Mr SHORTEN (Maribyrnong—Leader of the Opposition) (10:25): I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet and the continent which we share. I pay my respects to elders past and present. This was and always will be Aboriginal land. Many of us in this place use these or similar words of respect. Words that acknowledge the custodians of our national estate for over 40,000 years—the keepers of the world's oldest cultures and traditions. Our words acknowledge the resilience Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have shown in the face of more than two centuries of indignities and injustice great and small, and this acknowledgement, this respect, this recognition belongs in our Constitution. Including the first members of our Australian family on our national birth certificate should be the shared goal of all Australians. It is well past the hour for our Constitution to speak the truth about our past and to point the way forward to a more equal future. The Referendum Council, led by the collective wisdom of Pat Dodson and Mark Leibler, have begun crafting a question to be shaped by community conventions. We hear a lot about the risks of rushing this process, but, when justice has been denied and delayed for so long, inaction is far more dangerous than urgency. Whilst he has left the chamber, I wish to say that, on the question of timing, we agree with the former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, that May 2017, the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum, would be an auspicious time for a national vote on recognition. If elected, a Labor government will deliver the referendum then. Recognition cannot be a mere poetic sentence or two stapled to the front of our Constitution. Platitudes just don't cut it, do they? There must be real and there must be substantive change. It must eliminate racism and signal a declaration of national intent. Equality in our Constitution must be twinned with a real world of equal opportunity in housing, health, employment, education, justice and, perhaps the most basic right of all, empowering our First Australians with the right to grow old. Today, eight years after Prime Minister Rudd extended a hand of healing, grasped in friendship, supported by the then Leader of the Opposition, Mr Brendan Nelson, we need to examine our progress in closing the gap—not in the spirit of self-congratulation nor trenchant self-criticism, but just with clarity and honesty, with a determination to speak the truth about what is working and what is not, to recognise that the progress we have made is uneven and too slow, to redouble our efforts in an equal, engaged and empowered partnership with the First Australians. Closing the gap must in part involve closing the political gap. Senator Peris and the member for Hasluck are great servants of this parliament, along, indeed, with senators Lambie and Lindgren. But we must strive to attract more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders peoples into politics and into this place—not lobbying from outside but making change inside, with the ability not to seek to plead with the people who sit in this chamber and the other but to walk the carpet of this chamber and the other place in order to have a voice in their own future. My party has not done enough to encourage this in the past. At our national conference last year we vowed to do better—and we will. Nowhere in our country, though, is the picture of diminished opportunity more stark or vivid than in our justice system. At the first COAG, Council of Australian Governments, meeting under a Labor government, the first item on the agenda will be setting new targets to close the justice gap: tackling the appalling incarceration rate amongst Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander peoples and focusing on preventing crime, reducing violence and victimisation, and boosting community safety not just in remote communities but in our cities, suburbs and regional towns. It is unAustralian that if you are an Aboriginal man you are 15 times more likely to be imprisoned than a non-Aboriginal man. Half of all Aboriginal prisoners in custody are under the age of 30. The re-imprisonment rate for Aboriginal young people is higher than the school retention rate. In the last decade, imprisonment rates have more than doubled—growing faster than the crime rate. For Aboriginal women there has been a 74 per cent increase in the past 15 years; they make up one-third of our female prison population. Far too many prisoners have poorly understood disability, particularly cognitive and mental impairment. Far too many young people see jail time as a preordained destination—part of the natural order of things. It is not natural. These facts are more than uncomfortable. They are not the nation that we wish to see in the mirror. It cannot be correct that the colour of your skin is a greater predictor of going to prison. Until we address this problem, we will never close the gap. We cannot tolerate a criminal justice system built on processing people rather than administering justice. The odds are stacked against people who go to jail young. The risks of mental health issues or substance addiction go up. Their chances of finishing school, learning a trade or finding a good job decline. So many children growing up with a parent in jail live with the pain of poverty and neglect. So many end up in out-of-home care, where the Aboriginal population has grown by 440 per cent in the last 19 years. So many of these children lead such different lives—lives of trauma, coming to school with mental health issues and other learning difficulties. But it is not just these people and these families who pay the price. Every Australian pays the price for the failure of our justice system: higher crime rates, increased rates of family violence, reduced safety. It is a national disgrace. It is not one which I believe anyone consciously signs up to in this parliament; but, when we know the problem exists, to walk past the problem makes us part of the problem. This why Labor's new community safety policies will be shaped by the voices of people who truly know the justice gap: law enforcement, legal services, community sector experts and, above all, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their representative organisations—not the least of which is the National Congress led by Jackie Huggins and Rod Little. I look at places like Burke, Cowra and Katherine: they are not waiting for parliament; they are already engaged in justice reinvestment to reduce crime and reoffending. As part of empowering communities to prevent crime, a Labor government will support three new launch sites for this justice reinvestment model in a major city, a regional town and remote Australia. This is not a question of being soft on crime—far from it. This is a plan to reduce crime, to reduce the cost to the taxpayer and, most importantly, to stop the waste of so many Australians from a better society. Four of the seven current seven Closing the Gap targets are focused on education. Education, as we know, is essential to extending and improving the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from properly funded child care right through to university and TAFE. I record the welcome of the Labor opposition to the government's announcement on supporting the retention and learning of Aboriginal languages. But, above all, the future opportunity for Indigenous Australians will be defined in large part by their school experience. It is why Labor is committed to making extra investments for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. Already around Australia there are tens of thousands of Aboriginal students benefiting from the additional classroom attention funded by Labor's commitment to fund education based on need. Last week, I met with students from Le Fevre High School in the western suburbs of Adelaide, where extra resources mean a stronger focus on literacy, mentoring programs and classes taught in the Garna language. I met students from Vincentia Public School in New South Wales, where attendance at their expanded homework centre has increased from 15 students a week to over 50. This is what extra needs based funding delivers—real outcomes for every child in every school. Labor's 'Your Child. Our Future' policy will allow the continuation and expansion of the success stories that I have just outlined. Labor's policy will guarantee the individual attention and the targeted programs that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children deserve to be their best. 