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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-11-12 Daily Xml
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Indigenous Disadvantage

Ms BEDFORD (Florey) (14:40): My question is to the Premier. Premier, what information can you provide the house on the Aboriginal Affairs Executive Committee working group to address the over-representation of Aboriginal people within the justice sector, and what new and additional powers will it have to effect positive change?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:40): I thank the member for her question. What we have done in the government is to set up a working group—in fact, four working groups—to look at the major themes that have been contained in the Closing the Gap report, and one of those is the one that the member for Florey referred to earlier. What we have done with the working group that we have established is to have co-chairs, and these co-chairs mirror the co-chairs that were set up for the joint council, which looked at that refresh.

So we have an Aboriginal member of the Public Service, together with a chief executive of one of our departments. Importantly, in the area that the member referred to, we don't have the chief executive of the department that is responsible specifically for this. We have brought in another chief executive to do that work because we genuinely want to have the whole of the senior management council or committee here in South Australia focused on delivering significantly better outcomes for the people of the state.

I don't have the names of the joint chairs of the committee that the member refers to. I suspect that—in fact, I'm not going to guess, but I'm happy to provide that information to the member and, in fact, to the house. I think this is a very innovative way. It mirrors the work of the very successful refresh of the Closing the Gap strategy.

What we are also going to be doing is to look at making sure that what we do with the refresh of our Aboriginal action plan in South Australia is to bring those and put them together as much as possible so we don't have one document, which is the state government's response to the Closing the Gap refresh, and then a second response in terms of the Aboriginal action plan. We want to bring them both together.

We know that the federal government has made it very clear that they want a significant improvement in outcomes for Aboriginal Australians from the refresh, and we applaud the work that Pat Turner and Ken Wyatt did in chairing that council. We had representation on the committee from South Australia with Ruth Miller. She and I sat on that on behalf of South Australia. We have significantly increased our resourcing of our response to that Closing the Gap report, and you would have seen that in the budget that was handed down in this place on Tuesday.

We are taking our responsibilities very seriously. There is much to do, but I am feeling very optimistic with the refresh that has been presented at the federal level. Now the ball is in our court to do what we can at the subnational level to make sure that we align with the aspirations of that refresh.

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