Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

You do not get many weeks like last week in the federal parliament. And the interesting thing was that the significance which has brought us to have the debate that we are engaging in now was a moment where we did not pass a law. It was a moment where none of the constitutional responsibilities that we take on as members of parliament in the black-letter form were actually what was making the difference. It goes to something I referred to in my first speech in this place: the fact that the greatest power that the House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Australia have goes way beyond our constitutional power—that, at our best, we have a capacity as a parliament to affect how Australians relate to each other.

I first discovered this back in 1996 after the then member for Oxley made her first speech and made particular comments with respect to immigration. It started an extraordinary debate across the airwaves that then went to debates across the dinner tables in people’s homes. I remember my wife coming home from work at Greenacre Childcare Centre and saying that there was a noticeable and sudden difference in the way that the children were playing. It sounded like an extraordinary link that made no sense—and yet how do you explain it when children in a long-day care centre are using racist taunts, in a widespread fashion, that for the previous year none of those children had used?

The mere fact that something is said in our federal parliament actually reaches out to the community and legitimises what is being said. In the same way, I found this again late last year when I met with members of the African community in Darwin. One woman stood up and expressed her concern that, as a result of comments made by federal parliamentarians, her children were now being teased in the playground in a way they never have been previously. She remarked to me, holding her baby, which I think was her fourth or fifth child, ‘You have to understand, Tony, we haven’t chosen Australia; we went to the United Nations in Darfur and said, “Please find us a home,” and Australia chose us.’ After her children had been treated in that fashion her line to me, which will always stay with me, was, ‘I now wonder whether we will ever be home.’ If there is any group of people who should always feel ‘home’ in Australia it is the Indigenous population of Australia.

The report Bringing them home came down more than a decade ago. The apology itself never went to laws that would be passed within Australia. The apology did not go to the exercise of executive power. Yet it did go to an extraordinary power that is held within the House of Representatives, and that is the capacity to affect the way Australians treat each other and relate to each other. That is actually what happened last week. Some people who had been critics of the apology for long periods of time had run an argument that we should not feel a sense of guilt, we should not hang our heads in shame. What we saw last week was a sense where an apology, an acknowledgement of history and a willingness to say sorry pointed not to hanging heads in shame but rather to providing an opportunity where we can walk tall together.

The best indication I could have as to what a difference the apology would make to how Australians related to each other was given to me in two ways: on the day before and on that morning. On the morning, by a very simple accident of history, I ended up receiving a call and being asked to assist in escorting the members of the stolen generation who were to sit on the floor of the House of Representatives to their seats. One man from Mutitjulu remarked to me as we made our walk across the green carpet, ‘I cannot believe I’m actually being welcomed here—welcomed to the federal parliament.’ That gives a particular significance to the welcome to country which was given to us.

The day before that, unexpectedly and driven entirely by the students themselves, the students at Kingsgrove High School decided to put together their own petition. It was done by the students, not by the teachers. They simply wrote:

Petition: apology for the stolen generations.

We the undersigned students and teachers at Kingsgrove High School support the national apology being made to the stolen generations. This is an important initial step towards the achievement of justice and equality for Indigenous Australians.

This is from an area that has very few—it has some—Indigenous residents. The ages running through the petition are generally from 14 to 17, with the occasional teacher in their 40s. These students made a decision on a school playground that they believed that there was a statement being made in the federal parliament that was deeply relevant to them as Australians.

They presented this to me in my office in Parliament House the day before the apology with a letter. The letter read:

Dear Mr Rudd

Kingsgrove High School students acknowledge the importance of showing support for the Aboriginal people by choosing to participate and support the federal government’s formal apology held in the nation’s capital Canberra on Wednesday 13 February. Students from Kingsgrove High feel the federal government’s apology will go a long way in terms of helping to bridge the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

For example, it will:

… help create pathways for Indigenous children to make better choices in life and realise their dreams.

Twenty students along with three teachers have made the journey to Canberra to witness this historic event and represent the youth of our school community. The Prime Minister, Mr Rudd, has shown exceptional leadership in initiating this legislation. It will show that the healing process starts with the word sorry. This historical legislation—

as they described it—

… will be an important step towards the achievement of justice and equality for Indigenous Australia. All Australians should be proud that after so long our representatives are doing the right thing and this will be recognised by Australia and the world. In support of the national policy, students and staff of Kingsgrove High School have signed a petition recognising this event and indicating that from all our multicultural backgrounds this legislation has universal acceptance.

Yours sincerely

The students of Kingsgrove High School

While the petition was not in the correct forms of the House, I still received it gratefully and I think it is important to have it here on the record in the federal parliament.

The night following, there was a function for the group Heywire broadcast on ABC radio where students had come from all around Australia, from country regions, and had been part of the Heywire process of putting together their own stories—their own stories regarding the different issues and challenges that young people face in the areas in which they all lived. I was taken aback by speech after speech of the young people who had been down for the week, who just wanted to talk about the leadership that they felt had been offered in the apology.

What they had done as young people from the bush was put together their stories, and I think it is important to remember that the national momentum did not begin with legislation in terms of doing something about this; the national momentum did not actually come from a recommendation contained within the Bringing them home report; the national momentum came from the stories contained within that report. These are stories where individual lives turned upside down, told simply, provided a level of shock, provided a real level of horror in their message such that we wanted to give that natural, immediate human reaction, on hearing what had happened to people’s lives in the names of laws put through the parliament, by saying to those individuals, ‘We are so very terribly sorry.’ To have been a member of parliament at the time that that step was taken is perhaps one of the greatest privileges I will have as a member of parliament in my time here. It was good that it was done in a bipartisan fashion and was recognised by all as being the first in a series of steps that we can now embark on as a nation together.

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