Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Reconciliation and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

In the short time available in this debate before the adjournment debate, I rise to speak on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Amendment Bill 2005. I will make some general observations about history. Understanding the past and learning the connections that run from the past to the present enables people, and the institutions that they grant power and authority to, to better understand and make sense of the present and to make decent laws in the present which reflect their understanding of the past.

But when you see the past through the prism of ideology you are unable to do that. That is the big issue that lies in this bill before the House because, if you see the past through the prism of ideology, as the Prime Minister consistently does on Indigenous issues, then what you are attempting to do is to make the past malleable. If there are a set of certainties attached to it that you do not agree with then you try and make the past malleable. This is the stuff of the ‘Thought Police’, a phrase that was brought to prominence in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and referred to by the Prime Minister quite recently in his speech to the Quadrant magazine anniversary dinner.

I was intrigued that the Prime Minister should refer to Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four given this legislation before the House and its character, because the subtext of this legislation is the Howard government’s fixation with the reconfiguring the past to suit its present prejudices. That particular way of treating legislation—which is both implicit and explicit in this Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage protection bill—needs to be commented on, noted and understood not only by those in this parliament but also by those who are listening outside as bills are debated in this House. This legislation needs to be looked at in the context of the amendments to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, which we have also debated in this House. When that legislation came into the House, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage, the member for Flinders, assured us in his second reading speech that that legislation strengthened the protection of the environment. It does no such thing. In fact the government even voted against a climate change action amendment that we wanted to see made to that legislation.

Debate interrupted.

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