Duncan Kerr (Denison, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

It is hard to think of novel and heartfelt comment after the debate because so much has been said already that one would wish to echo. So I am going to just place on record some of my personal reflections and some thanks to people who over the last 20 or 30 years have been important in moving towards the day we were able to witness last week—when we witnessed the historic occasion of the Australian parliament recognising the first peoples of this country and expressing our sorrow for some of the events that had been carried out in the names of other parliaments before us and expressing our sorrow for the stolen generation.

I want to first mention a fellow Tasmanian, a man called Tom Airey. Tom is a man whom I sought at one stage to put forward for an award in the Order of Australia for the work he had done on reconciliation. He is no longer young, but his mind is still sharp, and he was sharp enough to tell me where I could go in that regard, taking the view that what he had done was no more than any other citizen should in advancing an interest that he believed passionately in. He did not want any special recognition through an honour for that work. But, at a time when the idea of reconciliation was deeply unpopular, Tom continued to hold a passion and a commitment which he lived through his life of action in Tasmania, and I want to honour him in this speech.

I also want to recognise the work that Henry Reynolds did in publishing what I think was a crucial book in opening many Australians’ eyes to the lived experience of Indigenous Australians as they experienced European settlement in this country, and that is The Other Side of the Frontier. We are all in this parliament because of the fact that our ancestors, either recent or past, came to this continent, which had previously been in the possession of the Indigenous Australians, and we have been the beneficiaries of the form of governance, the advances that have occurred in technology and the wealth that has been generated since European settlement. We have to recognise that, from a different perspective, it was seen as dispossession. It was seen as a war in which fairly defenceless people—or people with limited capacity for defence—heroically in many cases resisted what they saw as an invasion. They were pushed back in many places. I think anyone who knows the history of my state of Tasmania would be familiar with the tragedies of the encounters between Indigenous Tasmanians and European settlers—the infamous ‘black line’ where people were hunted down, not very successfully, in attempts to round up the last of the Indigenous Tasmanians; the removal of those who were found, ultimately to Bass Strait Island; the lessons taught in schools for years thereafter that there were no more Tasmanians left and that the last Tasmanian Aboriginal was Truganini, who died many years ago.

The fight was led by someone whom I do not always agree with but whom I have to recognise for his passion and commitment over many decades, Michael Mansell. He continues to be provocative and, if I can say so in this parliament, thank God that there are such provocative people, even though at times I guess that all of us find their provocations difficult. Michael Mansell first made Tasmanians aware that there was still a robust community of Tasmanians alive and kicking who recognised their Aboriginality and who wanted to demand recognition. And so, although I have had my differences from time to time with Michael Mansell and will continue to do so, I put on record in this debate an appreciation of the service that he has played in both the Indigenous and Australian communities.

I also mention two people whom I worked with when I was Principal Solicitor for the New South Wales Aboriginal Legal Service, Cecil Patten and Paul Coe. Both were involved in those early days of the debates about Indigenous self-determination. Again, they were sometimes difficult people, people who have not always had a simple past, but they are people who impress me immensely and led me to have many of the views that I still hold about the importance of recognition of Aboriginal identity and the right to self-determination, and I am certain they played their part in the events that we saw last week.

Lowitja O’Donoghue is another person that I would like to recognise in this regard. Lowitja was a Chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and was a powerful spokesperson for the Indigenous community in that role, but she would have been a powerful spokesperson for the Indigenous population without that appointment and without that role. She is a person in whom humanity is best seen. There have been many occasions when discussing Indigenous affairs with Lowitja O’Donoghue that tears have been left in my eyes because of the straightforwardness of her account and the bluntness of her expression of what seemed to be so simple a set of propositions that we were so heartless in rejecting for so long.

Can I also mention the fact that I am just a little saddened there was no obviously self-identifiable Indigenous Australian in our parliament to have served before Neville Bonner, representing the Liberal Party of Australia, and Aden Ridgeway, representing the Australian Democrats. I hope it is not long until I will be able to be proudly speaking of a member of the Australian Labor Party who represents us in this parliament from an Indigenous background, because we need to find space in our ranks for the whole of the Australian community.

