Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations

The Hon. L.A. HENDERSON (15:20): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking a question of the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs regarding Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations.

Leave granted.

The Hon. L.A. HENDERSON: The national peak body for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander child and family services, namely the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC), published a report this year titled 'Funding model options for ACCO integrated early years services'. In the report they state that their research has found that 'current funding approaches are not fit for purpose and are failing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, families and communities'. They state that current funding approaches, and I quote:

1. create barriers for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families in accessing early childhood education and care and integrated early years services;

2. limit ACCOs' capacity to deliver holistic, child-centred services needed to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families to thrive; and

3. are not successfully improving early development outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.

In addition, the National Indigenous Times reported on 3 October this year that the new Wakwakurna Kanyini's CE said that many ACCOs were working in the early intervention and prevention space without being adequately funded or supported for the work they do. My questions to the minister are:

1. What has the government done to address the 'patchwork and piecemeal' funding for ACCOs, as stated by the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care?

2. How has this minister worked with the Minister for Child Protection to better fund ACCOs?

The Hon. K.J. MAHER (Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Attorney-General, Minister for Industrial Relations and Public Sector) (15:22): I thank the honourable member for her question, and it is a very good question. It is a pleasure to have a question from each of the members of the opposition during the course of question time today.

Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations (ACCOs) are Aboriginal led and run organisations that provide services to Aboriginal people. ACCOs exist in a very wide range of services, from the provision of legal advice and legal services through ATSILS (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services), such as the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement in South Australia, through to areas that deal with working with victim survivors of domestic violence and including areas to do with looking after children in the child protection system.

The organisation that the honourable member mentioned, which is colloquially known as SNAICC, headed by Catherine Liddle, is an exceptionally important advocacy organisation. I am very grateful to regularly be able to have discussions with Catherine, the CEO of SNAICC, about the work that they do. As well, Catherine Liddle, the CEO of SNAICC, is represented on the Joint Council on Closing the Gap, so she attends the meetings with all the ministers and many of the peaks from organisations a number of times each year.

In relation to funding of ACCOs, one of the ambitions of the Joint Council on Closing the Gap is to have services used by Aboriginal people as much as possible be provided by Aboriginal people rather than by governments, and that is an aim that we are signed up to in South Australia. One of the critical steps in doing that is something we completed only very recently.

A task that was required of all participants, which is every state and territory in South Australia who are participants and signatories to the Closing the Gap ambition and members of the Joint Council on Closing the Gap, was to conduct an expenditure review. Unfortunately, when we came to government in March 2022 we found that no work had been started on this requirement of members of the Joint Council of Closing the Gap.

I want to thank senior Treasury officials for the very hard work they undertook in conducting that expenditure review in South Australia to identify where money was being spent in two areas: money that is specifically for Aboriginal programs, such as many that are worked on in the protection of children area, and also money that is spent for the benefit of Aboriginal people in mainstream areas.

We have conducted and published the first ever expenditure review in South Australia of these sorts of funds, which is the first step in looking at ways that we can transfer more of the functions of government to ACCOs, who very often have a better and more connected understanding of the Aboriginal communities they serve.

It is something that I have talked with Catherine Liddle (the head of SNAICC) directly about; it is something that Catherine certainly puts forward at meetings of the Joint Council on Closing the Gap, and I am very pleased that in South Australia we have now taken that first step of the identification of expenditure to then look at how we can make sure that, where it is appropriate, ACCOs receive funding to do the work that they do best.