Senator Nigel Scullion - Address The Nationals Federal Council 2011
28-August-2011
Senator Nigel Scullion
Deputy Leader of The Nationals
Address to The Nationals Federal Council 2011
Well they say a week is a long time in
Parliament, in politics. Well I
certainly, I’ve worked out that a week in Opposition probably equates to about
probably fourteen days at any other time. And it tends to focus the mind on issues that
you certainly wouldn’t do in Government.
I’ve been thinking a little about how I’m trying to formulate – and what
I can make of – all the feedback that I’m getting as I travel around
Australia. And there is a couple of
particular messages.
I can remember in that great experiment of
democracy that Australian’s had a bit of a crack at in 2007. They sat next to the election box, it was a
great sunny day, it wasn’t raining anywhere.
We all had a bit of a debt, we had our normal problems, we had to buy a
new car or whatever it was, but things were going pretty well. In fact, they went so well, and things had
been going well for so long, I think that notion of democracy was something they
were going to have a bit of a crack at something different. It wasn’t all that important. And so in that laboratory environment they
pushed the button.
Well in 2010, I think most of them were in
panic mode. They were very concerned
that they had made the wrong decision and they wanted very much to right that
wrong. And of course in every disaster,
natural or otherwise, in this case a laboratory fire, somehow a couple of the
rats ended up in the wrong cage and we now have the Labor Government back in
power again.
But as a consequence of that, many of the
voters this time around will be very prudent.
The circumstances between 2007, for us as a nation, for us as families,
for us as communities, and individuals, have changed very, very much. And I know all of you will have friends and
people you talk to all the time. It
doesn’t matter who you are, how much you earn, what job you have, what your
aspirations are. It’s just the hill’s a
lot higher, things are nowhere near as optimistic. People are not confident, and confidence is
an important thing. Not only an
important thing personally: to yourself, and your family, but it’s an important
thing to your country and to your economy.
So confidence is rock-bottom. And
I think when we start looking at the next election we need to think very
carefully about the sort of messaging that we need to give people. Because I think at the next election, people
are going to be far more prudent – and can I say, conservative – about how they
cast their vote.
They’ve just had two terms of the most
toxic reminder about what happens when you get it wrong. This is not a joke, this is not an
experiment, this isn’t a laugh, this isn’t a different t-shirt with a whole
bunch of razzamatazz. This is fair
dinkum. We’re going to have to have a
very careful look at this. And I think
some of the reminders that I’ve had over recent times about what people will be
thinking about. I think they’re going to
judge us less on policies. I think
people expect – I haven’t actually seen a political party put forward a policy
at election time that’s absolutely awful.
They couch it in pretty nice terms and it all looks good. I mean, you can scrape a bit of paint off The
Greens and that’s all pretty awful, but the rest of the ordinary parties I
think that’s the case.
And so a relative comparison of policies,
you know I just don’t think it’s going to have the same grunt as it has in
other times. People are going to be
looking for two things. They’re going to
be looking for credibility, and they’re going to be looking for
competence. Competence is going to be a
very, very important part of the political vernacular of the future. And it is very important, because of that, that
we’re able to talk to everybody who will listen, and we need to weave through
our narrative history. Who we are? We are a competent party and we are made up
of extremely experienced and competent people.
And of course the Australian public don’t have to look very far to be
able to demonstrate a stark comparison.
We can recall, and we’ve been through this
in the past, we inherited – the last time we were in Government we inherited – a
huge debt. We paid off the debt. We made a surplus. We built a
telecommunications fund. We built a
Future Fund. We built an education
fund. And we built confidence. We built confidence in people, and people
felt that.
So when Labor took over, they lost the
surplus, they lost the telecommunications fund, they lost the Future Fund, they
lost the education fund, and they found a massive debt. And of course, this crushed confidence in
this country. It’s really crushed the
confidence of this country. And I am aware
of it particularly when I talk to people in small business. The small business world at the moment are
doing it really, really tough. And
that’s because of consumer confidence.
We talk about competence. There’s a couple
of tests, but one of the fundamental tests is knowing when it’s going
wrong. Having sort of an understanding
that things aren’t going as well as it could be. So with the pink batts scheme – we can
remember the pink batts scheme, you know – they’d already signed out millions
of dollars of invoices for buildings that didn’t exist. It took the tragedy of four lives, 300
house-fires. I mean you’d reckon you’d
see the smoke from Parliament House. And
they didn’t have the competence to understand that when something goes wrong in
any program delivery, leadership dictates you’ve got to intervene and change
those parameters. You’ve got to get in
and do it.
The Strategic Indigenous Housing and
infrastructure Program, SIHIP, you’d reckon the sort of signals – like we’ve
spent $40 million and we haven’t laid a single brick might have been a bit of
an early indication that things weren’t going right. But no … we sort of pondered along, we’re
still struggling along the moment. A
complete failure.
Building the Education Revolution, well it
started off all right, but one would have thought in the early days when they
had spent all of the money and had got around about a third of the outcomes that
the alarms would have started going off.
