Professor Jack Beetson says Indigenous voice to parliament needed to guide education policy

A leading Indigenous education advocate says the voice would ensure that intergenerational problems among Aboriginal people would be a policy priority for future governments.

University of New England professor Jack Beetson.

A leading Indigenous education advocate says the Voice would ensure that intergenerational problems among Aboriginal people such as low levels of literacy would be made to be a policy priority for future governments.

Jack Beetson, a Ngemba man and adjunct professor at the Australian Centre for Agriculture and Law at the University of New England, said 40-70 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people over 15 years of age had low or poor literacy.

Writing for The Australian, Professor Beetson said despite widespread acknowledgment of the problem and the potential benefits to closing the gap if it was tackled, there had been little political imperative and action to improve Indigenous literacy.

Professor Beetson said for decades successive inquiries and taskforces, including the 1988 Aboriginal Education Policy Task Force and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, had called for a mass literacy program and were ignored.

“If the recommendations of the Task Force and Commission had been enacted, the trickle-through effect on the younger generations should by now be revealing stunning results – improved education levels, job opportunities, lower Indigenous rates of incarceration and numerous other social and economic benefits,’’ he writes.

Professor Beetson’s father was a drover and his mother an orderly at the hospital in Nyngan, west of Dubbo. He picked cotton from the age of 8. He was taught how to read by the non-Indigenous wife of his brother.

A director of the Literacy for Life Foundation, he said internationally designed “low-cost, high-impact” programs that had been trialled had cut illiteracy levels by up to 24 per cent in communities in NSW, Queensland and the Northern Territory.