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The Federal Government today begins its search for a leader in its efforts to close the gap on health, education and housing for Indigenous Australians.

The Government is advertising the position of Coordinator-General for Remote Indigenous Services, to pull together the various initiatives announced during the week.

They include nearly $60 million to tackle eye and ear health and $46 million for aged care, as well as housing, construction and employment programs.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said on Thursday there has been progress in the past 12 months in closing the gap in the living standards between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

The Opposition says there is nothing in the report card to suggest Mr Rudd’s claims of advancement are true, and the Greens agree.

But there has been a more positive response from some Indigenous advocates.

Head of the CRC for Aboriginal Health at Charles Darwin University, Mike Gooda, said yesterday the Government’s plans to fund two free health checks over the next four years for half of Indigenous people aged between 16 and 55 will make a difference.

“It’s really important that we get our people to basically empower themselves with their own health issues,” he said.

“To get in there to take control, otherwise the health system will take control and when you have heart attack or a stroke that’s when the health system takes control.

“They’re trying to encourage people to take control themselves and take some responsibility for their health as well.”

Outback Stores says a quality food store is as essential as police, education and health in remote Aboriginal communities.

It has put in a submission to a Federal Parliamentary inquiry looking at improving the affordability and availability of good food to Aboriginal people.

Chief executive officer John Kop says his company has set up 27 stores in communities and hopes to create more employment and training opportunities.

“I think that stores are the central hub in the community and they are one of the few entities that can actually create economic viability as well as actually delivering food security in a community,”

“That is fundamental for making a community function and become sustainable for the longer term.”

The first “report card” on efforts to improve the living conditions of Indigenous Australians is in, with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd saying there has been progress in the past 12 months.

Mr Rudd says last year’s apology to the Stolen Generations raised expectations of a speedy solution, but it will take time to deliver major gains in Indigenous education, employment and life expectancy.

“Some say little has happened in the year since the apology, but that is not the case,” Mr Rudd said.

“Progress has been made, houses are being built. Since the end of 2007, 80 houses have been completed or just nearing completion in remote Northern Territory communities.”

The Opposition says there is nothing in the report card to suggest Mr Rudd’s claims of advancement are true, and the Greens agree.

But there has been a more positive response from some Indigenous advocates.

Head of the CRC for Aboriginal Health at Charles Darwin University, Mike Gooda, says the Government’s plans to fund two free health checks over the next four years for half of Indigenous people aged between 16 and 55 will make a difference.

“It’s really important that we get our people to basically empower themselves with their own health issues. To get in there to take control, otherwise the health system will take control and when you have heart attack or a stroke that’s when the health system takes control,” Mr Gooda said.

“They’re trying to encourage people to take control themselves and take some responsibility for their health as well.”

Mr Rudd also announced $58 million will be spent to tackle chronic eye diseases such as trachoma and chronic middle ear infections and that a coordinator general will be appointed to ensure programs are delivered effectively.

Mr Gooda welcomes the money but warns it needs to “hit the ground” in a timely and effective manner.

“We know there are terrific issues to be addressed and worked for - it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got, if you don’t have people to go out there and work it’s useless. So from our perspective I would like to think about the coordinator general’s position about how that’s going to manifest itself and making sure the effort is made on the ground.”

Education reforms

Dr Chris Sarra is executive director of the Indigenous Education Leadership Institute based at the Queensland University of Technology. He says he was encouraged by Mr Rudd’s comments on the education reform, but there is still clearly a long way to go.

Dr Sarra achieved impressive results as the principal of Cherbourg State School, a regional Aboriginal community school in Queensland.

“At last there’s a recognition that maybe we need to have a look at ourselves as service providers to communities and create positions that are going to sit down and have conversations with Aboriginal people to say ‘what exists here that’s good, what’s missing, how can we get things going between us and what’s the responsibilities of each party’?” Dr Sarra said.

