Politics with Michelle Grattan: Pat Turner on Indigenous empowerment, Closing the Gap, and future Indigenous leadership

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s address to the weekend Garma festival had a different tone from last year’s, when the Voice referendum was approaching. The Prime Minister is resetting policy, moving the focus to the economic empowerment of Indigenous communities as a path to reducing Indigenous disadvantage and “closing the gap”. Indigenous outcomes continue to go backwards for some key closing-the-gap targets.

Albanese said the government would work closely with the Coalition of Peaks, a grouping of more than 80 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled organisations.

Pat Turner is lead convener of the Coalition of Peaks and CEO of the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO), and she joined the podcast.

On government-subsidised projects, Turner is frustrated companies and investors have been slow to involve local Aboriginal communities.

This has been raised in the group that is responsible for renewables, and they say, oh no, it’s far too expensive to do this in Aboriginal communities. So they need to get out and talk to the Aboriginal leaders on the ground who know what their community’s needs are, and they need to map it so they can’t just be using the excuse of costs alone as an issue that’s preventing them from engaging directly with the landholders.

They just look at the costs and, you know, shake their heads. But I think they’ve got to do better modelling with the land councils.

On increasing Aboriginal employment, Turner says

We’ve been working with the Treasury as the Coalition of Peaks now since the [2022] jobs summit. And the Coalition of Peaks’ priority is to ensure that we get real jobs at the local level. And then we have the issue in relation to the leveraging of […] our land assets for all future development opportunities. So there is a good opportunity there, but it must involve the statutory landholders directly.

On reducing incarceration rates, she highlights bail laws,

All jurisdictions should be reviewing their bail laws.

You’ve got to have an address for people to be bailed to. And so there’s got to be some form of accommodation whereby people can give an address to be bailed to. This is how everything’s interrelated and I say that you can’t do economic policy on its own. That means that state governments should be investing more money into housing and different types of accommodation that are required for different, situations.

On the Voice’s defeat and the future of Aboriginal leadership, Turner says the loss was “a massive hit to morale across Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia”.

But I have to say that it hasn’t deterred the Coalition of Peaks from pursuing full implementation of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap.

While we all need new generations to come forward, they have to do it by listening to the elders and being guided by them.

Asked to name any leaders of the future she points to Rachel Perkins, one of those prominent in the Voice campaign.

Could she work with Jacinta Price if there were a Coaliton government?

We work with anyone who’s in government. As we’ve already demonstrated. It was Scott Morrison who gave birth to the National Agreement when he was the head of COAG, right back in 2018 and they gave the go-ahead in Adelaide.

So the Coalition is very invested in the National Agreement on Closing the Gap. And I expect that support to continue.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.