Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr President.

… we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history.

We reflect on their past mistreatment.

We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations—this blemished chapter in our nation's history.

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.

We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.

To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.

And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and proud culture, we say sorry.

This is how Kevin Rudd began the National Apology to the Stolen Generations. It was a day of national catharsis, a day of national healing and, most of all, a day of national hope. In the House of Representatives, on the lawns outside and across the country, we Australians embraced in a way we never had before, because we embraced one another without armour, in honesty, in truth—the conditions of respect. It was the starting point for an equal stake. Yet too often when parliamentarians have recognised the anniversary of the National Apology to the Stolen Generations there have been attempts to comfort our conscience and say, 'Well, we have a long way to go, but look how far we've come.' We need no more of that. We diminish the apology, this watershed moment of truth-telling, if we conceal failure and neglect in self-gratifying fictions that we are moving forward. In fact, it's hard to see how we are moving much at all. On this year's anniversary of the national apology, we look at how far we have not come and we reproach this government, which appears perfectly at peace with its own inertia on reconciliation and on closing the gap with First Australians.

This past Saturday was the 13th anniversary of the apology, but for years now work on closing the gap, the voice to parliament and makarrata has been stalled. In last year's Closing the gap report, five of the seven targets—child mortality, literacy and numeracy, school attendance, employment and life expectancy—weren't on track. Last year's Family matters report, more than a decade after the apology, showed the alarming rates at which Indigenous children are being removed from their families now: 37.3 per cent of all children removed. The Morrison government promised a referendum for constitutional recognition. They promised it, but they won't commit. They won't commit to a time line. They won't commit to doing the work to make the referendum a success.

I reiterate the offer made by Mr Albanese, Senator Dodson and Ms Burney, the shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, who is here today, that Labor wants to work constructively to achieve a constitutionally enshrined voice to parliament. We don't care who gets the credit, but we do want to get it done—and there is time to get it done now. All of us in this place should be determined to see all three elements of the statement: the constitutionally enshrined voice, treaty-making and truth-telling overseen by a makarrata commission. Senator Dodson, the father of reconciliation, has put a motion on the Notice Paper to establish a Joint Select Committee on Makarrata. I know he's seeking agreement with Minister Wyatt. I say to the government: express your support. I say to government senators: express your support in the party room. It's not so much to ask. It costs you so little. The Uluru statement as a whole is not much to ask, frankly. In fact, we should be humbled and gracious that a people who have had everything taken from them are willing to meet us on these terms. These are terms that cost us nothing and ask us only to demonstrate some humility and some grace ourselves. It is time for those opposite to demonstrate some humility and some grace.

The apology was recommended in the Bringing them home report, which Senator Dodson has spoken about. The then Prime Minister, John Howard, resisted it for the following 10 years. Let's remember the ridiculing of those who acknowledged the facts of our past as having a 'black armband' view, the opposition to the apology—all this despite the community support that is best remembered by and exemplified in those reconciliation walks in the year 2000. Nelson Mandela visited Australia that year. He said the quarter of a million people-strong Sydney Harbour Bridge walk showed a country wanting to heal itself and deal with the hurt of the past. He went on to say:

Leaving wounds unattended leads to its festering and eventually causes greater injury to the body of society.

Mr Mandela well understood from the South African experience what we call makarrata. Then, of course, in 2008, in one of his earliest acts as Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd moved the national apology, and the Nelson opposition went along with it. After eight years in government, it's time the Liberals showed they meant it.

Unlike John Howard, today's Liberals don't huff and puff and dig in their heels. Instead, they just say they care, they talk about how important it is to get it right, but they don't deliver. The current Prime Minister uses similar but more subtle arguments than his Liberal predecessor about not getting stuck in the past. Well, it is irrelevant that the past can't be changed because it lives on. We receive the past as material and emotional inheritance, whether it be abundance or deprivation. We receive it as a system that continues to mete out disadvantage and advantage by the same formula it always has, unless we take steps to change it. You see, this is how systemic racism works, and we do talk about that now as much as we talk about individual acts of racial prejudice. That is a positive development, because it helps us understand that racism is not just seen in explicit acts of abuse or violence. It is also manifest in culture, law and policy. If you don't believe me, have a look around and ask whether this place, and many other centres of power in Australia, look like today's Australia.

It is a great thing for our Labor caucus to have Pat Dodson, Linda Burney and Malarndirri McCarthy in it. It deeply enriches us. We welcome those other members of parliament and senators—Mr Wyatt, Senator Thorpe, Senator Lambie—but alongside representation the rest of us also need to act, and in this place, in the parliament of Australia, we actually have the means to move the needle, we have the means to help the nation heal, and we have the means to tackle systematic intergenerational Indigenous disadvantage. So, if we don't have the will, what does it say about us? If you want to sit on the government benches but you're not going to insist that your cabinet and Prime Minister do better then what does it say about you?

The national apology was the start, but a government that wants to claim legitimacy in the sweep of this country's history must make sure it was not the end. If you want Australia to succeed as a nation and as a family, we must all have the equal stake in it that Prime Minister Rudd called for and that our Indigenous people have called for. So I again extend Labor's offer to work together to close the gap and to achieve constitutional recognition for voice, treaty and truth.