Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, their leaders past, present and emerging.

The history of Australia is peppered with memories that make us, and memories that break us. Today, I am rising to speak on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum and to mark 25 years since the High Court's Mabo decision. These were moments that defined Australia as a nation. They defined us as a people, and they defined our notion of sovereignty.

The 1967 referendum was a foundational shift and resulted in the Australian Constitution officially recognising Indigenous people as members of the Australian population. In 1962, the Australian Labor Party, in opposition at the time, submitted an urgency motion seeking a referendum to include Aboriginal people in the census. This followed the 1962 decision to permit all Indigenous adults to vote in Commonwealth elections. 'Permit'; what a word! It seems absurd that just 55 years ago a supposedly modern Western democracy like Australia did not 'permit' all of its first peoples to take part. It seems incomprehensible that as white Australians and immigrants citizens lined up to cast their votes, Indigenous Australians, with their culture going back thousands of years on this land, were denied a full say in its future.

But the 1960s were a time of great passion, upheaval and conflict. Values were being reshaped. Australians had different opinions on Vietnam, but on the urgent need to acknowledge Indigenous rights they were at least united. With both the coalition government of the time and the ALP opposition urging a 'yes' vote, more than 90 per cent of eligible Australians said yes.

History remembers the politicians, but we often come late to the party. We need to honour and remember names such as Jessie Street, Faith Bandler, Pearl Gibbs, John McGuinness, Pastor Doug Nicholls, Stan Davies and so many more. The change to the Constitution also and crucially amended section 51 of the Constitution, which had prohibited the Australian government from making laws specifically for the Indigenous people of any state.

Australian governments have enacted a number of important pieces of legislation over subsequent years, including the Native Title Act 1993. The trigger has worked in some cases, and in others it has failed miserably. Twenty years ago the Bringing them home report provided a damning assessment of the forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families under the misguided attempt to forcibly assimilate children of mixed race into white society. Children were ripped from their mothers' arms, taken to cities and fostered out. Many never recovered; many never stopped trying to get home.

The Bringing them home report made many findings and recommendations. A review has just been conducted into the 20 intervening years, and it is clear that much remains to be done to bring effect to those recommendations. The report marked a pivotal moment in our national consciousness, but for some in positions of national leadership at the time the burden of shame and guilt was too much to bear. There was a preference by some to pretend that those times were not really all that bad and that the report was detailing a 'black arm band' version of Australian history that did not align with the preferred Australian narrative of Anzac heroism, FJ Holdens and laid-back mateship.

But the truth is that we are all these things. We are a great nation but we are not perfect, and the road that we have taken to get here has had its twists and its potholes—and there are more ahead. We do ourselves a disservice when we look at our history through rose-coloured glasses. It is a history that did not start in 1770, with Captain Cook supposedly discovering Australia, but tens of thousands of years before that. We owe it to ourselves, to our children and certainly to the Indigenous people of this nation to be as honest as we can with the story of Australia and all its chapters.

The importance of the 1967 referendum cannot be overestimated. It represented a seismic shift. As the member for Barton remarked, it is a popular myth that before the referendum Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people could not vote. The truth is more complicated: as British subjects, Aboriginal men in most states, other than WA and Queensland, have been able to vote in state elections since the 1850s. In 1895, the same right was extended to Aboriginal women in South Australia. After Federation, the 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act allowed only Aboriginal people who had been enrolled as state voters to vote federally.

In 1949 the Chifley government legislated that anyone eligible to vote in state elections could vote federally. In 1962 legislation extended the vote in federal elections to all Aboriginal people of voting age, but it was voluntary and it was not well known nor well advertised. Incidentally, it was not until 1962 that WA extended its state vote to Aboriginal people, while it took Queensland until 1965 to do the same. So the real import of the referendum in 1967 was not so much voting rights but a universal acknowledgement that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were no longer 'them', to be counted separately, but 'us'. We are one people.

Twenty-five years ago I was at the High Court to hear the Mabo case handed down. At the time I was on the staff of Roger Price, the then member for Chifley. I had ducked out to go to hear what I knew would be a watershed moment in Australian history. My memory is swiss cheese at the best of times, but I do recollect that day with some measure of clarity. The long room was packed, and on the steps outside there was a great buzz.

Mabo challenged the Australian legal assumption that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had no concept of land ownership before the arrival of the British colonists or—for want of a better word—the British First Fleet in 1788. This was the concept of terra nullius: that sovereignty delivered complete ownership of all land in the new colony to the Crown, abolishing any rights that might have existed previously. The premise of terra nullius could never be defended, because it was a fiction—terra nullius, 'empty land' belonging to no-one—but that did not stop many from trying. This was not for moral reasons but to protect financial interests. So the Mabo victory shook the Australian establishment to its foundations. It changed the lives of so many, it drew a line in the sand and it recognised Indigenous sovereignty of this land.

'Mabo' has become shorthand for Aboriginal land rights, but it is a person's name—Eddie Mabo. He was a man of the Meriam people in the Torres Strait and had launched the legal case to have his people's traditional ownership rights to the Murray Islands recognised. Eddie Mabo did not live to hear the judgement, but his name will live for ever.

A display here in the parliament showcases Eddie Mabo's drawing of the shape of the island of Mer, noting the family names associated with tracts of the island, including his own family name. There are also other important documents and paintings on display: the Yirrkala bark petition, the Barunga petition and the Kevin Rudd apology.

Subsequent to Mabo, this parliament in 1993, under the Labor government of Paul Keating, enacted the Native Title Act, and that sought to build on the common law as redefined by Mabo. It was not a universally accepted piece of legislation, but it has stood the test of time. Much land has been handed back to traditional owners. There have been deals and contracts struck with commercial lessees, and there are many cases still going through the courts. It takes time to address 200 years of theft.

We have seen our nation changed, values reshaped and prejudice diminished as our reconciliation journey has rolled out. Our political leaders have both led and responded to events. In 1975 Gough Whitlam poured red soil into the hand of Vincent Lingiari at Wave Hill in the Northern Territory; in 1992 Paul Keating delivered his Redfern speech, acknowledging the destruction of Indigenous culture and society; in 2000 Peter Costello marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge for Sorry Day; in 2008 Kevin Rudd delivered his apology to Indigenous people for the stolen generations; and in 2016 Linda Burney, Pat Dodson and Malarndirri McCarthy joined Ken Wyatt and Jacqui Lambie as Indigenous MPs and senators of this parliament, and Ken Wyatt was appointed this nation's first Indigenous minister at federal cabinet level.

We have a long way to go. As this nation now grapples with the concept of including Indigenous recognition in the Constitution, I hope we can come together as a parliament in tripartisan spirit—the Greens, the Liberals, the Nationals and Labor—for the future of this nation, just as we did in 1967, and recognise Aboriginal people in the Constitution.

Debate adjourned.

See this speech in context