'Your child. Our future' will do more than close the gap in education than any policy decision in the last two generations—not just in some schools, not just for some students, but every child in every school getting every opportunity. This opportunity must be extended equally to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women. The next generation of young mothers—the generation that will close the gap—must be given the chance to make informed choices about their future. This is why Labor is supporting the national rollout of the Stars program for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander girls. Stars is already operating successfully in seven schools in the Northern Territory, using a similar model to the widely respected Clontarf program for young men. As a matter of gender equality, I invite the government to join us in funding Stars on the same basis as Clontarf. In health we are making progress, albeit uneven, towards meeting the close the gap targets in health. Maintaining bipartisan support for the national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health plan and the resources to support its implementation strategy will deliver more gains. Managing chronic disease is imperative; rolling out the NDIS program is equally important. Tackling the social determinants of health, from income to housing, is vital, but prevention in health care must be our priority to ensure a healthier next generation. That means working for better maternal and child health care, better food security, promoting healthy lifestyles and nutrition, targeting smoking, alcohol and substance abuse, a more concentrated effort as preventing suicide and improving mental health more broadly. All of this depends on constructive equal opportunity and partnerships, particularly with Aboriginal controlled health organisations. Australia, through the work of leaders such as Fred Hollows and organisations like Vision 2020, has led the world in improving eye health, yet shockingly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults are six times more likely to suffer from blindness. Ninety-four per cent of this vision loss is either preventable or treatable, with diabetic eye health, cataracts and untreated poor vision among the main causes. We are the last developed nation in the world where the infectious and wholly preventable eye disease of trachoma exists. It exists only amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, where it is endemic in two out of three remote communities. With increased eye health services at the community level, many cases can be corrected overnight, and yet 35 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults have never had an eye exam. Addressing this vision loss alone will close 11 per cent of the gap in health, and every dollar spent in the area would return $2.50 in economic benefit. This country is rich enough and generous enough to deal with this issue right now. So today I am pleased to announce that a Labor government will commit $9 million to close the gap in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander vision loss. We will deliver increased visiting optometry and ophthalmology services to address the gap in specialist eye healthcare service delivery and trachoma prevention strategies, based on World Health Organisation recommendations. With this additional funding we can, and we will, eliminate trachoma from Australia by 2020. We can begin to turn the tide on this endemic health problem, and we do not mind if the government takes this policy this afternoon and implements it tomorrow. It is as simple as making the decision. It is easy in the current political discourse to say that throwing money at the problem will not solve it and that, if it was going to solve it, we would have solved it in the past. This is an alibi to justify cutting funding. Pretending that money does not matter or pretending that empowerment through greater resources does not make a difference is an arrogant falsehood. It is generally used by people for whom lack of money and lack of power have never been a problem. When an Aboriginal woman is 34 times more likely to be hospitalised as a result of family violence and 11 times more likely to die; when family violence is the No. 1 cause of Aboriginal children being removed from their family and their community; when too many women seeking help from family violence faced significant legal, psychological and cultural barriers—how can repeatedly cutting millions of dollars from Aboriginal legal and specialist support services possibly be part of the solution? There is no excuse for these cuts. You cannot cut your way to Closing the Gap. In September 1842, as part of five night public debate on the rights of Aborigines, Richard Windeyer—a Sydney barrister, wealthy landowner and aspiring politician—concluded his speech on the glories of colonial settlement with the haunting questions: How is it that our minds are not satisfied? … What means this whispering at the bottom of our hearts? There is 174 years between then and now, and that whispering has grown to a full-throated roar: the cry for justice heard 50 years ago, when 200 Aboriginal stockmen, house servants and their families walked off Wave Hill Station not to return until they received a fair day's pay; or 41 years ago when a tall stranger poured a handful of sand through Vincent Lingiari's fingers; or 31 years ago when Uluru was formerly returned to the people from whom we could never take it away; or 28 years ago when the High Court of Australia first learnt the name of Mabo; or 22 years ago on a sunny December day in a park in Redfern or 19 years ago when Kim Beazley fought tears at this dispatch box or eight years ago when elders embraced in the galleries above us and on the lawns outside. For all of this, our mind and our nation cannot be satisfied. The gap is still not closed. The gap stands as an affront to our national sense of fairness. Closing the gap demands the best of us, the best of our collective energies and intellect, but that is what we should aim for—the best. We cannot just be the best multicultural nation in the world, but we should also be the nation best at empowering and respecting its first peoples. One day we will be able to talk of one country and mean it. One day we will be able to say that racism is a relic of the past and that the fair go is truly colourblind. One day the Australian people will be able to tell their children and new arrivals and visitors to this land that opportunity in Australia truly belongs to all. One day the Australian people will be able to sing with confidence the unofficial Australian anthem, 'We are one,' and it will be true. This is not too much to hope for; it is not too high to aim; it is the very least we must do.