Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the member for Berowra's motion on NAIDOC Week, and I commend him for this motion. I note also his ongoing commitment to this issue and to Indigenous Australians. His sincerity and commitment to it is noted, and it is a very good thing. I, too, acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, the Ngunawal and Ngambri people, and I pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging. I also acknowledge the traditional owners from the place I represent, the Boonwurrung people of the Kulin nation. and I acknowledge their elders past, present and emerging.

This year, NAIDOC Week was marked locally in a couple of ways. The City of Port Philip together with N'arweet Dr Carolyn Briggs AM, the elder of the Yaluk-ut Weelam clan of the Boonwurrung, celebrated NAIDOC Week. She welcomed country, and there were a number of local events including Uncle Jack Charles doing a guided meditation for those in Port Philip. It truly was a celebration of local Indigenous culture and of Indigenous culture locally. I think it's a wonderful thing that we stopped and celebrated it and marked it. But it is not all just positivity, to be honest. Whenever we stop and speak about Indigenous Australians and the issues that confront them on a daily basis we need to be sombre and note there is much to do. While we are constantly reminded and renewed of our focus through events and celebrations like NAIDOC Week, we must also be honest and fair about the work that still needs to be done and be critical of the fact we haven't achieved what we should have up until now.

The theme of this year's NAIDOC Week is 'Always Was, Always Will Be'—65,000 years of history of this great country and the fact that we will never ever take that away and we will celebrate that into the future identity of what it is to be Australian. Indigenous Australians understood things that I think that we are still grappling with: how to live sustainably on the land, how to manage water sustainably and how to not take too much from the land on which we live but to live in harmony with our surroundings. We have much to heed from the past and from the thousands of years of civilisation that happened before we all arrived in this country. But, in order to bring that forward and to close some of the truly ugly and awful differences in the life and life expectancy between Indigenous Australians and non-Indigenous Australians, we need to listen to the one key thing that Indigenous Australians are asking for, and that is more of a say in their own affairs—more of a say in their own issues and the policies that affect them and their lives.

On the coming together in 2017 at Uluru for a remarkable and sincere document, the Uluru Statement from the Heart, it saddens me a little bit that we don't have bipartisan support in full for the Uluru Statement from the Heart—and that is fracturing. There is actually only one political party that supports the Uluru statement in full, and that is not something that I say with pride; that is something I say with disappointment. We stand ready and we await the coalition government to come on board and to not let this be a partisan issues. We gain nothing by having this as a partisan issue, and we need to come together. In fact, a recent survey found that a vast majority, 81 per cent, of Australians are happy for a constitutionally enshrined voice. A voice protected in the Constitution is not something that we should be afraid of.

We all remember the hesitation that former Prime Minister Howard had in saying sorry. It became a matter of culture and politics when it didn't need to be. We don't need to be standing here today afraid of what a voice and what listening and respecting the requests of Indigenous Australians means. We can stand here with confidence and engage and build something that is unifying and is embracing of the past and of the future. NAIDOC Week presents us with an opportunity to remind ourselves of that, and I hope we have a better future—and a bipartisan future—on this very front.

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