Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Industry and Innovation) | Hansard source

I want to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which this parliament meets, the Ngunawal and Ngambri people. As the member for Chifley, I'm proud to represent people who either hail from or live on Dharug land, and I want to acknowledge and pay my respects to elders past and present there. It gives me enormous pride—and it is an enormous honour—to represent, within the electorate of Chifley, one of the largest urban based Aboriginal communities in the country. It's something that I wear as a badge of honour, and I take very seriously, beyond just making that reference, the need for us to do things to help every step of the way.

The apology means something to a lot of people in our area, because they were members of stolen generations. I sat with a lump in my throat listening, in particular, to one story about a brother and sister who were taken away from their folks. They thought, for some reason, that their parents were deficient, and they never got to see their parents. Their parents worked multiple jobs just so that they could earn money to send to those kids. The money never made it to those kids, and those kids thought that their parents didn't love them. It was only after their parents died that these kids, who grew up to become adults, learned the true story. They now carry around, like a stone, the guilt that they feel about their parents. It's pretty tough. There's no better way to tell a person they mean nothing—and I mean nothing—than to put a number on them: to take away their name, to take away who they are, to stop them speaking their language, to stop them celebrating their culture and to disconnect them from the land. And that's what we did.

The apology is really important. As was said a number of times yesterday, it's not about making people feel guilty; it's about asking people to do what we ask people to do every single day—to understand what has happened to us, to appreciate it, to walk in our shoes for a bit. There's an elder in my neck of the woods, Uncle Greg Simms, who, whenever he does an acknowledgement of country, says, 'Before you take your next step, remember the ones who took the steps before you.' I think that is a good thing, just for living life.

So the apology is important. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made it because, for years, we had a Prime Minister who believed it was just empty symbolism and wouldn't do it. There was this whole thing about 'practical reconciliation'. But you can do both things. Symbolism matters, because, if it doesn't—with the greatest respect, Deputy Speaker Coulton—why are you sitting down? Why are you elevated before us? Why do we have flags? Why am I speaking from here? Why don't I sit down and deliver this speech? All these things—verbal, nonverbal and otherwise—mean something. Symbolism is a big deal for us; it's a big deal for others. So we should do both the symbolism plus the thing of making a difference. The reason I mention this is that, right now in my community—one of the biggest communities, I stress—we have an Aboriginal medical service that's not run by the local Aboriginal community. It's hit the wall; it's entered administration.

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