Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs report Reforming the Constitution: A roundtable discussion. When I was a kid in grade 1 in 1971—that is going back a while—Australian history, as I recall it, was comprised primarily of lists of white explorers and the dates on which they encountered various parts of Australia. I still remember some of the dates that were flogged into me, I guess, by the nuns, such as when Thomas Mitchell crossed the Balonne River on St George’s Day, 23 April, and I remember Burke and Wills. So much of our history back then was about white explorers and how they encountered Australia. The other bit that I particularly remember from my childhood education was the drawing of maps, rivers and towns—particularly rivers, where it was all about drawing the river accurately. Obviously, our approach to Australian history has changed significantly since 1971 and the time that I finished school.

So how do we make sense of the modern Australia and have an inkling as to its future direction? As I said, the Australia that I grew up in during the 1970s and 1980s had a very ‘whitefella’ approach to what constituted Australian history. It was all about explorers and the like. I would like to refer to a quote by Robert Alter in a book called Commentary in 1970—it is a literary commentary, but I think it is relevant here in terms of looking at Australia’s role in the world.

People who shrilly insist on the uniqueness of their own identity are likely to be insecure about it.

Robert Alter is an American commentator and—I do not have the whole text in front of me—I assume he was talking about the US experience rather than the Australian experience. The quote is actually from A Map of Australian Verse by James McAuley, which is a history of Australian poetry.

The reason I refer to that quote is that the legal and constitutional affairs committee has spent a lot of time and resources talking about how our Constitution could be reformed. We do so in the context of being a people who do not shrilly insist on the uniqueness of our own identity. There are certainly some obvious Australian characteristics, especially when it comes to politics: we are very sceptical of our politicians; our politicians do not have the same religious affiliations that might have once been there but are certainly not present in the modern Australia; we do not have the US approach in terms of saying, ‘This is what defines an Australian culture,’ because we have always been, I guess, a multicultural community. Even when we did not write a history that reflected that multicultural community, we were a multicultural community.

That brings me to the efforts of the Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. The Australia that the committee is a part of is a very different Australia from the one that I experienced when I was a child. It is not so Anglocentric. We are particularly relaxed and comfortable as a nation when it comes to talking about politics. We have realised that the Australian history has many more explorers. For example, we understand that it was not just James Cook and a few other English blokes—there were the Macassans, who landed in the Darwin area long before Captain James Cook landed in Australia in the 1770s. We also know the role of the Chinese explorers and the Dutch, who more than 400 years ago had already settled in Australia. Then there are the French, the Portuguese and many other groups. I was even approached by one of my constituents who assured me that much of the gold in the Egyptian pyramids came from Gympie. I hasten to point out that I do not subscribe to this view of history, but nevertheless it is a view that is put out there by some of the more adventurous members of my electorate.

The Australia of 2008 has a much broader history. It recognises—and I say this proudly—that Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders have played a much more significant role in our history than just some bloke called Bennelong who went off to England. Obviously we now recognise many other significant individual Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, such as Jandamarra, Vincent Lingiari, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Lowitja O’Donohue, Neville Bonner et cetera, and I have not even started on listing sports people because I thought if I started there the list would go on and on. The Australia of 2008 recognises that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders played a very significant role in our country long before white men first landed here—or Macassans or Chinese et cetera.

I started this speech by talking about when I was in grade 1 in 1971. When I was in grade 5, the Racial Discrimination Act came into force. Then, if we just go forward a few years to 3 June 1992, the High Court handed down its Mabo decision, which forever changed our view of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders because they were no longer classified as fauna, which had been the convenient fabrication for much of Australian history. To digress, it is interesting that Torres Strait Islander Eddie Mabo’s case about individual ownership, which was all about his individual ownership of a block of dirt or some fish traps and the like, failed. Other claimants were successful, but Eddie Mabo’s case actually failed. If you look at the Queensland Supreme Court decision, he failed at first instance. Then, amazingly, the High Court was able to make that leap about individual ownership of property—which is quite common in Torres Strait Islander culture—and transfer that over to an Aboriginal collective ownership of property. From there we had the Mabo decision and moved on to the Native Title Act.

