and custodial officers, or, indeed, to any of us. Aboriginals must be directly and significantly involved in the design and delivery of awareness training in those subjects. I call on the Chief Minister and the Attorney-General to see to it that they are, and without delay. I ask them, further, to report to this Assembly when they have achieved it.
If I were to list all the matters in group four, Madam Speaker - things the Government has yet to do - I would far exceed my time in this debate, and it would be unfair, I suppose, to attack the Government over matters with which the report for 1993-94, when we get it, may adequately deal. I will just take a quick look at some of them. Recommendations 3 and 100 deal with Aboriginal positions - Aboriginals advising chief executives and the like. The Chief Minister, in her response, said that in the Aboriginal Affairs Unit of the Chief Minister's Department there are two Aboriginal identified positions; but do they fit the classification that was set down in recommendation 3 of the royal commission? I suspect not. But this report does not tell us. All she says is that there are two positions. It is indicative, Madam Speaker, of how little information this report conveys to us about what is being done in the areas where this Government is supposed to be doing something.
Recommendation 47 talks about relevant Ministers reporting annually to their State and Territory parliaments with some pretty good statistics as to the "numbers of persons held in police, prison and juvenile centre custody with statistical details as to the legal status of the persons so held" - for example, on arrest, on remand, and so on. What is the position? The Chief Minister says that the ACT is keen to implement this recommendation. We are now two years downstream. Where is the first set of statistics? We have not seen any. I hope that the 1993-94 report - again, when we get it - provides the information from the system that the Chief Minister is so keen to implement.
Recommendation 52 was "that funding should be made available to organisations such as Link-Up". The ACT Government has not received any such requests for funding to date, but it will give sympathetic consideration to any future request. Bear in mind that this is for the year 1992-93. I have to ask the question: Has the Government yet received any requests for funding for a body such as Link-Up to establish family and community links broken or damaged by past government policies? Two years downstream all we have is more platitudes from the Government.
Recommendation 56 was:
The Commission notes that many Aboriginal people have expressed the wish to record and make known to both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people aspects of the history, traditions and contemporary culture of Aboriginal society.
This is a beauty, of course, because this involves the $2.5m that came out of the casino premium nearly three years ago, and where is it? What is the status? This report does not say anything about it, except that $2.5m has been set aside. It just goes on and on with all the motherhood statements, all the platitudes; but so far we have not seen one single thing that the Government has actually done. I submit that it is getting a bit late.
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