*** Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article mentions people who have died ***
As the Queensland Aboriginal and Islander Health Council (QAIHC) members conference opened yesterday, the focus was both local and global, Marie McInerney reports for the Croakey Conference News Service.
Marie McInerney writes:
First Nations peoples globally should forge long-term links and rise up together to challenge institutionalised racism that “tries to take away our sovereignty” and attacks on rights and recognition, a Queensland Indigenous health leader said this week.
Matthew Cooke, Chair of the Queensland Aboriginal and Islander Health Council (QAIHC) and chair of Central Queensland Hospital and Health Service, made the call at QAIHC’s annual members conference yesterday after a moving gift exchange with Māori health leaders attending the event.
The two-day conference heard passionate and powerful discussions on self-determination, community control and the central role of culture in health, as well as examples of programs seeking to embed decision making at the local community level in both Queensland and Aotearoa/New Zealand.
However, presenters, panellists and delegates spoke about how those gains were at risk from attacks on First Nations peoples’ rights in Australia and globally.
They highlighted the ongoing fight against racism in the healthcare system, and the failure of governments to meet their obligations under the Closing the Gap National Agreement, notably the four priority reforms focused on transforming government agencies and Indigenous data sovereignty.
Cooke, an Aboriginal and South Sea Islander man from the Bailai (Byellee) people in Gladstone, Central Queensland, said he relished the opportunity to host Māori health leaders at the conference.
It encouraged him to strengthen ties with other First Nations across the globe, to learn how to retain reforms that had been long fought for and to find ways of not “living at the whim of government”.
Later in an interview, Cooke told Croakey that opponents of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice to Parliament had sought to make the defeat of the 2023 referendum “a defeat of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people” and of their rights to celebrate their culture, including with Welcome to Country ceremonies.
“Sadly, it was defeated, but it did not defeat our right to assert our human rights,” he said.
Watch the interview
Making it real
QAIHC’s two-day conference, held in Meanjin/Brisbane, on the lands of the Turrbal and Jagera peoples, brought together hundreds of attendees from community controlled organisations across urban, rural and remote Queensland, with its theme urging “real reform, real investment, real outcomes”.
The conference opened on Mabo Day, which commemorates Eddie Koiki Mabo and his momentous struggle that resulted in the 1992 High Court decision overturning the doctrine of terra nullius.
But the conference also comes at a challenging time for First Nations people around the globe, including Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Greenland, and the United States, where rights are under assault from governments of all stripes.
Māori health leaders Janice Kuka and Rāwiri Crawford, from Ngā Mataapuna Oranga, a Māori-led primary health organisation, talked about the rush by the National Party Government to challenge Maori rights under Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Waitangi Treaty).
As part of its first 100 days of office, the Government moved to abolish Te Aka Whai Ora, the Maori Treaty Authority, which had emerged from decades of work by from Ngā Mataapuna Oranga and other Maori organisations.
On the potential for one day restoring the Authority, Kuka conceded “we can’t go back” but said “we want a singular focus on ourselves”. First Nations people are always talking about partnerships with governments, she said, but it can be a process that “works against us, we carry its burden”.
She did, however, see hope for the future, including in the number of young people participating in Hīkoi mō te Tiriti (March for the Treaty) protests in Aotearoa/New Zealand, which brought tens of thousands of people out against the Treaty Principles Bill proposed last year.
Sharing the panel with her, Graham Bidois Cameron, director of Māori Public Health at Health New Zealand, talked about three reflections on Māori strength and future: ancestors, Aunties (“where your Aunties are, is probably where the solutions are”) and young people.
He said that young Maori are watching Dame Whina Cooper, who led the famous 1975 land march from Te Hāpua (in the far north) to Parliament in Wellington, on TikTok.
Challenging environment
The Māori health leaders were speaking in a session titled ‘’navigating a changing political landscape’, which also raised how the Labor Federal Government has walked back from its commitment to Treaty and Truth in the wake of the defeated Voice referendum.
Cooke said he had been sure that the Coalition, led by Peter Dutton, would be elected at the May 2025 election, “on the back of the defeat of the referendum”.
He had been relieved to find that, even though many Australians voted No at the referendum, “people actually changed their heart” at the federal election.
