Ms CARNEY - 2006-10-11
When the member for Arafura was Minister for Family and Community Services, she said in the parliament on 24 August 2004 that, in relation to child abuse, she did not need any more information before taking action. She said that her department currently had in front of it over 20 different reports about understanding and addressing child abuse in Australia. She went on to say: ‘… that while information is important, it is action, not information, which is needed now’. Did you provide a copy of the memo you wrote to the then Police minister in November 2004 to the then Minister for Family and Community Services? You and your Police minister knew what was going on and you failed to act until you announced an inquiry in June. Do you agree that that was a shallow and opportunistic response?
ANSWER
Madam Speaker, I took time in the House to answer in detail the first question about Mutitjulu. I believe I demonstrated pretty clearly that we have been taking action on a range of issues at Mutitjulu. Mutitjulu has a long history of being a very difficult community. It attracts people from around that Central Australian region. Certainly, petrol sniffing is a key issue. I do not believe there is any secret about the problems facing Mutitjulu.
We have put additional resources into police. We had a discussion about that yesterday – 165 additional police officers on the ground in the Territory; there will be 200 by the end of the financial year, and significant additional resources into child protection. We knew the issue was a very significant one for us. Every other jurisdiction has put considerable resources into child protection in an attempt to tackle what is an insidious problem. We are not Robinson Crusoe in this. It is a problem right across Australia.
We put those resources in. There was action being taken, working with the Commonwealth, and we were not hiding that action. I stood in this House talking about the Working Together project, saying we were working together on Mutitjulu because of the problems. We have taken that action.
I do not back off the decision to have an inquiry. We had a lot of national attention on Mutitjulu. If you read a newspaper such as the National Indigenous Times, the assessment is that the Lateline program was really an attempt to justify a statement made by the Indigenous Affairs minister. Mal Brough went on television and said: ‘There are paedophile rings in the Northern Territory’, and when asked to justify it, could not.
So we had the disgraceful episode of a program like Lateline, which had a reputation, and lost it, I believe, very substantially over that program, by creating a story about Mutitjulu with a number of people who had not lived there for up to five or six years. We had the likes of Greg Andrews, in his disguise as a former youth worker, which he never was, with his hat pulled down over his head and in the darkness, supporting comments made by the man who employed him, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough.
Mr Stirling: What a set up!
Ms MARTIN: What a set up it was. I responded, quite appropriately, to the national discussion that was going on around child sex abuse, a quite legitimate discussion, despite efforts right across Australia, and realised that it was an appropriate time to have an inquiry to look at how we get through the problems of not having witnesses, of people feeling fearful of stepping forward and saying: ‘That’s the perpetrator. I want him to go to court’.
It does not mean that we took no action before this. That is simply rubbish. It does not mean that we did not take action. What we did was to add another level of inquiry to this very important issue. Protecting our children is of the highest importance, and I do not make any apology. I say again, much of the information passed to me by someone I trusted, that is the project manager of Working Together, Greg Andrews, has been unsubstantiated. He did not, as an employee of the federal government working in the Territory, pass on issues that he was instructed to do to our police. He did not do that - only an anonymous fax after he left employ and left the Territory.
I am very disappointed over what happened, but it does not undermine the fact that Mutitjulu is a community with a range of problems. As I said to the Mutitjulu community, I am committed to working with them. We do have runs on the board, and I want to be able to work with the Mutitjulu community, and hopefully with the Commonwealth government if they will stop taking punitive action at Mutitjulu, and look at a much brighter future.
ANSWER
Madam Speaker, I took time in the House to answer in detail the first question about Mutitjulu. I believe I demonstrated pretty clearly that we have been taking action on a range of issues at Mutitjulu. Mutitjulu has a long history of being a very difficult community. It attracts people from around that Central Australian region. Certainly, petrol sniffing is a key issue. I do not believe there is any secret about the problems facing Mutitjulu.
We have put additional resources into police. We had a discussion about that yesterday – 165 additional police officers on the ground in the Territory; there will be 200 by the end of the financial year, and significant additional resources into child protection. We knew the issue was a very significant one for us. Every other jurisdiction has put considerable resources into child protection in an attempt to tackle what is an insidious problem. We are not Robinson Crusoe in this. It is a problem right across Australia.
We put those resources in. There was action being taken, working with the Commonwealth, and we were not hiding that action. I stood in this House talking about the Working Together project, saying we were working together on Mutitjulu because of the problems. We have taken that action.
I do not back off the decision to have an inquiry. We had a lot of national attention on Mutitjulu. If you read a newspaper such as the National Indigenous Times, the assessment is that the Lateline program was really an attempt to justify a statement made by the Indigenous Affairs minister. Mal Brough went on television and said: ‘There are paedophile rings in the Northern Territory’, and when asked to justify it, could not.
So we had the disgraceful episode of a program like Lateline, which had a reputation, and lost it, I believe, very substantially over that program, by creating a story about Mutitjulu with a number of people who had not lived there for up to five or six years. We had the likes of Greg Andrews, in his disguise as a former youth worker, which he never was, with his hat pulled down over his head and in the darkness, supporting comments made by the man who employed him, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough.
Mr Stirling: What a set up!
Ms MARTIN: What a set up it was. I responded, quite appropriately, to the national discussion that was going on around child sex abuse, a quite legitimate discussion, despite efforts right across Australia, and realised that it was an appropriate time to have an inquiry to look at how we get through the problems of not having witnesses, of people feeling fearful of stepping forward and saying: ‘That’s the perpetrator. I want him to go to court’.
It does not mean that we took no action before this. That is simply rubbish. It does not mean that we did not take action. What we did was to add another level of inquiry to this very important issue. Protecting our children is of the highest importance, and I do not make any apology. I say again, much of the information passed to me by someone I trusted, that is the project manager of Working Together, Greg Andrews, has been unsubstantiated. He did not, as an employee of the federal government working in the Territory, pass on issues that he was instructed to do to our police. He did not do that - only an anonymous fax after he left employ and left the Territory.
I am very disappointed over what happened, but it does not undermine the fact that Mutitjulu is a community with a range of problems. As I said to the Mutitjulu community, I am committed to working with them. We do have runs on the board, and I want to be able to work with the Mutitjulu community, and hopefully with the Commonwealth government if they will stop taking punitive action at Mutitjulu, and look at a much brighter future.
Last updated: 09 Aug 2016