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“…that we do no further harm”

Marion Scrymgour

A speech delivered to the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly on 21 August supporting the Chief Minister’s announcement of the NT government’s Closing the Gap of Indigenous Disadvantage.

People feel betrayed. Good, honest, caring members of our remote towns and communities spoke up to the inquiry. They spoke from their hearts – and many spoke for the first time about their fears. And the result has been that they have been flogged by distant, ideologically driven politicians and bureaucrats remote from the realities of our every day lives.

May I say Closing the Gap comes at a critical point in the history of the Territory. What we do now – and how we embrace the challenges of the next 20 years – will affect the lives of all of us, not to mention those who will come after us.

And this is about the future – a future in which we must close the gap.

The gap must be closed for practical reasons; the gap must be closed for moral reasons.

In the next 20 years more than 30,000 Aboriginal children will be born in the Northern Territory. It’s as if we are holding those 30,000 future lives in our hands today, as we consider the actions we must take over those two decades to ensure the outcomes we desperately need. It’s those lives we must think of if we are to hold out heads high as a community here in the Northern Territory.

The Anderson-Wild inquiry is a turning point. The inquiry – instituted by this Government – answered many questions, and made 97 recommendations to which this Government is responding – and more.

No one here pretends that this inquiry was the first to alert us to the issues of child protection on Indigenous communities – as the Prime Minister knows full well. It was he that received urgent pleas to take action six years ago – and did nothing. Since coming to Government in 2001, this Government has been alert to the issue, and have done much. Increased spending – from around $8 million a year under the CLP to $34 million a year on child protection – is evidence of that.

But we recognise – and the Wild-Anderson report has been a stark reminder – that we need to do more – much more. It is a stark reminder, too, that we must take action for the long term.

It is not something that can be done as part of an ill-planned knee jerk blitz, in which a “boots on the ground” philosophy masquerades as a solution in which the only thing on the horizon is a six month window to the next election.

At the heart of the Inquiry’s recommendations – and of our response – is the absolute necessity of taking a long term view over the problems we face. The scourge of child abuse cannot be defeated by one-dimensional quick fixes. It is not something that will be resolved by simple minded approaches to narrow problems.

There is no simple shopping list of solutions.

Any solution must take a root and branch approach to tackling the broad living conditions our people experience. It is why we must approach this on generational terms; that we must take the long view.

In moving round the bush over the past two months, talking to many hundreds of people whose lives are being so drastically affected by the Federal intervention, a single fact stands out.

People feel betrayed. Good, honest, caring members of our remote towns and communities spoke up to the inquiry. They spoke from their hearts – and many spoke for the first time about their fears. And the result has been that they have been flogged by distant, ideologically driven politicians and bureaucrats remote from the realities of our every day lives.

Instead of compassion and understanding, and a working through of the ways and means of reaching mutual understandings and solutions, thousands of our parents; thousands of our grand parents, have been tarred by the same brush.

I have attended meetings made up of decent, caring fathers, uncles, brothers and grandfathers, who feel they have been universally branded as perpetrators. As child abusers. To see these men, who are undoubtedly innocent of the horrific charges being bandied about, reduced to helplessness and tears, speaks to me of widespread social damage – not of a decent approach to tackling child abuse.

I have attended meetings down South, in which Aboriginal men have been universally condemned as uncaring, substance-abusing vicious molesters; while women have been portrayed as hopelessly weak, pathetic creatures, incapable of caring for their families or their children.

This New McCarthyism has to stop – and stop now.

It is why, for example, the Federal Government must immediately suspend its charge to abolish CDEP. The destruction of CDEP is not about creating real jobs; it is about branding all Aboriginal people of being incapable of handling money; it is about stigmatising all Aboriginal people as being hopeless drunks and gamblers. The abolition of CDEP is not about moving people from welfare to work; but of forcing people from work to welfare.

This betrayal by the Federal Government, felt so acutely by so many people, has not thus far – I repeat thus far – done anything to save the children. That issue has been lost in the merry-go-round of vilification that has been adopted by so many federal politicians. It is why Federal Minister Brough believed he could get away – last week – with dismissing his critics as living in a “fog of substance abuse”. That he was forced to apologise says little for him or his integrity: the very fact of his use of such McCarthyist tactics speaks volumes.

And let’s face it. The Commonwealth “survey teams” have discovered nothing that the Commonwealth didn’t know about before. The Commonwealth has been working in partnership with Northern Territory agencies from the days of the CLP 30 years ago to the present in defining what is out there; and calculating the needs. Last December the most recent CHINS survey into housing and infrastructure was completed – a joint Commonwealth-Territory program.

The so-called “survey” is little more than window-dressing. We know the results. They will tell us that – for generations – Aboriginal Territorians have endured poor housing; poor health; low educational outcomes; and few job prospects. While not necessarily directly causal in relationship, these social factors, which the Commonwealth has known about for 30 years; and which the current Federal Government has presided over for 11 years; have undoubted impact on the incidence and severity of community and family violence, sexual abuse and substance abuse.

