Transcript – 2CC Breakfast with Stephen Cenatiempo – 8 July

Shadow Minister for Social Services and Indigenous Australians – Transcript – 2CC Breakfast
Senator Kerrynne Liddle
Shadow Minister for Social Services
Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians
Senator for South Australia

Transcript
2CC Breakfast
8 July 2025

Topics: NAIDOC Week, Closing the Gap, Kumanjayi Walker Coroner’s Report

E&OE…

Stephen Cenatiempo
NAIDOC Week is on this week an annual event to celebrate Australia’s oldest living culture. But obviously the focus should be on closing the gap and eliminating disadvantage in some Aboriginal communities. To talk to us about this, we’re joined by the Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians, Kerrynne Liddle. Kerrynne, good morning.

Senator Liddle
Good morning, Stephen.

Stephen Cenatiempo
You ever done the drive from Katherine to Nhulunbuy?

Senator Liddle
Well, I was actually born in the Northern Territory, so I’ve been in a lot of places in the Northern Territory – some of them aren’t even on the map. It’s a wonderful place. It’s a wonderful place. And I encourage everybody to travel to the Northern Territory. It’s a fantastic place to visit.

Stephen Cenatiempo
We use this term closing the gap a lot, and we know we’re not achieving it, but I wonder where we need to start, because, clearly, everything we’ve done up to this point hasn’t really worked. Well, I mean, I shouldn’t say that, because there have been major advancements made in over the last, you know, three or four or five decades, but there’s still a lot of work to do. What’s the first point in your view?

Senator Liddle
Look, you know, as the former Shadow Minister for the Prevention of Family Violence, I go back to: if you look at the four targets that are going in the wrong direction. One is incarceration, the other is children in out of home care. The other one is early childhood development, and the other one, sadly, is suicide. You know, when you actually look at the statistics, the common factor in here is actually family violence, and we need to address that. We need to have conversations about the protective factors, which is about getting kids into school rather than on the streets, and actually getting parents into work and not on welfare. These are really important things that we must do to provide protective factors to everyone, and we must also celebrate the really good stuff, like we are in NAIDOC week, but there are great stories out there of success as well, and we should remember that. That’s why I keep saying whenever I get an opportunity, we really do need to focus our attention on the issues that matter

Stephen Cenatiempo
So Senator, those things you talked about are not unique to Indigenous communities, though. Why are they more prevalent in indigenous communities based on the statistics?

Senator Liddle
Well, I think there are, there are issues in there of where people live, how people live. You know, I’ve seen just in the last couple of weeks, some pretty significant infrastructure issues in remote communities. You know, when your toilet breaks down in a city, it’s generally fixed within the day or so. But in some of those remote places, it takes a while to get that stuff done, and we really do need to get better at servicing the infrastructure that also keeps people healthy. You know, in Mutitjulu a couple of weeks ago, they were saying they were building ten new homes, but those homes were being built and just replacing ones that were so dilapidated, so they weren’t adding to what is a growing community. And that’s really important, that we get our head around and our action around what’s actually happening in communities now.

Stephen Cenatiempo
But how do we address the geographical realities? Because I know there’s, you know, connection to land and all of those kind of things, but there’s no other country in the world that tries, or actively tries to keep its Indigenous communities in, and I don’t want to use the term Dark Ages, but I mean in a backward sense, if you know what I mean, rather than progressing them. And then we get to that point where, you talk about those communities around Uluru there, you can’t expect that there’s going to be a fully functioning hospital, or, you know, you know, plumbers on call, like they would be in a place where there’s, you know, half a million or a million people, so to speak.

Senator Liddle
Well, if you look at some of these places that are quite remote, when they’ve actually grasped tourism and national parks, there are opportunities. What we need is more people to take up those opportunities, and we need to find a different way for people to actually be responsible for things that are infrastructure that they have access to. You know, only this week, I was very pleased to see the coroner’s report from the Northern Territory and its many recommendations. Many of them focused on protective factors. Many of them focused on the drivers of people ending up in trouble and in some time, some cases, quite dysfunctional. You know, she talked about programs and assessments of children at a younger age so that there could be intervention to support them. She talked about, you know, things such as getting people into employment, in this case, into the police force. She talked about community policing. She talked about a whole range of issues that I talk about often that are about providing the protective factors for people to actually live the best lives they can.

Stephen Cenatiempo
A lot of these things sound like common sense, though. Kerrynne, are they easy enough to implement?

Senator Liddle
Well, I get frustrated when people say this issue is so complex and that somehow means it’s harder to address. I think that the failure of us often is that we apply a different standard. We apply different expectations. And I think that what we should say is every single dollar that gets spent on Indigenous Australians and the industry, because there is an industry that sustains this, is a dollar that we make sure is spent really effectively and that we don’t continue to spend more dollars. We should be spending less dollars the longer this goes on, not more. So we really need to be addressing a whole range of issues at the same time, but also stop doing what doesn’t work and do more of what does. Because there are some very good examples out there of things that are working really well.

Stephen Cenatiempo
Can that industry be dismantled?

Senator Liddle
Well, it’s a massive industry and I intend to do as much as I can to disrupt and dismantle it because it’s not as effective as it should be. And I’m not just talking, I’m not talking about Aboriginal community control services. I’m talking about all services that deliver to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. NIAA has been growing in staffing for over the period of this Labor government, and yet, there are over 1000 service providers that they pay to do work on their behalf. I want to make sure that every dollar that is actually spent, is accounted for, and it is not going into services that currently have so poor governance that they can’t deliver what they need to deliver to the most vulnerable people.

Stephen Cenatiempo
Amen to that. Kerrynne, appreciate your time this morning.

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