The reason that I give this lengthy introduction is that the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs is looking at what makes Australia. We are looking at our Constitution, that document which is up on level 1 and level 2 of this House and which is an act of the British parliament dated 9 July 1900, and which is pictured on the front of the report. We are looking at the future of Australia. As the report indicates, referendums that have attempted to change this very old document have not been successful. Since 1901, there have been 44 referenda proposals but only eight have been successful.

One of those was the 1967 referendum proposal about changing the way in which we approached Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, which was an incredible decision. It is easy to see now in the atmosphere of 2008 that it was right, but 1967 was a completely different world. It was a segregated world in many country towns—certainly where I came from was a segregated town. It was a time of freedom rides in Australia. It was a different world. But still we had an overwhelming majority of Australian people say, ‘We want fairness to come to Australia.’

We then leap forward to Mabo in 1992. In 1993 there was Paul Keating’s Native Title Act. Then there were later decisions, such as the Wik decision in the High Court and the Yorta Yorta decision. We can even look at John Howard’s 10-point plan, which I will not comment on. After all of these progressions in Australian history, we still have section 25 of the Constitution, which, according to a common-sense interpretation, despite its initial intent, is still discriminatory. This is one of the key things that the committee was looking at in its roundtable discussion.

Before I speak more about the roundtable discussion, I commend the people who turned up in Canberra to have input into the discussion. I also commend the chair, Mark Dreyfus QC, for the team that he put together. It was an edifying day for me. It was a great occasion for me to get some further understanding of this white fella document that has governed so much of Australia for so long.

One of the key topics that the committee looked at was how to amend the Constitution. Obviously, there is a school of thought that, with only eight out of 44 referenda getting up, the Australian people must be doing something wrong. I am quite comfortable with that ratio, because I believe that the Australian people always get it right. Even though I campaigned for the republic on 6 November 1999, I understand that the Australian people will only vote for something like that if we are to take the Australian people with us, even when someone is trying to shove a preamble down their throat, like John Howard tried to—with all respect to Les Murray—or bringing through a constitutional model that the Australian people have not embraced. The Australian people will change the Constitution when they see that the change is right, as they did in 1967 and as they did on one out of three occasions when Curtin and Menzies put up the idea of the dental plan. The Australian people will get it right, but it is up to politicians and leaders in the community to make sure that we move them with us.

We also looked at the disqualification provisions, especially those relating to foreign allegiance and office of profit under the crown. I particularly raise that because I represent an electorate where one in three voters was born overseas. I personally have never thought that, because she was born in Wales, someone such as Julia Gillard would somehow not be loyal to Australia if she happened to have a Welsh passport. That is ridiculous. We also looked at parliamentary terms. Coming from Queensland where we only have one house, a unicameral system, and we do not have four-year terms, I have some interesting perspectives. We also looked at federal-state relations. The Rudd government will set some new standards in terms of what can be achieved when we work cooperatively. However, it is still the role of the federal parliament to look at some of the practical functioning implications for the rest of Australia. I have already touched on Indigenous recognition and the possibility of a new preamble. We saw from the apology in February that some symbolic things have a lot of resonance and a lot of weight in the Australian community. We also looked at citizenship and a bill of rights.

From that, I will segue into my last comment, which is that, when I have talked to kids in schools as a teacher and as a politician, often kids will talk about their bill of rights or even their Constitution. This might be due to the fact that Nicholas Cage’s movie National Treasure was so popular—I am not sure. I think that there is even a sequel, National Treasure II. There has never been an Australian version of National Treasure. Kids can quote their rights, but obviously they are quoting from the US Bill of Rights and are not aware—which is why we have this cover: so that we can make the Constitution real for them—that we have a document as well. Hopefully, over the next few years we will be able to engage them with the fact that they have a document that governs their country and that they have a right and a responsibility to make sure that it is an accurate document.

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