Steve Hutchins (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The incorporated speech read as follows—

Mr President, I congratulate the Prime Minister for his apology to the stolen generation and lend my support to the sentiments expressed by all Members and Senators who have supported the motion.

In doing so I wish to emphasise that this is only the first step towards reconciliation and redressing more than 200 years of mistreatment and persecution towards the first people of this nation.

The Bringing them home report on the Stolen Generation details some of the many thousands of stories of the forced separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their parents and communities.

From the story of John, removed from his family as an infant in the 1940s and sexually abused at Kinchela boys home to Stephen who attempted suicide by slitting his wrists—the plight of the Stolen Generation is unparalleled in our history as a nation. It, when considered with the historical reports of massacres and racial intolerance towards aboriginals, amounts to one of the great atrocities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The report into the Stolen Generation, commissioned in 1995 and providing more than 50 recommendations to right the wrongs created by our predecessors, has sat there, ignored, for more than 10 years.

Today we see a recommendation of the report implemented in part, in a manner appropriate to our contemporary circumstances.

Recommendation 5A of the Bringing them home report calls for all houses of parliament across the country to acknowledge responsibility and apologise for the actions of their predecessors.

To this date, we have seen every state and territory parliament of this nation do just that. From New South Wales to Western Australia, every parliament has supported and passed a motion of apology to the indigenous population for their past mistreatment.

Only one stumbling block remains.

The closest that the Commonwealth Parliament has gotten to apology to the stolen generation and the indigenous peoples of this land has been to express its ‘deep and sincere regret’ for the injustices suffered under the ‘practices of past generations’.

Today I am pleased to see the Commonwealth Parliament go that one step further: apologising and officially acknowledging the responsibility of their predecessors for the laws, policies, and practices of forcible removal of a generation of indigenous children.

I am proud and humbled to be a part of the parliament is finally doing so.

That being said, 54 recommendations were made in the report into the stolen generation. I am not calling on parliament to support and implement every one of these—the recommendations themselves are more than 10 years old. Society and the problems faced by those victims of the stolen generation have moved on since then.

All I seek to demonstrate by raising these recommendations is to show that an official apology on behalf of the parliament is only the tip of the iceberg.

As my colleague Senator Moore has already expressed, words are of little meaning without action to back them up.

The indigenous population of this country is in crisis. Let no one here think that now an apology has been made, the matter is done and the book is closed on this dark chapter in our history. Let no one in this house think that an apology from our Prime Minister will remedy—without qualification—the problems faced by Aboriginals and Torres-Strait Islanders. We will not wake up tomorrow morning and find that there has been an end to drinking and petrol-sniffing in Aboriginal communities. We will not suddenly discover that sexual assaults in remote Northern Territory communities are down and primary and high school attendance rates have hit 100%.

Words alone are not enough to fix more than 200 years of disadvantage and persecution.

The Prime Minister announced this morning that we would be seeking a new partnership between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians—taking practical steps to close the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous disadvantage.

I believe this is a positive step forward, a new beginning as the Prime Minister put it.

I lend my full support to this initiative.

I commend this motion to the parliament and I support it without qualification.