That is why we are urging the Commonwealth to join us on the generational plan the Chief Minister has outlined today. It’s why we have, in my portfolio, now brought the resources to bear on the problem from $8 million a year to a projected $50 million a year.

We do not reject recent Commonwealth interest in the area, we just want more than rhetoric and heavy-handed McCarthyism.

As I said in the 26 minutes the Territory Government got to appear in the Senate ten days ago – 26 minutes to consider and respond to 500 pages of legislation, mind you:

No-one owns a moral position that has greater prominence than any other. We all want to prevent child abuse.

In broad terms, the Northern Territory government has supported the federal government’s intervention where it directly targets child abuse. The Northern Territory government has been calling for increased federal government investment for Indigenous Territorians since at least 2001. The Northern Territory government supports proposed changes to access to pornography laws, we support the additional police and we support additional medical resources. We welcome these things. But since the federal government has announced its legislative follow-up to the intervention, the Northern Territory government has become increasingly concerned.

Our government has made it clear from day one that it does not support the removal of the permit system or the compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal land. Neither of these measures directly targets child abuse. The removal of the application of the Racial Discrimination Act is also of concern. The immediate abolition of the CDEP scheme is another area we believe needs much more consideration...

We have a remarkable opportunity before us, perhaps a once in a lifetime opportunity. Why would the (Federal) government not want to consult and involve Aboriginal people in this intervention? Why seek to deliberately rush and exclude us? The Northern Territory government takes the issue of child abuse very seriously.

We commissioned the Little Children are Sacred report … I am concerned that the children we need to protect are getting a bit lost in this whole debate. It is not about leases and access to Aboriginal land. What started this is the need to protect children. Since the intervention and this legislation, the protection of those children that we wrote about in that inquiry has been taken off the radar.

In my area of responsibility, there will be an additional $79.36 million a year available to the area of child protection. This will include the provision of:

• 1 Children’s Commissioner
• 10 child protection workers
• 37 additional specialist Family and Children’s Services staff
• 40 police – Remote Policing Strategy and Child Abuse Taskforce
• 4 specialist alcohol rehabilitation workers
• 26 family violence support workers

But, as the Chief Minister pointed out yesterday, none of this will work without the active engagement of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory.

And I believe this will happen for the simple reason that it is the kind of thing Aboriginal Territorians have been looking for over many years.

It is why we have seen the activism of so many Aboriginal Territorians in issues such as night patrols and substance abuse programs; with women’s centres; with health services and schools.

This activism must be rewarded, and the Closing the Gap generational plan for action is a vital step on the road to achieve measures of equality that have not been available here in the Territory at any stage – before or post-self government.

Child protection is a profoundly complex question – for the children and families involved no less than that for the State, which of necessity has a role in its administration. It is an area in which the State is deliberately asked by the community to intervene and interfere with an institution that is customarily regarded as sacrosanct: the family.

Violence, sexual abuse and neglect within the family have a variety of complex, interwoven origins, including poverty, mental health issues, substance abuse and uneven power relationships between adults and children, women and men.

At times, the problems seem absolutely intractable: we are talking here of young peoples’ lives that will forever be touched by experiences often too horrible to contemplate – let alone comprehend.

We are talking here of actions by one human against another that are often to hideous to think about – let alone forgive.

The role of the State in child protection is invidious. It is asked – even commanded – to actively intervene in the lives of members of our community. The judgement of the community is that some people are too vulnerable than to do anything but rely on the State.

The State is asked to make awful choices in the name of child protection including, potentially, taking children away from their families – temporarily or permanently.

The State is asked to care for our children, and very often our women too, in less than perfect circumstances.

While we try and do good – while our police and child protection workers, nurses, health workers doctors and teachers try to do good – a fine line must be trodden.

There are no glib, easy solutions; no quick fixes. Anyone in this place, or beyond, who tries to tell us otherwise is a fool. Anyone who thinks that a solution can rest with just a bit of juggling of a budget here or there; or jailing people for a bit longer; are just kidding themselves.

Because we are dealing with people who are damaged – sometimes horrifically – our every action – and inaction – can have consequences that are profoundly difficult to predict for those people. We are dealing with imperfect human beings, in an imperfect world – administered by an imperfect State.

There are no simple solutions.

However, there is an overarching philosophy that must guide us. It must guide us as legislators; as it guides so many of the front line workers in the field of child protection to whom I pay tribute today.

That is, no matter what positive outcomes we might hope to achieve, our guiding principle must be to “do no further harm”.

We owe that to the children. We owe that to the future. We owe that to the 30,000 Aboriginal kids that will be born over the next 20 years.

As you would know, there are not a lot of laughs in child protection. Not a day goes by without material crossing my desk that is testament to the evil that humans can do to each other; especially to our women and children.

It often seems hopeless.

Perhaps Malcolm Fraser was right in pointing out “Life wasn’t meant to be easy”.

But, as Mr Fraser has also pointed out on a number of occasions, the complete quotation comes from the Irish writer, George Bernard Shaw, who originally said:

“Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.”

Let’s do our utmost, on both sides of this Assembly, to do our best to take courage – and hope – and create a society in which life – for our kids – can indeed be delightful.