Arch Bevis (Brisbane, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is an honour to participate in this debate and to wholeheartedly endorse the comments made by the Prime Minister and so many members of parliament expressing our formal sorrow as a nation to the Aboriginal and Islander people against whom unspeakable atrocities were committed by order of the state and under the authority of the state. I think the Prime Minister’s speech will truly stand the test of time. The events of last week are something that people will look back on in years to come and in so doing they will want to see what the leaders of Australia in 2008 had to say about this matter. I really did find the comments in the speech by the Prime Minister to be uplifting and to be of the highest calibre. I am pleased to associate myself with those words.

I had not realised until later that day, when watching the television, that so many Australians were so keen to participate, not just to watch. To see the news that night with school assembly halls and community halls dotted around Australia, in large cities, in parks and in communities throughout the country, where so many Australians were wanting to participate, to listen to the words being spoken here and to feel part of that process was also a great thing. It was reflected in what we saw outside the parliament. After the formal proceedings, along with my wife, Cathy, I went outside to the lawns between Old Parliament House and the current Parliament House to join the people and the celebrations. I do not think I have felt a sense of universal goodwill and euphoria like that in all of my time in public life or political campaigning, or any other activity with public involvement. There was a genuine feeling of goodwill and that we had reached a watershed.

I suppose we should have realised that because it is not that long ago that we saw sorry marches in our major capital cities, where hundreds of thousands of Australians marched. I participated with my family in the march in Brisbane and I know many members of parliament on both sides of the chamber did likewise. I have been to quite a few demonstrations in Brisbane over the years. I do not think I have been to a bigger demonstration. It was a family outing. Unlike a lot of other demonstrations, there was no nasty chanting and nobody pointing fingers. It was just an expression of goodwill on the part of so many Australians. Perhaps I should have not been surprised last week to see the outpouring of goodwill.

I was moved last week to revisit the Bringing them home report that Justice Ronald Wilson prepared at the request of the then Labor government prior to the 1996 election and delivered in 1997. I remember reading it when it was tabled and I remember my emotions. I could not actually remember the detail of the stories—although I could remember how I felt—so I wanted to go back and look at some of the things that I read then. It was instructive because in his speech the Prime Minister quite rightly pointed out that, whatever people might say about good intent and goodwill—and no doubt for some that was true—the apparatus of the state singled people out by virtue of their race and colour to be dealt with in what I regard as abominable ways. When you read the accounts of the people concerned, you cannot help but be moved.

I just want to read two or three of the accounts that were contained in Justice Wilson’s report. One is from a woman who experienced these problems as a child many years ago. We might like to think they do not apply any more, but this was her account:

When anybody come to pick up a worker they used to line us up and they’d make you flex your muscles. If you were big and strong they’d pick you - like a slave market. I was sent out at 11. I worked there for seven and a half years, never got paid anything, all that time. We used to bring the cattle in … we didn’t get nothing. So I had to join the army to survive.

Can you imagine, Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, our children being taken when they were young and, at the age of 11, primary school student age, being sent out to work without so much as a cent being given to them for their hard labour? No doubt they got board, lodging and food; otherwise they would not have been able to turn up for work the next day. When I read that, it reminded me of those terrible movies we watch about the southern states of America a couple of hundred years ago and the way that slaves were treated. It is abominable to think that it could happen in this country; it is abominable to think that it could happen in the 20th century. It did, and we should not be blind to it.

A couple of other accounts are from the 1960s. The 1960s are far too recent for these sorts of accounts, but they are true. There is the account of a child talking about the way she felt with the foster parents she was given to. She said:

All the teachings that we received from our (foster) family when we were little, that black people were bad … I wanted my skin to be white.

What a terrible thing it is for a young person growing up to be told that they are less worthy and for them to actually dislike their own identity so much because of what their foster parents had said. Another account said:

She [foster mother] would say I was dumb all the time and my mother and father were lazy dirty people who couldn’t feed me or the other brothers and sister.

The final account I want to quote says:

When I was 14 years old and going to these foster people, I remember the welfare officer sitting down and they were having a cup of tea and talking about how they was hoping our race would die out. And that I was fair enough, I was a half-caste and I would automatically live with a white person and get married. Because the system would make sure that no-one would marry an Aborigine person anyhow. And then my children would automatically be fairer, quarter-caste, and then the next generation would be white and we would be bred out. I remember when she was discussing this with my foster people, I remember thinking - because I had no concept of what it all meant - I remember thinking, ‘That’s a good idea, because all the Aborigines are poor’.