“When you compare that to what occurred under previous governments, where they sent the Army in and the gingerbread men all over the place, they scared the hell out of Aborigines and got them running out of town.”

But he says linking school attendance with welfare payments is not one of the magic bullets to fix the truancy problem.

“The way you get kids to school is to create a good quality school, that says I believe in you and this is a great place to be, that recognises you’ve got challenges in your community, but we’ve got something here that can set you free from that,” he said.

Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin says the Government will introduce legislation to reinstate the Racial Discrimination Act into Parliament later this year.

The Act was suspended in 2007 to clear the way for it to quarantine welfare payments as part of the Northern Territory indigenous intervention.

Yesterday the Government said it would keep quarantining welfare as part of its attempt to improve Indigenous living conditions.

Ms Macklin

The Central Australia Aboriginal Alcohol Programs Unit’s Abdul Kahn says their Alice Springs facility already has 24 clients despite only having a capacity for 20 and there is a growing waiting list.

He says he asked former health minister Chris Burns for funding in particular to cover the costs of running a women’s residential facility for those affected by alcohol.

“I have 17 agencies on the waiting list. They’re waiting to bring women with children to this facility,” he said.

“But the Northern Territory Government, they haven’t given us the funding for this thing and I’m really a bit embarrassed.

“People are ringing me on a day-to-day basis [asking] when do we think the women’s facility will be open.”

As central Australia’s main alcohol rehabilitation provider Mr Kahn says educating young people should be the focus of policies on Closing the Gap for Indigenous people.

He says there should be education officers visiting all schools to teach students about alcohol and drug abuse.

Mr Kahn says there has been some improvement with more drug and alcohol inspectors being employed.

But he says alcohol restrictions have not worked and he has heard people are abusing the $100 limit on alcohol purchases that are not recorded.

“It hasn’t worked to some extent. Because even now when I drive around the town in the broad daylight I see people drinking,” he said.

“I don’t think that it has improved significantly.

“First of all something has to be done about the outlets. We have far too many outlets in this town.”

The Prime Minister’s update on his Closing the Gap policy has received scathing reviews from the Western Australian Greens.

Kevin Rudd pledged to bring Aboriginal life expectancy and living conditions into line with mainstream Australians following his election in 2007.

He yesterday told Parliament that while improvements will take time, progress has been made in housing and healthcare.

Western Australian Greens Senator Rachel Siewert says it was a disappointing speech that exposed the Prime Minister’s lack of commitment to the cause.

“Data from around Australia shows there hasn’t been a closing of the gap in the past 12 months and I was disappointed in the Prime Minister’s statement in Parliament that basically didn’t give any detail about how to close the gap,” she said.

“We all know, of course, that it’s going to take some time but in order to do that there needs to be a real commitment.”

Senator Siewert says for all the Government’s noble aims, little has changed since the Howard era.

“We haven’t seen the level of commitment of resources that needs to be put in, and in fact the Prime Ministers statement… unfortunately seems to be a continuation of the Howard government, and I find that extremely disappointing,” she said.

Far north Queensland police say it was a quiet night in the Cape York community of Aurukun after a disturbance yesterday afternoon.

Officers from Cairns were flown in to assist after a group of people gathered outside the police station during a domestic situation.

A number of people, including children, had to shelter inside the building.

Police say they are speaking to a man allegedly involved in the disturbance.

They say there have been no reports of violence overnight.

The Federal Government is coming under fire over its first annual report to Parliament on efforts to improve the living conditions of Indigenous Australians.

The Government’s report card shows significant gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in health, education and housing.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says progress is being made, but the Opposition’s Indigenous Affairs spokesman, Tony Abbott, is not so sure.

“There are no statistics in there to show there has been any significant improvement,” he said.

“Indigenous disadvantage is just as great as it was 12 months ago.”

Greens Senator Rachel Siewert agrees.

