Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome discussion on the Prime Minister’s motion of an apology. The one thing most speakers have in common is their recognition that this is a complex issue. I agree with them and applaud any real attempt to improve the lives of Aboriginal people and abused or neglected children whether Indigenous or non-Indigenous. Further, the complexity of this situation was not best served by the secrecy of the Labor government in the formation of this motion, whether it be the fact that members, senators and the Australian people were not able to see the wording of the motion a mere 16 hours before debate began, or the fact that the government did not release its legal advice regarding compensation claims that may flow as a result of the apology. A truly open and accountable government would not have been afraid to take the Australian public into its confidence.

This motion of apology sets a worrying precedent. Noel Pearson spoke of his concern that the apology:

… will sanction a view of history that cements a detrimental psychology of victimhood, rather than a stronger one of defiance, survival and agency.

This motion of apology was marketed as being the first step towards ending the disadvantage. In essence, it will do very little to resolve the ingrained dysfunction within some Aboriginal communities.

The Aboriginal people of this land have had a tragic history since white settlement. In Australian history there have been successive policies that have been detrimental to Aboriginal Australians—the policies that ensconced the welfare mentality and dependency into the subculture; the failure to confront the harsh truths of life in Indigenous communities; the misguided paternalism which did nothing to right the wrongs of past decades; and the damaging mindset of the victim mentality, which pervaded the psyche of Indigenous affairs and made coming face to face with the more pressing problems of Aboriginal communities nigh on impossible.

When the Howard government announced the gutsy and groundbreaking Northern Territory intervention, the critics came out in full force. The Age reported then of Prime Minister Howard pulling a ‘black rabbit’ out of the hat, that the intervention was a ‘black children overboard’ moment, and that John Howard had ‘done a Robert Mugabe on our citizens’—and the hyperbole did not stop there. However, this was the first time that entrenched failure in Indigenous affairs and the ugly, detrimental, dysfunctional nature of Aboriginal communities was confronted head on. I do not believe for one moment that, had the Labor Party been in power on the reception of the report of the Northern Territory board of inquiry, they would have made the difficult decision to intervene in Northern Territory Aboriginal affairs; in fact, Labor is now backtracking and reintroducing the permit system, effectively closing many troubled communities to the outside world and to proper scrutiny.

This apology flows from recommendations in the 1997 Bringing them home report. This report not only called for a motion of apology but recommended that:

. . . ‘compensation’ be widely defined to mean ‘reparation’—

which could—

consist of,

1. acknowledgment and apology,

2. guarantees against repetition,

3. measures of restitution,

4. measures of rehabilitation, and

5. monetary compensation—

and that reparations were to be made not only to individuals but to family members, entire communities and their descendants.

The problem with the Bringing them home report upon which the apology and claims for financial compensation are based is described by well-known Aboriginal activist Noel Pearson when he states that the report:

… is not a rigorous history of the removal of Aboriginal children and the breaking up of families … it does not represent a defensible history.

Yet this is the very report upon which this apology motion is based.

If we accept that an apology is important, then why shouldn’t we get it right? The very term ‘stolen generations’ is not defined, is not qualified and, as such, is troublesome. It is a direct lift from the Bringing them home report. It is a term that is too simplistic and has become an unqualified phrase. In purely legal terms, the word ‘stolen’ has specific meaning denoting criminality. This gives rise to a host of troubling scenarios, not least of which is the question of whether welfare officers and other government employees are, by implication, to be held liable in some way for their involvement in saving children at risk of harm in local communities.

To some, this may seem like semantics, but the parliament has a responsibility to get things as right as possible. Every day in Australia there are children being separated from a parent because someone has deemed it to be in the child’s best interests. Are these children stolen? Some of the reasons that Aboriginal children were taken from their families in decades past are the same reasons that Aboriginal children are sadly taken away today. It sickens me that young Aboriginal children are still being diagnosed with sexually transmitted diseases or identified as being in some other danger, yet some people would say removing them from such perilous environments would be creating the next stolen generation. The protection of children is far more important than any individual’s political agenda, including that of the Prime Minister, whose own staff led a back-turning campaign in Parliament House when the Leader of the Opposition was speaking in support of this motion.

The most recent report that highlights the level of Indigenous disadvantage is the Little children are sacred report. This is the report that led to the Howard government’s emergency intervention in the Northern Territory. The two authors of the Little children are sacred report made visits to 45 communities in the Northern Territory. Tragically, they found instances of sexual abuse in each one of those 45 communities. Similarly, each one of these 45 sites ‘indicated that alcohol was having an extremely significant detrimental effect on almost every aspect of community life, including the safety of children’. The former Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, said in his speech to the House on the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Bill 2007:

When confronted with a failed society where basic standards of law and order and behaviour have broken down and where women and children are unsafe, how should we respond? Do we respond with more of what we have done in the past? Or do we radically change direction with an intervention strategy matched to the magnitude of the problem?

Thankfully, the Howard government changed direction to confront these harsh and, at times, unpalatable truths. The Northern Territory intervention included more police, restrictions on alcohol, audits on computers to stamp out pornography, acquisition of five-year leases, improving living conditions, carrying out health checks and changing the way communities are governed. All these things challenge the mindset of those who refuse to condemn the decades-old failed approach of paternalism and dependency, which has offered such dispiriting outcomes to Indigenous Australia. Mal Brough and John Howard challenged that, and we need the groundbreaking Northern Territory intervention to continue and certainly not be watered down.