These were the people working in the field who were called the helpers and the supervisors and they were talking about ‘breeding them out’.

That reminded me of a more recent experience in my own employment in the early 1980s when I was an officer in the teachers union and I visited the communities on the Cape and the gulf and in the Torres Strait Islands. I can remember around 1981 or 1982 standing on the jetty at Thursday Island with one of the senior teachers as we watched these boats ferry the young teenage girls out to a boat. The boat was the state government’s ship. The government owned the ship; the government crewed the ship. It was there supposedly to provide supplies and, as I was told by the locals, the teachers, it was common practice when the boat came into harbour for the crew to ferry the young girls out onto the boat at night for a party—not the young men, just the young girls. This was the state government in 1981 or 1982. I saw it with my own eyes. It was mind-boggling to think that such things could occur in the 1980s, but they did.

I would like to think that the events of this last week or so have genuinely turned a page in the thinking of all of us in leadership roles and that we will take a leadership role in the community on this matter. It is sadly the case that not all Australians share my enthusiasm for the comments made by the Prime Minister. Our role here is to do what is right. It is clear, I am sure, to the overwhelming number of us in this parliament, whatever our politics and background, that the course set by the Prime Minister in relation to this matter is right.

I am reminded, though, of the problems we had on this with short-term, competing political influences. I well remember when Sir Ronald Wilson’s report was tabled in this parliament. The then government in 1997 refused to allow the parliament to take note of the report. The parliament was denied the opportunity to discuss it by a conscious decision of the then government. In fact, I can remember the whips office organising opposition speakers to read sections of this report into the Hansard for the next two weeks in the adjournment debate because it was the only way the parliament could record what went on. That was a decade ago. Ten years ago the government refused to allow the parliament to even discuss this document. I do not think that too many members of the opposition today would look back on that with great pride. I am sure there are many on the opposition bench now who will be surprised to know that that is what others who were occupying their seats did 10 years ago, but it happens to be the case. It is about time we got over that sort of short-term vision and looked at the longer-term issues.

I have been here long enough to see that sort of sentiment repeated a couple of times. I can remember, when the High Court made its decision on Mabo, the hotly contested debate that ensued. There were many members of the parliament who were then and are again in opposition who took exception to the proposals of the government and a number who actually attacked the High Court decision and thought that the question of Indigenous land title was fundamentally wrong and that the High Court was stepping beyond its bounds. I do not propose to refer to names of members, but indicative of some of the sentiments was a speech made on 5 October 1993 by a member of parliament who was then in opposition and is still a member of parliament. They said:

Land-holders throughout the country are worried about their title. Uncertainty has been introduced into land title in Australia through the decision brought down in June 1992 by six High Court judges. We need to bring certainty back into the land law.

The problem is that the parliament introduced the Racial Discrimination Act in 1975. We should be rolling back the Racial Discrimination Act and returning land tenure to the states. States would then be able to decide the question of land rights in accordance with their own laws and values.

I do not think too many people today would subscribe to the view that, in respect of land title or race rights, the provisions of the antidiscrimination act need to be rolled back.

That was not an isolated view being expressed by members of the parliament at that time—nor was the attitude when I first came into parliament after the 1990 election, to my amazement, towards race relations in another place called South Africa. There were a number of speeches made at that time about the evils of Nelson Mandela. I do not propose to mention the name of the member of parliament at that time who put a question on notice encapsulating this sentiment:

Is the ANC (a) no more than a political party, (b) not the largest political party in South Africa and (c) affiliated with the South African Communist Party.

This was because the government at the time had invited Nelson Mandela to come to Australia. The Prime Minister’s reply in part said:

In the Government’s view the ANC is not merely a political party but is a major partner in the political process currently underway in South Africa. At the same time it has no right to contest elections and it has no formal status within the existing political structures in South Africa.

I do not think many people today would deny the important role the ANC played. These are all related to the same question, I think, of the central equality of life on this planet and our duty as leaders to do what we know is right. I think the events last week and the sentiment broadly agreed on both sides of the chamber have advanced that goodwill. The task we all have is to try and turn that goodwill into genuine and concrete improvements for the lot of Indigenous Australians. I think the steps that were taken by the overwhelming majority of us last week are in keeping with the overwhelming wish of the people, and I hope that that goodwill extends to good deeds as we move forward.

See this speech in context