Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to contribute to this debate on the Australian Education Amendment Bill 2014, which has four major components. I want to deal in the first instance with the first of those: the support for Indigenous students in boarding schools. The bill will establish a new mechanism to allow the minister to make payments to schools for reasons prescribed by regulation. This will facilitate the payment of $6.8 million in 2014-15 to non-government boarding schools with more than 50 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander boarders or more than 50 per cent of boarders who are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. This funding was announced in the budget. Of course, support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students attending boarding school is absolutely consistent with Labor's policies in government to construct new boarding schools and help students from remote communities access boarding school education. I want to go particularly to the issue of boarding schools in my own electorate.

In 2008, the budget allocated $28.9 million for three new boarding facilities in the Northern Territory to provide education support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander secondary students. The Indigenous Land Corporation, the ILC, also committed the contribution of $15 million, bringing the joint investment to $43.9 million. We know that three were to be built. The first was to be in Wadeye in the north-west of my electorate—a large community of about 3½ thousand people where there was a Catholic high school but no boarding facility. So we agreed with the community to build a boarding facility adjacent to the high school to look after the needs of kids not only in that community but also in surrounding communities where there was a large catchment population. That building went ahead. In the end, I think, in the order of about $24 million was spent. It is open and doing its business as it should.

What of the other two? One was to be built in north-east Arnhem Land and another in Central Australia in what is euphemistically called the Warlpiri triangle—that is, the areas where Warlpiri communities predominate: Yuendumu, Lajamanu, Nyirripi and Willowra, and smaller communities in between. What happened was that we were unable to get final agreement around the siting of the one in the Warlpiri triangle, so that was put off. But we did get agreement in north-east Arnhem Land from the Yolngu people of Garrthalala to build a boarding facility there. Prior to the last election, contracts were let for that facility. Then when the Abbott government came into power, they stopped those contracts from proceeding. That meant effectively, despite the rhetoric which comes out of this government, that they had purposely and quite deliberately put a stop on the building of a boarding facility in a remote Aboriginal community dealing with Aboriginal kids in remote outstations of North-East Arnhem Land—quite deliberately. There is no excuse for it because there had been agreement by the communities that this was where they wanted this facility built. It meant that their kids would not have to go to Nhulunbuy or to some other facility in North-East Arnhem Land or, indeed, anywhere else across Australia to attend high school. They were denied access to years 11 and 12 unless they attended a boarding facility. That was to be understood because they come mostly from small homeland communities in North-East Arnhem Land. On 18 October 2012, Senator Scullion said:

Whether building these boarding schools in remote communities is of value or not is a question for another day.

It is not a question for another day; it is a question which he should have addressed then and which he should be addressing now by making sure that facility proceeds. The Yolngu people he met a number of weeks ago when he was there with the Prime Minister would have reaffirmed their desire to have this facility built at Garrthalala. The centre is also aware that a report commissioned by the Labor government in 2010 and conducted by KPMG recommended a boarding facility for remote students in North-East Arnhem Land be established at—where do you think?—Garrthalala. In answer to a question asked by Senator Scullion in a meeting of the Senate Standing Committee on Education, Employment and Workplace Relations on 31 May 2012, the department's response referred to a feasibility study. The answer included:

KPMG assessed seven main options for locating the facility—close to one of each of the five Indigenous communities, in addition to a homeland and non-community location.

The government's extensive discussions and consultation in the region clearly demonstrated a high-level of community buy-in and willingness to invest in the decision of placing the facility at Garrthalala.

The Garrthalala community has a well-documented commitment to education, and a strong desire to host the facility, building upon the small residential school program that it has been running successfully for homeland students for several years. It was this strong support from the local community for education, and the surrounding outstations, together with the secure environment, that led the Government to the decision to proceed with building the boarding facility in Garrthalala.

The key to the siting of this facility is the provision of a safe and secure environment where students can learn free of negative social issues and influences. Based on the report, Garrthalala was clearly the site that offered the best safety and security.

Why is it then that this boarding facility has not been built? How can, on the one hand, the government be arguing for kids going away to boarding facilities, yet when there is a community ready and willing to host a boarding facility for the region, to address the needs of the Yolngu Aboriginal kids of North-East Arnhem Land, they will not allow it to happen. This smacks of hypocrisy. The Prime Minister would have been told about this when he was in North-East Arnhem Land and Senator Scullion would have been told again and again.

