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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (24 May) . . Page.. 1683 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

In 1997 there was such a service. We had a school not far from, or perhaps even within the boundaries of, Boomanulla Oval in Narrabundah. It had two indigenous teachers. The task of that school was to provide educational programs but it was also to enable kids to adapt to the education system and to assist them in their societal development through the use of the educational ethic. The students came from significantly disadvantaged homes within the Narrabundah area. There were not too many of them. One of the biggest problems with students from that area was truancy, so attendance was not crash hot. My conversations with the teachers-at the time I worked in an unrelated area of education-indicated that they were making inroads into this problem, and in fact the kids were looking forward to going to the school. They were achieving a success rate of about 10 per cent a year, and it was building.

In 1997 that school was closed and the teachers taken away from there, and the program that the teachers were giving kids in Narrabundah disappeared. It is certainly a great idea to have some sort of assistance for indigenous kids in mainstream schools. It is also supremely important that we understand some of the problems facing indigenous youth today. Sometimes we have to put a school in their midst. We cannot afford to take teachers away. Those kids have reverted to their old ways. Truancy is back up. A lot of the kids are into drugs and most of them are into monstering the neighbours. Their societal development has regressed.

Under the leadership of Mr Harris we are tackling how we can assist indigenous kids to go through our school system so they can compete on an equal footing when they leave the school system and enter the job market. That is a great idea. But we may have lost sight of those kids who do not fit into the mainstream system and who will not fit in unless they have some sort of transitional arrangement. That is what the school in Narrabundah was. As far as I know-I am happy to stand corrected-it does not exist anymore. I urge the government to look into that and to include in it some of its investigations into how we provide services for indigenous people. It is a vicious circle. If we do not break that circle, we are going to have uneducated, illiterate, inarticulate and innumerate indigenous adults who have no way of getting on to a level playing field in the job market.

I saw in the budget a line which said that this government is going to enhance the provision of services for indigenous education. When I looked further into it, I was disappointed to find that it was Commonwealth money, not ours. It could have been better described so that there was not an expectation on my part that our people were driving it. I got a sense of disappointment when I dug into it, and with a sense of disappointment comes a sense of scepticism and cynicism that perhaps we are not committed as much as we ought to be.

The minister indicated that the government is doing things in health, accommodation and juvenile justice. My point is that if we had continued the school at Boomanulla Oval we would have fewer problem dealing with juvenile justice. The program of the teachers there was not restricted to educational exercises. It was about how students there were fitting into society and how their culture could exist side by side with others. It was about the differences between, using the term very loosely, Aboriginal law and white man's law.

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