Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I want to use this debate on the apology motion to place on record some thoughts about Sorry Day in the House last week. Before I get to the crux of the motion, I just want to say a few words about the state of Aboriginal affairs in Australia. It is worth while reflecting on not only how difficult this problem of the stolen generation is but how there is a group of people in Australia which has a substantially lesser life expectancy, a high infant mortality and crime statistics which, quite frankly, boggle the mind. Why is it that there is a group of people in Australia whose children are not as well protected by the law as we would expect all our children to be protected? We should not underestimate the challenge of Indigenous affairs, neither should we think we are the first people to try to address this challenge. I think there has been a lot of goodwill to try and attack these areas of entrenched disadvantage.

I was initially relatively sceptical about the idea of providing an apology to the stolen generation, but I think it is important. In this place I think we can often stake out our positions and never move from them. All we do is just fight to defend the ground that we have already staked out and it makes it very difficult for us to move. But certainly on this issue I feel as though I did move some distance, and I was very happy to wholeheartedly support the apology, as given by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition last week.

Former senator Reg Withers, a very great Western Australian senator, said that consistency is a sign of a feeble mind. In this instance I was glad that, in listening to some of the contributions to this debate, I was able to change my thoughts on this motion. I was particularly taken on the day after the apology was given by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. I took the opportunity to talk to some of the people who had come to listen to the apology. I did not think symbols were necessarily going to help them in their situation and that was why I was initially sceptical. But certainly I was quite moved to see the emotion that they felt about coming down here and hearing the parliament apologise to them. It is important that, even if we do not necessarily understand it all ourselves, we acknowledge that if people are feeling like this then, as I do think, what the parliament did was extraordinarily worth while.

So I congratulate the Prime Minister and the new government on doing this. I was also extraordinarily proud of the contribution made by the Leader of the Opposition on the day. It was a difficult issue for the coalition parties; let us not beat about the bush on that. There was a diversity of views within our party room. There is also a diversity of views in the community. We should not just think that everyone in Australia supports us 100 per cent on this motion, because the reality is that there is a diversity of views. There certainly is in my electorate and people have put different views to me about the motion.

Symbolism can only take us so far and, whilst I do think this is an important step, we really need to use this apology to create a new agenda for action to attack this entrenched disadvantage. I firmly believe that the Northern Territory intervention by the Howard government—and I am not making a partisan comment here—was an extraordinarily good start to tackling some of this entrenched disadvantage. Members in this place for the past four decades have tried to do something to change the situation of Aboriginal Australians within our society and, quite frankly—let us be honest—the different approaches have not met with great success. Because that is the case, we need to think long and hard about how we do things. I do believe that the intervention was extremely important. If you cannot provide basic services and law and order to a community—all the things which everyone in the suburbs of Stirling expects and which we would expect to find in our electorates—then it is very difficult to see how you can build on these other issues.

That is why, in listening to some of the contributions in the debate, I have been concerned to hear the Northern Territory intervention being criticised. We should not doubt each other’s sincerity to address these issues; we may have different approaches to it. But I am very happy to put aside any scepticism about the government’s approach to this issue, and I would ask that the Labor Party do the same when they are evaluating the opposition’s approach and the former government’s approach to these issues, because I do believe that everybody in this place wants to see an improvement. I genuinely believe that.

I urge the government to continue with the intervention in the Northern Territory. I think it was a retrograde step to wind back the steps that the previous government were taking on the permit system. Again, whilst I do not doubt the sincerity of the new Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, I am not sure why we would want to go back to a system that has so obviously failed Indigenous people.

I want to just reflect on the challenge that is ahead of us because, as I said, we are not the first people to discover how difficult this problem is. Members in this place in the past have tried to address it but, sadly, we have not met with the success that we would like. But we should not be so arrogant as to assume that, suddenly, we have just discovered there is a whole group of Australians who are not enjoying the prosperity that Australia seems to offer everybody else and therefore feel that we are vastly superior to our forebears who have come before us in this chamber. A lot of effort has gone into Indigenous affairs, but the reality is that we have not seen the progress that everybody would like.

In a former life I worked for the then Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. The Howard government had a program that I thought was a very good initiative to address some of these issues. They made a minister and also their department head specifically responsible for progress in a particular community. I was working for Amanda Vanstone at the time and she was given responsibility for the community at Wadeye, which used to be called Port Keats, which is in the Northern Territory and quite close to the Western Australian border. It is not an easy place to get to.

I went up there with her—it must have been in 2002—and that was my first experience of going to an outlying Indigenous community. You really could not help but be shocked by seeing how this community was so incredibly dysfunctional. Any property that could have been moved or was capable of being stolen was behind barbed wire. From talking to the people there, you got an understanding that at night things descended into a state of lawlessness. It was extraordinarily difficult to get people from the Northern Territory government to go out there and provide services because it was not considered to be a particularly good place for them to go and take their own families. I was pretty shocked by that experience, and it was my first experience. We visited Wadeye on a number of occasions and a sincere effort was made by the former government to try to improve conditions there.

We need to use this apology to commit to providing Aboriginal Australia with the same services and life chances that are available to every other Australian. I think Australians are very happy to give people a fair go. Most of the groups that have come into Australia have been very successful. Why has this one group not been able to share in the broad success that the rest of the community is enjoying?

Of course, speeches in parliament will not achieve this progress. We need to back up our noble words—and they were good words—with actions. We cannot accept lesser standards of law and order in Aboriginal communities and, sadly, this is not just happening in the Northern Territory where the federal government is intervening; the reality is that it is happening in Western Australia, Queensland and other parts of Australia. I despair that the state government of Western Australia, instead of trying to take ownership of the problem, seem determined to try to downplay the problem. I think they see the fact that this problem is continuing as somehow an indictment of the policies that they have put in place. They have clearly failed. The problems in Western Australia are equal to those that are occurring in some of the communities in the Northern Territory.

I just want to move quickly to the issue of compensation. I do not believe that it is appropriate that this generation of Australians compensate the stolen generation for the obvious hardship that they endured. I do believe that that would be a very divisive thing for the government to do and I do think that that is not the way forward for the nation.

I will conclude my remarks by saying that I am very happy to support this motion. If you had asked me a month ago, I would not have said that but, as I have said, I have moved greatly on this issue. So I do wholeheartedly support this motion. I was moved by the proceedings in the chamber last week, but I would like everyone in this place to understand that we have not just discovered this problem; people have been trying to address it for decades. We do need a new approach, and the apology is only very much the first step along that road.

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