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Rudd pledges annual update on indigenous crusade

Michelle Grattan

6 April 2008 - A PROGRESS report by the Government on how it is closing the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians will be made on the first working day of every parliamentary year, Kevin Rudd has pledged.

He said this annual parliamentary statement would cover life expectancy, mortality among infants and children up to five, and literacy and numeracy results.

Announcing the undertaking at a conference in London, Mr Rudd recognised that he could be making a rod for his own back. "This annual statement will greatly increase pressure on my Government to make progress towards closing the gap. That is exactly why I am announcing it," he said.

"Each year we must know as a government, as a people, and as a country if we have made progress closing this gap. We should not underestimate the size of this challenge.

"Many governments with the best of intentions have failed in their attempts in the past.

"But the time has come for the debate to move on from intentions and focus on outcomes, because in this endeavour outcomes are what really matter."

He said that there was no reason for a 17-year life expectancy gap to exist between indigenous and non-indigenous people in Australia, a developed nation with a modern, prosperous economy.

Nor was there any reason that indigenous children should have less opportunity for education or health care.

"This gap has no place in a modern Australia," he said.

Mr Rudd addressed the Progressive Governance Conference, attended by a bevy of international leaders, in a session at which British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and New Zealand's Helen Clarke also spoke.

Each country should take advantage of "the lowhanging fruit" to deal with climate change, Mr Rudd said.

This included improving the efficiency of buildings and of power generation.

Forestry was another example of an obvious strategy and Australia was helping Indonesia and Papua New Guinea with this, he said.

Former US president Bill Clinton told the session it was vital to have implementation mechanisms for the next climate change agreement.

He pointed out that while most countries had signed up in good faith to Kyoto targets, only a handful of countries would meet the targets. This was because most of the world had no systems to turn good intentions into results.

He also urged that the non-governmental sectors should work with governments to get action in areas such as retro-fitting buildings.

Earlier, in a speech titled, "Hard Heads, Soft Hearts: A Future Reform Agenda for the New Australian Government", Mr Rudd said that political progressives should be "absolutely confident" of their values and equally confident in the ideas and politics they pursue.

"We must always join the intellectual debate against our ideological opponents — and we must prevail," he said.

Mr Rudd warned that progressive governments must not turn in on themselves. "Protectionism in all its forms is the enemy of working peoples," he said.

They needed to embrace the challenges of globalisation, arguing the case for openness and celebrating the opportunities it provided for working people.

'He said progressives always had a more difficult political task than conservatives, whose base proposition was that the beginning and end of governments was the maintenance of free markets.

Source: The Age

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