The measures in such an intervention do far more to advance the cause of Indigenous disadvantage than this apology. The problem with this issue is its complexity, which is not solved simply with glib sloganeering and cushy sound bites. We do the Aboriginal people an injustice because this apology falsely purports to offer hope that the entrenched disadvantage will now be remedied simply by debate on the motion in the House.

Some people have said that we should all simply go along with the apology because it is only symbolic and, although imperfect, we should just give it our support in order to move on. This sets a dangerous precedent and trivialises the very nature of what we do in this place. The hurried and frenzied nature of the dissemination of the wording of the motion is a case in point. Any parliamentary motion has a significant implication; therefore, why hide the wording? Why only release it some 15 hours before it is to be debated? Why should we as parliamentarians be refused access to the legal advice that the government sought to allegedly protect it from compensation claims? It was either rushed or deliberately withheld from debate. There was no chance to analyse the wording and its implications, much less to proffer a differing or alternative point of view and wording.

I could not, in all conscience, allow myself to be stampeded into de facto support for a motion which attempts to neatly and glibly rule a line under an impossibly complex issue with little regard for the possible consequences for Aboriginal Australians and for the nation as a whole. Many who have dared offer an alternative viewpoint, expressed a contrary opinion on the wording of the motion or called for more debate have been called uncompassionate, callous and racist, as if compassion is strictly limited to those who endorse the Prime Minister’s ‘sorry’ motion—as if they have an exclusive monopoly on compassion. This clearly shows that we are not dealing with a unifying motion, no matter how well intentioned it has been.

The ill-defined ‘sorry’ motion is now the basis for compensation claims, which is to be expected as this was also recommended in the Bringing them home report. Tasmanian Aboriginal lawyer and activist Michael Mansell said:

. . . we won’t rest until we get that compensation package.

Former Administrator of the Northern Territory Ted Egan said the government should consider compensation. Pat Dodson called for a compensation fund in his speech at the National Press Club. One local Bangerang representative stated on local radio in my electorate a couple of weeks ago that this apology was the first step towards compensation. Just two days after the apology, the front page of the Herald Sun carried the news of a class action against the government for multimillion dollar compensation claims for members of what were referred to as ‘the stolen generation’.

These are the unintended consequences of the apology. Already the claims have come in thick and fast. It is not compensation that will fix the problems in Aboriginal communities. We all want to see an end to substance abuse, child sexual abuse, the neglect of young children, the dissemination of pornography and the cycle of welfare dependency. Children’s health, infant mortality rates, Indigenous schooling and housing—none of these issues are easy to fix, but we all want to see improvement. It is just that some of us disagree about how we are going to get there and how to bring all other non-Indigenous Australians with us.

It is important to note that Indigenous affairs spending on health programs more than quadrupled in the decade from 1996 under the Howard government. However, the allocation of money to remedy the ingrained sociocultural dysfunction within some Aboriginal communities is of itself not enough. This apology will entrench the notion of Aboriginal disillusionment and more firmly ensconce the victim mentality right throughout Indigenous Australia, as was noted by Noel Pearson in his moving and eloquent piece in the Australian on the day prior to the motion’s presentation in parliament. Pearson wrote:

One of my misgivings about the apology has been my belief that nothing good will come from viewing ourselves, and making our case on the basis of our status, as victims.

It is far more simple to offer apologies than give proper recognition of the more heartbreaking, unpalatable realities of life in Indigenous communities—two-year-olds with gonorrhoea, children as victims of gang rape, squalid living conditions, young minds diminished by an ugly mixture of booze and porn and all the other sorts of unutterable miseries that run rife and unencumbered. An apology will not fix this, but a new mindset and better policy will go a long way. To be lastingly compassionate is to make the hard, sometimes unpopular, decisions to tackle the horrific problems of systemic sexual abuse, substance dependence and lawlessness in Aboriginal communities.

For my part, it would have been much easier to take the path of least resistance, stay silent on the matter and go along with the wave of feelgood across the parliament. But I could not in all conscience be railroaded, for the reasons I have already stated above, into supporting this hastily put together motion. I accept that many agree with my stand and many do not. It is worth noting, however, that some who have disagreed with the position I have taken have been very swift in serving a tirade of abuse, which only highlights how quickly calm debate and analysis can be replaced with rigid and inflexible views where one is not even allowed to question, let alone challenge, conventional wisdom.

To all those people in my electorate, to all those people in Australia who may be afraid of expressing their point of view out of fear of being labelled callous, uncompassionate and racist, I say: ‘Fear not. We live in a democracy, a very vibrant democracy. And, although from time to time conventional wisdom and political correctness may try to silence what you truly feel in your heart, please do not give in and please ensure that your voice is heard.’ With the change of government we have been transported back to the suffocating and stifling political correctness of the Keating era. This phenomenon itself will have consequences on every corner, down every street and down every track of mainstream Australia. Indigenous Australians deserve better than this glib debate. They deserve an open and courageous debate, as do all non-Indigenous Australians.

See this speech in context