This is not a competent Government, and it’s very easy for us to make
very good comparisons about we are very competent, and have been competent, and
they are not. But we’ve got to remember
that people are looking for competence.
That’s something that will be above and beyond the nature of the flash
policies in these coming times and we need to ensure that we can demonstrate
that. We’ve got to know our business,
we’ve got to know our way around the policies, and we’ve got to be able to be
competent in answering any questions, and articulating our direction in that
regard.
The other issue is about credibility. About credibility and trust. This last election, of course, there was a
very important policy. It was a
bipartisan policy at the last election.
That bipartisan policy was there because had you had any other policy at
the election you would not have been elected.
Would not have been elected. It
was a very important policy. Both
parties went strongly to an election saying, “We will not have a carbon
tax.” A very strong policy. A policy without which you would never have
been elected. Now if you’re talking
about credibility and trust, that is a breach of trust with the Australian
people. I don’t think there has been any
precedent since Federation. None. People will never get tired of being
reminded that you can not trust the Labor Government.
They will do anything in their own
political interests. They will put their
own political aspirations and the interest of their party above the national
interest almost every time. And so it is
a part of the narrative, it’s about trust.
And we’ve got to walk the talk.
Any of the policies that I’m associated with, and any of the policies
the Nationals have been associated with: our word will be our bond. We need to ensure that is carried through to
the election and beyond.
Now I’ve just been in Kalkaringi and in
Kalkaringi an old guy came up to me actually, and he was saying, he was
complaining, it was about a – I won’t go into the details – but it was about a
house. He’d been a part of the SIHIP
program and he was saying to me just two things. He said, “What about this – and he was
telling me about this – what about that carbon tax? How can you lie like that,
you know?” This is a pretty old man from
the bush, and he got on to talking about the houses. And there’s only two points he was
making. How could you possibly lie, and
why can’t she even paint a house for me?
And that just seems incredible.
And that message is resonating as far out in the bush as you can
possibly go. And it resonates everywhere
we go.
So when I was in Kalkaringi, I was actually
meeting with a number of the leaders of the north-western desert country in the
Northern Territory. They were gathering
for the 45th Anniversary of the Wave Hill Walkoff and it was a great
opportunity for me to meet them. Now
those particular aboriginal people make up 15% of all those people who live in
– sorry, they are, 15% of all Aboriginal people live in remote and very remote Australia. Now only 1% of our population lives there, of
the mainstream population. So that’ll
give you an idea of the sort of places that I’m talking about. And it’s often the sort of places that you
see characterised: you know pieces of tin, just complete third-world
circumstances, and they are awful circumstances and they must change.
But it is useful to put, I think, the
circumstances in context. Last year
there was 540,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia. So 330,000 of them actually live in the major
metropolitan areas of Australia, some 61%.
Now most of those are engaged in the same way we are. There is no difference in the terms of their
opportunity. They send their kids to
school, they’re all doing very well, they’re great Australian making a
wonderful contribution. But the other 40-odd%,
they’re our people. They live in
regional and rural Australia. And out of
that 40% - a massive percentage, is far more than those in metropolitan areas –
are disconnected.
Now, I think that when we’re talking about
Closing the Gap, I think we need to talk about who’s going to champion
this. Who’s going to get out of bed
every single day and make sure that somebody is changing the way we do
things? Because at Kalkaringi in 1966,
all that hope: handing back our lands, we’ll be able to do our own thing, we’ll
have independence, we’ll be become a part of the Australian community … well a
lot of that hope has been dashed, have been dashed over history.
When we talk about high levels of
incarceration, when we talk about high levels of substance abuse, disconnection
from employment and low levels of education that are characterised in these
areas, they’re not characteristics – as many of you would have heard from me
before – of ethnicity. It’s not about
Aboriginality, it’s simply about poverty.
And we’ve got to move to ensure that our policies are about dealing with
poverty rather than any particular ethnicity.
And there are two particular issues that are affecting – suffocating –
Aboriginal people today. They are
welfare dependency and poor educational standards.
If people are poorly educated and they are
trapped in this welfare dependency, absolutely nothing is going to change. You can provide jobs, we can provide
opportunities, we can provide all sorts of services. But if you haven’t got a good education, if
there are jobs available, they’re still out of reach. And so the fundamental changes we’ve got to
make is to get people educated and get them into work.
So there have been two reports released
literally over the last couple of weeks.
One report’s told us that we spend about $3.5 billion a year, and that’s
been over the last ten years. Now that
was predicated on figures from 2009, but I suspect it’s about right. And the second, that’s come out last week,
was the Productivity Commission Report on Indigenous Disadvantage under the
COAG benchmarks. Comes out ever year,
and the news is – at best – that the gap isn’t closing. At best.
And so why wonder why that is the case?
I suspect that the policy is, and the
policy settings are actually okay. In
some of these areas, I think they’re okay.
