Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's a great honour to be able to stand in the Australian parliament to pay tribute today to both the life and the work of Mr Mabo and indeed to the High Court decision in the case involving Mabo and the plaintiffs, which changed the legal story of this nation. I also pay tribute today to the most remarkable of anniversaries, that being the 1967 referendum, where our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia were finally granted the right not simply to be counted in our census but also to be counted in our history books and in the narrative of our nation and to get a say in contesting the space of colonial history that Australia was, for a long time, steeped in.

Those two events—the Mabo High Court decision and the 1967 referendum—are matters that this parliament should celebrate wholeheartedly, because these were extraordinarily hard-fought victories. They were campaigns that were long and arduous for all of the peoples involved. We really give thanks to Mr Mabo and to his family. We had the privilege of having his daughter, Gail, present in parliament on the day when this motion first came before the House. I reflected on that day, when I met not only Gail Mabo but the sons of other plaintiffs involved in the Mabo case, just what an extraordinary sacrifice those families made in sharing their fathers with this nation for decades in actively engaging in trying to reshape the history of this nation. And what a remarkable job they did.

Mr Mabo's life was full of extraordinary struggles and challenges. Regretfully, despite the 10 years which he dedicated to pursuing these legal actions, he never lived to see the outcome of his High Court challenge. Yet, there are few people in Australia who would not know his name and who would not understand the dramatic ramifications of the actions taken by that man from the island of Mer, who took on the Australian legal system in order to get justice. He asserted his continuing native title rights to the island of Mer, challenged the Australian notions of property rights and indeed challenged all of us to rethink what we had learnt about the founding stories of our nation. Forevermore, the contestability of those founding stories will ring loud in this chamber, in our courts and in the history books of this nation. And thank goodness, because I do not think we should be under any illusion that these victories came easy in Australia. These were hard-fought campaigns, with great personal cost to the people involved. That's why I paid special tribute to the families of Mr Mabo and all of those 1967 activists.

These were hard-fought gains. This was not an easy transition in Australia's history. I was working with remote Aboriginal communities in the Kimberley region when these decisions were coming down and there was great excitement in the Kimberley. The state of Western Australia, you might recall, has never had any form of land rights legislation. So prior to the title decision there was no capacity for the Indigenous people of Western Australia to ever exercise their rights as traditional owners of these lands and waters for 60,000 years-plus in this nation.

That was a shameful state of affairs. The hard work did not stop after the High Court decision. In seeking to implement changes to our laws to ensure that we recognised native title and afforded some protection, there were many members of this House who sought to extinguish native title at the first opportunity. Whether through ignorance at the time or a simple misunderstanding, they did not do this House proud. It is to their great credit that Indigenous people persevered with their negotiations with the Australian government. The then Keating government was able to formulate a native title act that was, for many people, already filled with compromises but also with lots of promise for the future.

It has been a continuing struggle to prevent perverse extinguishment of native title in legislation in this House. We recently had matters in this House where the government sought to overreach, again, when it came to dealing with the Macleay court decision and the implications that had for Indigenous land use agreements in Australia. We need to learn from those errors and not trash the legacy of those who came before us, like Mr Mabo, like the 1967 referendum heroes and heroines. These were people who stared racism, intolerance and wilful ignorance right in the face—and yet remained utterly determined to render change in this country, to ask Australians to face squarely our colonial history, to face squarely our 19th century obsession with racial discourse in this country and to face squarely the ongoing legacies of past injustices.

I know my colleagues before me have spoken of the moving ceremonies here in the House where the apology was given to the stolen generations. That remains with me one of the most profound days in my life: the honour of being able to witness that apology in this House, to witness the impact that had for the men and women who had been unlawfully stolen from their families at that time. There are lessons for us to remember now. There are more Indigenous children now living in out-of-home care, in Australia, than ever before. So it seems to me that our parliaments, collectively, around the country still have many important lessons to learn.

I do, however, give thanks to the extraordinary sacrifice of the men and women who fought so valiantly for their rights, and for the correction of that bloody and vicious colonial history on which the country was founded, through exercising their rights in the court when this parliament failed to do so. Let's learn from those mistakes. Let's not let that happen again. People should not have to go to court in order to exercise their rights. This parliament should be a generous partner with our Indigenous men and women in Australia to get this right in the future, and that's why I'm pleased that we have supported the constitutional recognition of their voices in this parliament.

Debate adjourned.

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