“They rejected hate, they rejected racism, they rejected the race wars and cultural wars that were being promoted by the then Opposition Leader,” he said.
Cooke called on the Albanese Government to take former Senator Patrick Dodson’s recent advice to be ambitious on Indigenous rights and recognition, to push forward with a national truth telling commission (Makarrata) and a treaty process, as part of its commitment to implement the Uluru Statement from the Heart in full.
He also challenged the Queensland LNP Government to meet its promise to provide the funds to Indigenous communities from the scrapping of the state’s Treaty process and Truth-telling and Healing Commission – one of the Crisafulli Government’s first acts after the state election.
The Government had pledged to recommit the $300 million allocated by the previous Labor Government to Truth and Treaty “to our people and communities”. That was “yet to materialise”, Cooke said, warning that the $300 million must go to new programs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
But there are likely other struggles ahead for Indigenous health in Queensland, judging by comments from Queensland Health director general Dr David Rosengren in a panel session on how the Indigenous health sector could partner effectively with the government to deliver practical local reform.
Rosengren rejected concerns at the conference that the role of the inaugural Chief First Nations Health Officer Haylene Grogan had been downgraded, and controversially said the First Nations community needs to “rethink the concept of community control”.
“I think the word ‘control’ gets in the way of the word ‘partnership’,” he said, in comments that were later described by at least one delegate as “disrespectful” and missing the point about community control.
When leading Indigenous nursing and midwifery expert Professor Gracelyn Smallwood raised the need to address racism in the health workforce, he took a “not all health workers” approach, saying many healthcare workers in Queensland were devoted to health equity. He warned against walking out of the conference with the sense “there’s no hope or that we’re failing anywhere”.
Ministerial perspectives
Health Minister Tim Nicholls was more conciliatory in his keynote address and later speaking with journalists, where he talked about “getting my feet dusty”, with trips to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, including recently to the Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria.
The Minister highlighted renaming of the Doomadgee Hospital to Yellagundgimarra Hospital Doomadgee, to help create a more welcoming and culturally safe environment for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, in the wake of the deaths there of three young Aboriginal women from complications of rheumatic heart disease within 12 months of each other.
As the ABC reported in 2023, a coroner found the public hospital and a community healthcare provider failed in their care for the women, that Doomadgee community lacked access to sufficient housing, showers, clean mattresses, and laundries, and that a strained relationship between the community and health services had created an environment where people did not feel safe.
Nicholls said the response of Queensland Health to the coronial findings had produced “quite startling statistics”, including a better than 90 per cent compliance rate with treatment programs for local community attending the hospital, the best rate in the state, he said.
“Now not all the problems have been solved….but if we can start and get those results by working with community, by improving the hospital, by improving the experience there, then we are starting that journey that we need to continue on,” he said.
The Minister said he will be encouraging every Health and Hospital Service (HH)S to work closely with local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stakeholders such as community controlled health organisations to deliver better outcomes.
He also committed support to “genuine place-based partnership, shared funding arrangements and recognition of the sector as an equal player”.
Nicholls would not be drawn at the media conference on whether he had concerns as Health Minister about the Crisafulli Government’s tough on crime laws, which health and medical groups have warned will impact on health and wellbeing, particularly for young Indigenous people.
He said he “can’t speak for other Ministers”, he can only seek to make a difference in his own portfolio. Nicholls acknowledged a significant problem with youth justice but said substantial funds were going into early intervention and strengthening communities’ programs.
“We don’t want to see people in detention….but we have an obligation to protect communities as well,” he said.
Nicholls also would not comment on whether Queensland has any plans to introduce redress for Stolen Generations, a recommendation made nearly 30 years ago in the Bringing Them Home report.
Western Australia last week finally committed to redress, leaving Queensland as the only state or territory not to have done so.
That was a decision for Fiona Simpson, the Minister for Women and Women’s Economic Security, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships and Multiculturalism, Nicholls said.
• Dr Tess Ryan, a member of Croakey Health Media, provided a cultural safety review and edit of this article.
Watch the media conference
Live reporting
Marie McInerney posted on @WePublicHealth throughout the conference. Below are some of her posts from the first day of #RealInQld2025.
Bookmark this link to follow our ongoing coverage of the QAIHC Members Conference 2025.
