Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yesterday, May 26, marked National Sorry Day, a significant and solemn day on the national calendar.

National Sorry Day is a time to reflect in our workplaces, in our classrooms and in our homes on the profound grief and trauma experienced by members of the stolen generations and to honour the resilience shown by them. It is a time to reflect on the harrowing and heart-breaking accounts of Indigenous children forcibly removed from their families, as told in the Bringing them home report. It is a time to reflect on the litany of their loss—the loss of family, language, identity, culture and country—and how that historic loss continues to encroach on and inform the present. But National Sorry Day is also an opportunity to reflect on the tenacity and endurance of the stolen generations and to celebrate their strength.

Yesterday was National Sorry Day, and today National Reconciliation Week begins. It concludes on June 3, Mabo Day. In our own lives and families, we recognise that heartfelt pain and suffering must be followed by reconciliation and healing. Words of regret must generate actions of remedy. And so it is fitting that National Reconciliation Week follows and flows from National Sorry Day.

We must take stock of how far we have travelled on our national journey of reconciliation, where we recommit ourselves to the promise made by parliament on behalf of Australians to take those practical and concrete steps required to close the gap in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity, and where we celebrate the progress we have made and rededicate ourselves to reconciliation's unfinished business. The next step on the journey must begin with us.

One of the next steps is to fill an important void in our Constitution—recognition of Australia's first people in our founding document. That step requires a bipartisan summit with respected Indigenous leaders from across the country, with the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister sitting down with them. So I welcome the gathering—the summit that is taking place in early July.

Labor stands ready, willing and able to participate in real and significant change in our Constitution. 'Nothing about us without us' is what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have said, and Labor is prepared to participate with good will and good intentions. I welcome the gathering that is going to take place in July.

I also welcome the parliamentary inquiry which is currently meeting—the Joint Select Committee on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, led by the member for Hasluck, Ken Wyatt, and Senator Nova Peris, from Labor's side and from the Northern Territory. I am a member of that inquiry, and I can say that all parties have participated well and actively. There has been tremendous cooperation and bipartisanship shown during that inquiry. People have worked diligently to prepare, firstly, an interim report and then a progress report. And I look forward to the final report coming down before 30 June this year. It will help and shape, I think, the gathering that will take place in early July.

I must say, however, that today we have seen a press release from the Minister for Indigenous Affairs and we have seen evidence of yet more shambles in the area of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs. In the budget last year, $535 million was cut from the portfolio. Front line services were trashed and slashed. In this budget, $146 million—including $46 million for Indigenous health—is gone. I urge the government to reconsider these cuts.

Today, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs has rolled out another $140 million in an attempt to fix up the problem that has been created by the government's chaotic Indigenous Advancement Strategy, IAS, which is the subject at the moment of an inquiry by the Senate Finance and Public Administration References Committee. I have read all the submissions to that inquiry, and they excoriate, denounce and condemn the IAS one after the other. Again and again, they get into it. This is an absolute shambles, chaos and mess created by this government.

If they are fair dinkum about national reconciliation, the Prime Minister and the Minister for Indigenous Affairs should reverse the cuts. They should get back to the table, have a real dialogue and discussion and make sure we do nothing to and everything for and with Indigenous people.