Page 1910 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 6 June 2017
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issues? What about the matters that affect the community, or even other matters? For example, how does the elected body help the government to work on behalf of or with the Indigenous community to meet the COAG targets for closing the gap in their community? How will the elected body help to ensure that the government is supporting their programs to meet the needs of the community, to achieve equitable outcomes in education, health, housing, employment, economic participation and justice?
In my own extensive and ongoing consultations with the Indigenous community these are the issues that are constantly raised. The community is concerned about the number of grassroots issues. These include the lack of Indigenous teachers employed in Koori preschools and government schools; the ongoing gap in educational outcomes across all indicators; the gap in income earnings; the lack of employment opportunities in the ACT public service, where targets have been reduced from COAG’s agreement of three per cent to two per cent of employees; the problems in health care and services; the closure of the Aboriginal Justice Centre; the closure of an Indigenous housing organisation; and, most recently, the failure of the Ngunnawal bush healing farm to become a centre for alcohol and drug rehabilitation. The community are asking me when they will get what has been promised and what they continually say is needed.
The elected body is going into its fourth term, but this government’s track record over this time is more about the Indigenous organisations and programs that have closed or failed to get off the ground than about the progress that is actually being made. I ask again: is the function of the elected body to help improve matters and work with their community to reach more equitable outcomes for the Indigenous community here in the ACT, as enshrined in this amendment bill? How does the agreement between the elected body and the government fit in with this legislation? How does it reflect the needs of the community that I have just listed?
I understand that this agreement replaces the current COAG targets, but the agreement does not include any indicators of success or measurables. It is of grave concern to me that the government is moving away from the targets set by COAG. This indicates a lack of will to work to make a difference. The closing the gap targets set by COAG in 2008 are a major measure of improvement. I know that the government likes to measure itself against the national mean in some outcomes, but the national mean includes areas such as northern Western Australia and remote areas of the Northern Territory. The reality is that whilst we measure up against the national mean, we do not measure up against ourselves—the general Canberran community. There has been no improvement or closing of the gap during the time the elected body has been enacted. How will the amendments proposed in this bill help to make the difference in the future?
As a final note, one of the responses by the directorate to our questions on the bill has been that many further details in response to the Janke report are to be worked out in the regulations which are yet to be developed. In presenting this bill without the mentioned regulations, the minister is asking us to take rather a lot on spec. We can all agree that consultation and listening to the Indigenous community, as enshrined in
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