Shorten pledge to legislate indigenous voice before referendum

Bill Shorten has pledged to legislate to create an indigenous ‘advisory’’ voice to parliament.

Bill Shorten speaks on the Closing the Gap report yesterday. Picture: AAP

Bill Shorten has pledged to legislate to create an indigenous ­“advisory’’ voice to parliament ahead of putting the plan to a constitutional referendum if Labor wins office, declaring the “lived experience’’ of seeing how such a body operated would defeat scare campaigns against it.

The Opposition Leader used the pledge, in his Closing the Gap response, to set a sharp point of difference to Malcolm Turnbull who has rejected the advisory voice to parliament being ­enshrined in the Constitution.

Mr Shorten’s promise yesterday goes further than his initial response last year which was to call for a joint parliamentary committee to examine the Referendum Council’s recommendation for the constitutionally enshrined body as well as a makarrata commission to oversee a process of agreement-making and truth-telling and work towards a referendum question.

Mr Shorten told parliament yesterday that delegates from the constitutional convention that produced the Uluru Statement From the Heart would join Labor to “begin the detailed design work” ready to legislate the body and then take it to a referendum.

Warning that “bipartisanship does not mean an agreement to do nothing”, Mr Shorten predicted it would be “easier for a referendum to succeed and harder for a scare campaign to be run if we already have lived experience of such a body”. “We will work with but we won’t wait for you,” Mr Shorten told the Prime Minister, adding that “we can close the gap — it is not too hard and it will be First Australians as ever who show us how”.

 

The Prime Minister spruiked economic prosperity rather than the structural reform proposed by the Uluru Statement, declaring that “we cannot close the gap if we do not have equal participation in the economy ... we are determined to build a strong economy, where everyone who can work is able to find employment’’.

Mr Turnbull revealed yesterday that fewer than half of the Closing the Gap strategy’s measures for reducing indigenous disadvantage were on track to be met, with school attendance, reading and numeracy, employment and life expectancy not in line with the decade-long program’s targets. Early-childhood education rates and child mortality have joined year 12 attainment rates — the only one of the scheme’s seven measures to have been on track this time last year — as now on trend to be met.

Four of the seven targets are due to expire this year. Mr Turnbull described the scheme’s current targets as “inappropriate” and signalled a pivot to a greater business and economy focus under a redesigned scheme being considered.

But critics pointed to structural flaws, with one of the measures declared to be on track, child mortality rates, deemed off track a year ago but on track the year before that — all on statistically non-significant data differences.

Kyllie Cripps, acting director of the Indigenous Law Centre at the University of NSW, warned that the numbers used on that measure were “volatile and subject to change”, with “small numbers diluting the rate, giving what on the surface looks positive”.

Centre for Independent Studies analyst Charles Jacobs said the strategy’s design was “inherently problematic” and prone to creating an “unstable environment for success”, with progress on any of its measures potentially masked by changes in the non-­indigenous population.

“For example, between 2005 and 2012, indigenous life expectancy at birth increased 1.6 years for males and 0.6 years for females. However, due to increases in the life expectancy for non-­indigenous Australians, the gap only narrowed by 0.8 years for indigenous males and 0.1 years for females,” Mr Jacobs said.

The program is estimated to have encompassed $130 billion in spending in its first eight years to 2016, according to Productivity Commission data covering both indigenous-specific and mainstream services and analysed by The Australian, but there is little reliable evaluation work done to demonstrate effectiveness.

Mr Turnbull said there would be a new indigenous grants policy looking at “how the billions of dollars we spend … might better support indigenous organisations”.

Speaking at the National Press Club to mark the 10th anniversary of the apology and the Closing the Gap strategy’s launch, Kevin Rudd warned against any watering down of existing targets.