We are told that Senator Scullion is to go back to North-East Arnhem Land to report to the North-East Arnhem Land Regional Economic Development Committee as a result of the visit from the Prime Minister. It was to be done by 17 October. Do you think he has done it? My word! Of course not. That I think is a further demonstration of the commitment that this government has, in reality, to those people of North-East Arnhem Land. The government go on about the importance of education and boarding facilities, yet kids are sent to Scotch College or to Adelaide, Melbourne, Darwin or anywhere else, while these people, who have a real hunger for education, are denied the opportunity to educate their kids in their home communities. What does that say about this government?

The Northern Territory is the site for a number of experiments by this government, one of which is the Remote School Attendance Strategy. We know that thus far this strategy has cost $46 million. As a result of that investment, in the first term there was an increase of 11 per cent in school attendance across Australia. In the second term, that dropped to six per cent on the baseline and in term 3, it has remained constant at six per cent. That tells us that the strategy is not working and it is not working for a range of reasons. We know that in some communities—I can name Yuendumu and Santa Teresa, Ali Curung and Thalia—attendance has gone backwards.

Last week, I met some of the school attendance officers and they are committed to doing their work. In some communities clearly they work very effectively. In one community last week school attendance was about 80 per cent but we know that, at the same time that this government is spending $46 million—I understand people in this government have become almost apoplectic at its dismal results, the flat-lining of this data—they have not achieved the outcomes they wanted.

During the last government, the Commonwealth government committed sufficient resources to fund 200 extra teachers for remote Indigenous schools in the Northern Territory. Mr Deputy Speaker Mitchell, you would be aware of this because I know you were here, that you were listening. Would it surprise you to hear that the Northern Territory is committed to providing only 100 to 170 of those teachers, that 30 teachers are no longer to be put in bush schools? They have been relocated for some other function in headquarters or wherever they may be. Apparently, there is a plan to reduce that number by another 35. So, instead of 200 additional teachers funded by the Commonwealth working in remote communities to address the abysmal outcomes for education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids in the Northern Territory, what are we going to see? We are going to see a reduction already of 30; now there will be another 35 potentially so that 200 becomes 135. That means that almost every significant school in the Northern Territory will lose a teacher, and you have to ask yourself: how fair dinkum can this government be, on the one hand blaming parents—because that is what they are doing about not having the kids go to school—while shifting bucketfuls of money out the backdoor and not providing the teaching resources that these schools require?

The formula does not work. It cannot work. You cannot, on the one hand, demand that you have more kids in the school and if you are lucky to get them there—and in some communities they come—then put additional pressure on the school. There will be kids who have not been to school for three, four or five years and they are put in next to kids who have been going to school regularly. What sort of demands does that place on the school community?

The Northern Territory government—what has it done? It has announced $250 million worth of cuts to education resources in bush schools over the forward estimates, and $50 million thus far. That means support teachers in schools. That means teachers in schools so, while the Commonwealth is blaming parents and trying to get kids into school—a good idea: we all want kids to go to school—these children rock up to some of these schools and cannot get the education they deserve because there aren't the resources. Why aren't there the resources? Because the Northern Territory government has withdrawn them. Don't blame Aboriginal parents for that; blame the Northern Territory government.

There are many ways in which you can look at this, but those of us who have been involved in education in the Northern Territory, as I was—as a teacher and subsequently as an observer and participant in the community—understand what this means. The first opportunity that Aboriginal kids in remote schools had to go to high school was in 2001, because when the Labor government was elected they introduced years 11 and 12 to these major communities—communities of 3,000 people where there was no high school. Now we hear the Northern Territory government is proposing to close them. They are apparently going to send all these kids off to boarding schools somewhere else. You don't have to be Einstein to work out what the results are going to be in many of these instances.

I saw that Fred Chaney put out a statement the other day talking about the new funding arrangement, the IAS funds—150 programs reduced to five; and 1400 organisations bidding for $4.8 billion in funds. Do you know what this includes? This includes bidding for school nutrition programs. This means schools in the Northern Territory who have had a nutrition program now have to bid to have those programs continue. Who in their right mind has thought of this?

The mind boggles—the inanity of what goes on in the public policy space in education within this government and their failure to grasp. They need to pounce on the Northern Territory government, bring them to heel and make sure they do what they should be doing for the communities of the Northern Territory and not doing what they are doing at the moment: selling Aboriginal people down the drain.

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