In reflecting on that, I go back to the days when I worked for the New South Wales Aboriginal Legal Service and recall that for some time I was also the principal solicitor for an organisation called the National Aboriginal and Islander Legal Services Secretariat. It was set up to coordinate the work of all legal services across Australia with an Indigenous background. That organisation put in a submission to the constitutional commission that was then headed by, I think, Gough Whitlam and a number of others reviewing the constitution.

One of the submissions which I participated in drafting that was put forward on behalf of the National Aboriginal and Islander Legal Services Secretariat was a proposition that is reflected in a recent proposition by Michael Mansell that Indigenous Australians should be directly represented in the parliament. Michael Mansell’s proposition, which he advanced with his usual enthusiasm for controversy on the day after the sorry statement, was that there should be a separate Indigenous state. It is not too far from the proposition that was advanced by the legal services secretariat, which was: wouldn’t it be a good thing, because we do not have geographical areas where Indigenous people are anywhere near the full majority, but why not have 12 senators elected from Indigenous Australia participating as a separate electorate and represented in our Senate as such?

Of course, if we were to move in that direction, it would be something that needs a lot of reflection and thought, but it is not different from, for example, New Zealand, where there are specified seats for the Maori, who have therefore parliamentary representation. I think it would be difficult to find that process in our House of Representatives. Constitutionally it does not fit very easily, but recognition of the idea of self-determination and the claim of sovereignty that has been made and never surrendered by Australian Aboriginal people, through a kind of treaty process that then leads to the recognition of the entitlement of Indigenous Australians to be represented in the parliament, is not an idea that we should turn our backs on.

In speaking of turning backs, at this stage of this contribution to the debate, I truly welcome the bipartisanship that was manifested in the day where both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition stood together after the debate in recognition of a common interest that we all share in putting this behind us. There is no doubt that, in the Australian community, not every Australian welcomes the fact that the political leadership has said sorry. That is also probably the case with the fact that a long time ago we buried the idea of white Australia and that was done on a bipartisan basis. Once these things are done, they can never be turned back. That is the importance of the fact of that bipartisanship. Once both political leaders and their parties accept the reality of the necessity to move beyond where they were stuck in the past, we have a political consensus that enables us to think afresh about the practical measures that are still necessary to make good the opportunities for Indigenous Australians to live a full and enriched life in an Australia we all share. It gives us the opportunity to be genuine about our relationships in a passionate way but without the kind of partisanship that has divided us in the past.

Finally, can I recognise those on both sides of politics who have worked so hard. I know that there have been people like Robert Tickner, who gave up an enormous amount in his personal life through the great debates about Wik and Mabo. I know there are people like former Senator Chaney, who made a tremendous contribution to debate from the Liberal Party. Nobody owns this exclusively. We did have a dead period of 11 years where change was resisted, but we have passed that.

It is now healthy for us to recognise that in the path that has led us here there have been many of those ordinary citizens like Tom Airey, who I mentioned earlier. There have been brave activists, like Michael Mansell and Coe and Cecil Patten. There have been academics—people like Henry Reynolds. There have been parliamentarians like Neville Bonner and Aden Ridgeway, who made the breakthrough of being Indigenous representatives in this parliament. There have been politicians on both side of the political divide like Robert Tickner and Fred Chaney. There have been distinguished former judges like Sir William Deane, who caught our hearts in the way he articulated our common interests, and there have been passionate former prime ministers like Paul Keating and Gough Whitlam.

I still remember the handing over of the dirt by former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in the first of the land returns, in the early days of my political involvement. I still treasure that memory as a great honour—although, standing for the Labor Party in 1977, as I first did when Gough Whitlam was leader, it was a little like being the voluntary passenger on the Titanic. We were not long for the world! But I do have the singular honour, I think, of being the only current member on the Labor side who can say they stood for Labor in a federal election when Gough Whitlam was still leader of the Labor Party. I was a member of this party when Paul Keating made his famous Redfern speech, which I think was another great staging post along the way for the events that happened.

Finally, can I acknowledge all my parliamentary colleagues on both sides of the House, and particularly Prime Minister Rudd, who made the decisive move to end a period where we had failed to come to terms with our history and so powerfully cemented a moment of national unity in a way that cannot be rolled back.

Debate (on motion by Ms Jackson) adjourned.

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