“The Government has not delivered on the promise of the apology,” she said.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma says he is pleased the report sets out a long term framework for improving living conditions, but says an ongoing sticking point is the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act.

“It’s just not acceptable that we have differential treatment,” he said.

“We still have one of our basic human rights protection mechanisms suspended.”

The suspension allows the Government to quarantine the welfare payments in Indigenous communities.

Medical, schooling and housing bodies in the Northern Territory have lashed out at the Federal Government’s first annual progress report on closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

In his apology to the Stolen Generations last year, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd promised a report card on the Government’s efforts to be delivered on the first day in Parliament every year.

But the first of those report cards was delayed until today, and leaders from the education, medical and housing sectors say the Government is not doing enough to honour their pledge.

The principal of an Aboriginal-run school in Alice Springs says elders are concerned the Federal and Territory governments do not recognise the value of teaching children in Indigenous languages.

Ken Langford-Smith from the Yipirinya School says the Federal Government needs to recognise the importance of teaching in a student’s first language.

“For four years, the Government has been battling with the Government, because they have threatened to withdraw the funding for teaching language and culture in this school,” he said.

“That’s very dear to our Indigenous elders.

“It’s very important to them to have that. That was the reason the main reason the school was founded in the first place.”

Mr Langford-Smith says he has seen no evidence of government action to improve results and attendance at his school.

He says the school will continue to resist the Territory Government’s push to have English taught for the first four hours of the day.

“We feel that’s misguided policy,” he said.

“We don’t agree with it at all and we’ll stick to our position of keeping Indigenous language and culture strong in our curriculum.

“We don’t believe that affects our results, because we think our results compare very well with the Indigenous average in the Territory.”

Housing

The Northern Territory’s peak housing group says says no new houses have been built for central Australia’s Indigenous population since the roll out of the federal intervention in 2007.

The group’s Jill Mead says there is plenty of money being handed out, but nothing is happening on the ground.

“It has been very slow and I do accept that change is very difficult,” she said.

“It is a very big ask and big amount of money, but the reality is that particularly no Indigenous people have benefited from the amount of dollars that have been given to the Territory, certainly in the last 12 months.”

Health concerns

The president of the Australian Medical Association’s Northern Territory branch says the huge investment governments are making into Indigenous health has not achieved the improvements the medical community was expecting.

Doctor Peter Beaumont says the Federal Government’s international aid model should be applied domestically to reduce poverty.

He says he has raised serious concerns about Indigenous health spending during a meeting with the Territory Health Minister Kon Vatskalis today.

“We are not seeing exactly what programs are in place, what the outcomes of those programs are and where we’re going,” he said.

“We’ve seen Australia give fantastic care through AusAID to groups of people who are disadvantaged outside of Australia.

“We suggested to Minister Vatskalis that perhaps Australia should look at the AusAID model and apply it to our own people.”

Dr Beaumont says a lot of Commonwealth money allocated to improve Aboriginal health has been caught up in bureaucracy.

“One of the points we raised with [Mr Vatskalis] was our serious concern that the doctors on the ground aren’t seeing the kind of outcomes from the money that’s been spent that we would like to have seen in Indigenous health,” he said.

‘Culture shock’

An Arnhem Land-based community group called Aboriginal Resource and Development Services says there has been little progress.

“People are almost suffering culture shock for the massive amount of change that has occurred in their lives over a very short period of time,” chief executive Richard Trudgen told ABC Radio’s PM.

“You had the intervention itself, which was massive. You’ve had the quarantining of welfare. But we’ve seen no new housing. We’ve now got a requirement that leases be on communities before any new housing development occurs on those places.”

He says top-down change will never work.

“If change is occurring over the top of your head by another group of people and you don’t understand the processes, you don’t even understand why it’s happening, and it’s happening to you and your family,” he said.

“That can be extremely disastrous and can lead to people getting severely depressed.

“Petrol sniffing is on the rise in East Arnhem, which means families are just, stop operating as families.”