Helen Coonan (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to support the motion to take note of the national apology in the Australian parliament for the past mistreatment of Indigenous Australians under the laws and practices of past governments. There has been a lot of hairsplitting and semantics that have surrounded the 10-year debate in our nation about saying sorry to Indigenous Australians. The debate has been bookended to a large extent by two reports: Bringing them home in 1997 and Little children are sacred in 2007. The first report assembled a catalogue of historic mistreatment and heart-rending personal stories of removal and alienation that have been characterised as the ‘stolen generation’. The second report contains horrifying contemporary accounts of endemic sexual abuse, neglect and injury to children in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory, some of whom were just babies.

It was impossible, on reading the second report, not to be moved by the accounts of violence, hopelessness, despair and dysfunction that still exist in contemporary Australia, and it demanded an urgent response. The report provided the catalyst for a new, innovative and daring approach to address what we all accept as enduring Aboriginal disadvantage and need. It was, and it is, the Northern Territory intervention. The intervention has bipartisan support and we must all work to ensure it is a success and that it delivers long-term benefits for Indigenous children.

I hope and trust that our actions today, well-meaning as they are, are not judged as misguided by future generations as we now regard the ones that we are apologising for in this national apology. There have been tomes written about the relative benefits of symbolic gestures, when compared to practical help, as the bridge to address what is urgent, unfinished business in our nation. In my view we need both. It is a compelling reason to extend a full apology for past mistreatment as the bridge to reconciliation. I accept that an apology to those affected by past mistreatment is a fundamental plank to rebuilding trust, confidence and mutual respect between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. This foundation is the cornerstone upon which the practical help with housing, health, education and employment, which have been the focus of the former Howard government’s efforts, can now be built. It is the basis upon which we can build the bipartisan joint policy commission announced yesterday to develop a national Indigenous housing strategy and, looking forward, the constitutional recognition of the first Australians. This move may well prove to be the best chance our nation has to improve standards of living and life expectancy for Indigenous Australians in the longer term.

I am somewhat surprised, however, by the Labor government’s adamant assertion that an apology will not give rise to an expectation, on the part of forcibly removed Indigenous children and their families, that a statutory compensation scheme will be set up to pay reparations. I have heard this referred to by some Aboriginal leaders as ‘unfinished business’. While it seems tolerably clear that the apology of itself is not an admission that would render the Commonwealth liable, the Rudd government has not seen fit to provide the legal advice on which it relies, and I think that is unfortunate.

However, every Australian has the right to use the state, territory and federal legal systems if they can identify a personal cause of action that sounds in damages. The obstacles to successfully pursuing such a claim are well known. If the state sanctioned removal was lawful or at least not negligent, it is unlikely that the apology will generate a flood of new claims for compensation and even less likely, in my view, that such cases would be capable of yielding successful verdicts. I do not believe that the Rudd government has thought through the moral implications and likely pressures of encouraging expectations and then failing to deliver on a compensation fund. I think we will hear a lot more debate about whether individual reparation for those forcibly removed is a more constructive way to rehabilitate them than generic programs that will deliver absent compensation. That, of course, is an argument for another day.

The purpose of the apology is that it provides a healing gesture. It needs to be done so that all Australians, whatever our differences, can move forward. That is enough reason for me to offer an apology, together with my colleagues—the members of parliament in the lower house and my colleagues in the Senate—in the spirit of reconciliation.