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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 1 Hansard (17 February) . . Page.. 232 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

It has often been said that the health, welfare and wellbeing of the poorest, most vulnerable or most disadvantaged in a society is a measure of how civilised, how fair and how just a society is. The State of the Territory Report has been in some ways a catalyst for the motion I am moving today to establish an Assembly inquiry into Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health in the Territory. The report, which was intended to "identify where we are heading and what steps we need to put in place to improve the quality of life for all Canberrans", included only a few statistics on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on issues such as employment, incomes and hospital separations. However, the experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the ACT is very complex. While Canberra is a high employer of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the public sector, many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are not employed and experience significant disadvantage, ill health, poverty and marginalisation.

We know that, nationally, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health continues to lag significantly behind that of non-indigenous Australians, so much so that the Nobel Peace Prize-winning international medical relief agency Medecins Sans Frontieres is talking to the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO) about starting aid work in Australia. An umbrella organisation, NACCHO is a peak body representing nearly 100 community-run Aboriginal primary health care centres in Australia, including our own Winnunga Nimmityjah Health Service.

Medecins Sans Frontieres' discussions with NACCHO have come out of statistics from James Cook University that show that the 20-year gap between life expectancies of indigenous and other Australians is the largest in the Western world. In New Zealand the gap is four years; and in the United States it is 3.6 years. Good public policy and good social planning are based on meaningful research that tells us about what is happening in the community. A one-size-fits-all approach to public policy, which develops programs for everyone, regardless of how people use services and what services are needed for different sections of the community, may not address fundamental Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander disadvantage.

That is why the State of the Territory Report was a disappointment. It tells us that there have been only two deaths in custody in the ACT since 1992, but it does not tell us that 20 per cent of inmates in ACT juvenile justice facilities are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, despite the fact that indigenous children only represent 1.6 per cent of all children in the ACT. These are ABS statistics.

It tells us that the ACT has a hospital separations rate of 182 per 1,000 people in the broader community, compared to nearly 500 per 1,000 for indigenous people. This means that indigenous people are discharged, transferred to another hospital or die in hospital after formal admission at more than twice the rate of the broader population in the ACT. This would suggest that the health of indigenous people is still very poor, and yet the Government claims it has performed well with its indigenous hospital separation rates, and does not offer actions that it will take to reduce indigenous hospital separations. The justification for this is that this is the first attempt at actually putting together a State of the Territory Report, it is based on ABS statistics and it compares figures across Australia.

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