Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to be speaking in the Main Committee tonight, for the first time in this parliament. I look forward to many other contributions. I am very pleased to be speaking, quite impromptu, as you can imagine, on the issue of an apology to the stolen generations. I am one of those people in the coalition who are glad that the parliament has finally said sorry to Indigenous people, not just for the policy of the stolen generations but also for the injustices the Indigenous people have suffered at the hands of colonisers since 1770 or 1788—depending on which date you wish to take in history. That is not to say that we should have any kind of black armband view of Australian history; we are a fantastic country and we have a magnificent history. But there is one deep stain on our nation’s psyche and history and that is the appalling treatment that we have meted out to Indigenous people over 200 years. We are probably one of the worst countries in the Western world, in the Anglo-Saxon group of countries, in the way we have handled our Indigenous people. The Inuit are better off in Canada, the Red Indian in America and the Maori in New Zealand. In Australia the health, housing, education and life expectancy outcomes of Indigenous Australians are worse than any of those peoples. Yet we are an incredibly wealthy, powerful country that should have done a lot better.

So when the Bringing them home report was handed down in 1997, recommending there be a national apology, my view was that that should have been done then. I think it is disappointing that it is 10 years later that the parliament has united and apologised for the treatment of those people who were forcibly removed from their families and for a 200-year history of not handling Indigenous policies or politics well. Certainly, there was ignorance on both sides but we should have been able to handle the situation with which we were presented much better than we did.

Today Australian Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders still have reason to feel that successive Australian governments have not succeeded in addressing their issues. Certainly health, welfare, education, employment and life expectancy outcomes are the critical things that Indigenous families want to have successfully addressed. Governments have failed to understand Indigenous Australia—and I am no expert on Indigenous Australia and I do not hold myself out as one. They have failed to understand, respect and recognise the culture and the connection with the land that Indigenous people feel is quite different from the feeling of a Celt like me, whose family came to this country in 1858. Symbolism therefore is important. To be able to draw a line under this ledger, to say we are sorry for what has gone before, that we are prepared to begin again and that we look forward to you forgiving us for the mistakes we have made is very important and I am very pleased that I was in the parliament last Wednesday to be part of what I regard as a historic moment. I am disappointed that it got to the point where it was such an historic moment. If there had been an apology in 1997, the building up of what seemed to be disappointment in so many people’s hearts over a long period of time would not have made it as significant as it was last Wednesday. But it has been done and I am delighted it has been done.

My father was a royal flying doctor in Alice Springs in the 1950s, and he had a deep connection with the Indigenous people. That is what made him become an ophthalmologist—because of the glaucoma and trachoma problems that Indigenous people suffered then. He returned to Adelaide and decided to become an ophthalmologist. He filled me with stories about respecting and understanding the culture of Indigenous people that I still hold very dear. I am delighted, so many years after his death in 1988, to be able to be here and to be part of a healing process.

See this speech in context