But the fact is we’ve got two-speed policies. You’ve heard about the two-speed economy, we
all know about that. But we’ve got an
application of our policy, we have an application for non-Indigenous people and
we seem to have an application for Indigenous people. For an example, in terms of education –
attendance, one would have thought would have been a fundamental of that,
you’re not going to learn much at home.
So the Northern Territory has a target –
this is their Budget as a Critical Performance Indicator – they want to have
96% school attendance for non-Aboriginal people. It’s in the Budget, that’s what we’re
targeting. But they’re actually
targeting for Aboriginal people, the target is 33%. That’s their target. That’s what they want to achieve in the
Northern Territory, whom which we have 30% of our population is Aboriginal.
They want to get 33% to school. Now what
an aspirational target that is. I mean,
that is just outrageous.
So the Northern Territory target – again,
this gets worse. Out of that 33% who
they want to go to school, who go to school, they want the minimum standard for
reading and writing – of course if the colour of your skin is white, it’s
89%. But unfortunately if you’re a
blackfella, its 32%. So out of the 33%
that actually attend, it ends up out of the total population somewhere 11% and
15% have got any possible hope, any possible hope, of completing Year 12. And of course, in that demographic,
unsurprisingly, those people who have achieved Year 12 is 12%. There’s no surprise, if that’s the sort of
inputs from those jurisdictions. It’s
racist, it’s discriminatory, and that approach sadly extends to other areas of
policy implementation.
Mutual obligation is a condition placed on
those who receive welfare payments. But
they must fulfil their part of the deal.
So you’ve got to turn up to job interviews. You’ve got to attend training. You’ve got to seek work. And failure means that you suspend your
welfare. It’s the same for all
Australians, except if you’re an Indigenous Australian. Because somewhere in the system someone feels
sorry for you. Or in this case, the
Minister said all those – there’s a thing called a Remote Exemption, in the
Howard Government we removed it because where there are jobs this still must
apply.
You can imagine what it would like to be, I
think we’d all understand, in a welfare dependent period, over a period of
time, it’s very difficult to break out of that.
And so you need assistance to break out of that. So by saying to someone, “No, it’s going to
be all right, we won’t have to breach you on these things. We won’t give you a hard time because of the
colour of your skin” is not helping them out.
It’s not helping them out. It’s
allowing them to continue to live in the cycle of welfare, often substance
abuse, and general poverty. And that is
completely unacceptable. These are our
people, their future is our future.
These are racist and discriminatory policies and they must change.
So we must remove all race-based standards
that have been allowed to permeate Government policy. Of course there’s going to be need for
Indigenous-specific policy, of that there’s no doubt. So what is deemed acceptable for one will be
the minimum standard for all Australians.
There’ll be no more “Indigenous is second best” – because you’re a
blackfella it just doesn’t matter, we’re not expecting you to do any better
than just stay where you are. That is
totally unacceptable and we’ll ensure that that doesn’t happen again.
It’s quite a simple process. We are all competent people. We will have in Government competent
Ministers and we will ensure the people running our Departments and are
responsible for the work that we demand are competent individuals. All kids will go to school. It’s not like it’s an option. In the Northern Territory today, 46% of kids
in the Northern Territory do not attend school – do not attend school. The Northern Territory Government is
responsible for them attending school.
It’s an option. I tell you what
if I’d have a continued option of fishing or school, well I’d probably be
fishing. And if it hadn’t have been for
that large sized-10 boot from a copper I definitely would still be fishing.
So all absences need to be recorded and
followed up with the necessary support.
You’ve got to work with the families, work with the communities, and we
can break this failed education cycle.
And I’d very much commend the work of Noel Pearson and the Family
Relationship Commission in Queensland, he’s done a fantastic job. So welfare, mutual obligation requirements,
must be enforced. We must extend this
leverage to move people from welfare to work to everybody irrespective of the
colour of their skin. There are opportunities
for work, people will be trained, supported, and placed in those jobs. Where employment is difficult to secure,
life-skills training, work for the dole, and there’s plenty of environmental
tasks and management tasks available and we will ensure that those tasks are
allocated. Sitting on welfare when
you’re capable of work or training will not be an acceptable outcome for
Australians.
Now we know there’ll still be a significant
need around chronic disease management, treatment for dialysis, heart-disease,
respiratory problems. There’s always
going to be unmet need in areas like dental treatment, hearing loss, mental
health services, that are all going to require action. But we can do those things, they are not the
difficult things. We can provide those
services. And we can assure that they
are provided in a way that ensures that those benchmarks actually narrow the
gap. They can be dealt with and they
will dealt with.
For the 7,000 Aboriginal people who were
involved in the live cattle trade, and who’s lives and aspirations have been
casually crushed by a Government that is fixated on placating the views of
their Green political partners rather than focussing on Australia’s most
vulnerable. I can promise them from
opposition and from Government, we’re going to strive to rebuild what Labor has
destroyed. And know this: The Nationals
will never put our political fortunes in front of the national interest and the
interest of our constituents. Thankyou.