Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would perhaps like to offer a bit of antivenom to deal with the member for Solomon's very 'snakey' comments! I think we can be pretty mature here and recognise that representatives of all parties in this place are very, very enthusiastic about the agenda to advance the position of Aboriginal people in this country and to address the endemic problems that we have seen emerge over the last few decades in Aboriginal education. Difficulty in education really has been undermining Aboriginal people being able to take their rightful place in our economy and our society. I think we have got to get a little bit beyond this sort of absurdity of pretending that only one party is interested, and indeed we would very much like to be recognised as being great promoters of this.

The difficulty is that these issues in relation to Aboriginal education and the advancement of Aboriginal people are very complex, and it has been established over many years that there are no easy answers here. It is very much a case of black and white Australians having to work to together to explore all of the opportunities. Labor took its commitments under Closing the Gap very seriously, and I think we can demonstrate that there were some achievements. But no-one would ever argue that anyone has taken the view that we have resolved all of the problems. This is going to be something that will require many decades of dedication to deal with.

My colleagues have outlined many of the shortcomings of the legislation, but, like a number of members, I really want to focus on the Indigenous education aspects of this and, in particular, the Indigenous boarding initiative. My engagement in Aboriginal education has gone on for some time, but at the moment I chair a group called the Martu Education Advisory Group. The Martu are a group of Aboriginal people who occupy parts of the Western Desert and eastern Pilbara regions. They have asked me to become involved in helping them progress their educational agenda.

It has been a great honour to be involved in that. The chairman of the WDLAC board, the native title group for the Martu, Brian Samson, says that he and his community really understand that they were left behind in the mining boom because they did not have the education to seize that opportunity. Indeed, we had a meeting a month or so ago on a Saturday up in Telfer to work out how we were going to take the education agenda forward. Telfer has regrouped now as a company town. The goldmining company employs some 1,000 people, and we would be lucky if 20 or 30 of those people were Aboriginal or Martu people, whilst there are hundreds of Martu people who would benefit from those employment opportunities.

Clearly we have a real disconnect. Here we have an area where there is indeed a big employer, and the ability for the Aboriginal community to access that employment is very limited. Part of the problem—not all of it—is the ability of Aboriginal people to access education and really be in a position where they can be competitive for this employment.

I am very pleased to say that the community has been very interested in the explicit-instruction model that we have seen working pretty well in Cape York. There is a view that attendance at the school and the achievement of the schools, despite the best endeavours of a great many dedicated teachers, has really not been good, and we cannot keep doing more of the same. The community has had considerable interaction with the work on the Cape York Peninsula. Indeed, a group of them visited the four schools on the Cape York Peninsula and came away very much convinced that this was the path that had to be tried. We had to get a more intensive, explicit instructional method that would be more suited to the needs of the Martu students and at the same time recognise that there had to be an enhanced commitment from the parents to ensure that their children attended school because, no matter how good your methodology is, if the children are not at school, that methodology is not going to assist them. It has to be something that works together.

One of the problems, in my experience working with quite a number of schools in disadvantaged areas over my 20 years of public life, is that, when children fail at school, they do not want to go to school. Failures in the instructional method feed into absenteeism because no-one wants to go to a place where they feel they are dumb, unable to keep up with the work that is being presented and that they are getting nothing out of it. So these are complex issues, but I am very pleased to say that the Martu now are working very constructively with Cape York and with the direct-instruction initiative. Cape York Academy, which is administering the new federal program, has agreed to involve the Martu in that next phase of the program.

This whole embrace of explicit instruction in these remote communities very much is a bipartisan approach. Noel Pearson will recognise that it was the direct intervention of Jenny Macklin and Julia Gillard that ensured that this model was able to get up in those Cape York schools. I think we have to keep that bipartisan support going for this initiative.

When it comes to secondary school, it is the view of the board that we would be very much better, rather than sending children away to secondary boarding school in Perth, where many students struggle with homesickness, keeping up with the general standard at those schools and social isolation, to focus on establishing a residential college in one of the larger towns in the Pilbara. For example, we are looking particularly at Newman. The idea there is that you would provide a college or residential facility that would provide not only the accommodation but the pastoral support and also the additional instruction for students who would then go off and attend the state government high school.

This seems to me to have many benefits. It would ensure that we had the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities in those areas of the Pilbara really interacting strongly at school and forging the friendships that one does across the cultural divide. We see that as more positive than taking a few of these kids out and putting them into boarding schools down in Perth and separating them from their communities. We also see that, for many of these kids who struggle with homesickness, the ability to go home on a weekend or long weekend is going to be something extremely beneficial. They will be in an area where they are still connected with their friends and their family.

I think the model of supporting private boarding schools, good that it is—and I accept that, as the member for Solomon said, there is a real need there and in some places this works very well. I urge the government to be prepared to look at this other model, which certainly is going to be much more beneficial model I think for Western Australia. We have very small communities. In the communities I am talking about we have seven schools: Punmu, Parngurr, Kunawarritji, Strelley, Warralong, Jigalong and Nullagine. So these are seven really quite small communities. Jigalong and Nullagine are a little bigger, but the others are very small schools. We accept that we cannot deliver secondary education in those communities and the students will have to come to a larger centre, but we want that to be a centre within the Pilbara that gives these kids the sense to be with their family and their friends but at the same time to have that opportunity to step up to higher academic standards. They will be in a strong, supported environment, giving them the opportunity to go out there and forge their way forward in an environment that will be much more nurturing for their culture.

I just want to comment on some matters made by the member for Bowman about language instruction. Look, I think perhaps he is right in part that there has been a bit of an overcorrection on this issue of the introduction of instruction in the local language. But the balance I have seen best placed is that out in some of these schools like Hope Vale, where certainly the medium of instruction is English. I think parents in Aboriginal communities strongly support that. They want to make sure that their children have a very strong grasp of the English language. But we should not shy away from at the same time ensuring that there is also taught the written form of the language which they speak at home or more generally in the community. In places that we are dealing with in the Martu lands this is going to be very complicated, because there are, indeed, so many different languages spoken in any one community that it is going to be somewhat difficult getting an agreed language and an agreed orthography. But I do think it is important that the medium of instruction be English but that we fully embrace introducing students to the written form of their first language.

I am keen, I am wanting to support the Indigenous boarding initiative, but I do urge the minister to consider whether or not he could broaden that funding to take into account the sorts of facilities that the Martu are keen to set up, because certainly in the Pilbara we do not have any non-government boarding schools and we do want to do what we can to allow the children coming from these very tiny communities to remain in the Pilbara where we believe they will prosper and achieve more educationally than being sent down to Perth.

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