Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

We've now had 12 Closing the gap reports and 12 declarations of failure—failure to close the gap. We saw in the most recent report that five out of seven targets are not on track. This is a failure to make good centuries of injustice in our nation. You can fill a small library with the subsequent speeches made in this place about these reports—so many speeches, so much regret, and so little progress. We cheapen language when we do this. Each year we show Australians the enormous difference, the enormous distance, between our words and our achievements.

I can only imagine how numbingly predictable and how hollow this process must seem to First Australians. It would be of little value for me to add yet another expression of regret here today. Nonetheless I stand here in despair that Indigenous children experience vastly higher mortality rates. I despair that life expectancy of Indigenous Australians is sharper and miserably less than the rest of Australia. This is the legacy of systemic murder and dispossession. It's the legacy of racial contempt and indifference. It's the legacy that, after centuries of injustice, led to the Uluru Statement from the Heart from Indigenous Australians.

Almost three years ago the Referendum Council delivered a historic document to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and were optimistic that its recommendations could be fulfilled. The report was the result of unprecedented consultation with First Australians. The council's co-chair Mark Liebler said:

The Uluru statement was the culmination of an inclusive, principled, and focused consultation process, the like of which Australia has never seen … Twelve hundred delegates took part in the Indigenous-specific dialogues, from a total population of about 600,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples nationally. We believe this to be the most proportionally significant consultation process ever undertaken with Indigenous Australians.

The product of that consultation process, the Uluru Statement from the Heart, made three consensus requests from Australia: voice, truth-telling, and makarrata, coming together after struggle.

The first step, meaningful constitutional recognition of the place of Indigenous Australians in our nation in the form of a voice to parliament, was an elegant and earnest desire that an advisory body to parliament be constitutionally enshrined. First Australians were clear: they didn't want fancy, ineffectual words added in a preamble to our Constitution. What they wanted, in the words of the council, was a form of 'living recognition'.

The voice to parliament was not a new idea. Indigenous activist William Cooper, a local of Melbourne's west in my electorate, petitioned the government in 1935 for direct representation to federal parliament. Born in 1860, Cooper was a self-taught activist of unusual skill whose principles and rhetoric were shaped by the Bible. In 1917 he lost his enlisted son on the Western Front. But, when Cooper petitioned the government and later the King for representation of Indigenous Australians' interests, none of this mattered. The thousands of Indigenous signatories to Cooper's petition to King George declared:

… it was not only a moral duty, but also a strict injunction included in the commission issued to those who came to people Australia that the original occupants and we, their heirs and successors, should be adequately cared for; and whereas the terms of the commission have not been adhered to, in that (a) our lands have been expropriated by your Majesty's Government in the Commonwealth, (b) legal status is denied to us by your Majesty's Government in the Commonwealth—

'In response we request the power to propose a member of parliament of our own blood to represent us in the federal parliament.' We can clearly hear in this petition the echoes of the Uluru Statement from the Heart's simple request for a voice to parliament.

William Cooper's petition was ignored in the 20th century just as the Uluru Statement from the Heart has been ignored in the 20th century. It's been 10 years since the process of constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians was initiated under the Gillard government. It's been almost three years since the Referendum Council gave former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull their request. In response we've heard unfounded fears about what the voice to parliament will mean.

I can address those fears simply. The voice to parliament would not be a third chamber. It would not undermine parliamentary sovereignty. It could not pass bills, nor veto them, but it was a consensus desire and one that the Referendum Council was confident that the Australian people would ratify by referendum. But it annoyed former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. He thought that it had no chance at referendum, that it would be seen as an intrusive third chamber of parliament. In other words, he didn't trust the Australian people to see it for what it was: a modest request that First Australians have a greater say in policies that affect their lives, their communities, their future.

We've recently heard Prime Minister Morrison talking about the voice to parliament as though it is a position of the Labor Party, that it needs to be changed in order to achieve bipartisan consensus. This is a mischaracterisation. Labor did not develop the voice to parliament. We are merely reflecting the consensus request of Indigenous Australians and the Referendum Council. The gap that must be bridged here is not between the coalition and the Labor Party; it is between the coalition and Indigenous Australians.

It's been a frustrating three years of inaction in response to the Uluru Statement from the Heart and it's led me to think about what I can do as a parliamentarian to progress these requests in the absence of government support. The Uluru Statement from the Heart was clear that its three requests were sequential—that is, you could not do truth-telling without voice and you couldn't do makarrata without truth-telling. That being said, while we wait for the voice to parliament, I want to engage in some personal truth-telling in this about my own family's accountability for what was done to Indigenous Australians. It's no substitute for the truth telling we need to hear from Indigenous Australia about what was done to them, but it's a small gesture of accounting from a personal perspective.

John Watts, my great-great-great-grandfather, was a pastoralist in 1840s Queensland and an MP. He was present during the initial dispossession of Indigenous Australians from areas stretching from the Darling Downs to Brisbane. His self-written memoirs, written for the audience of his descendants to tell the story of his colonial life, passed down through the generations to my family and in my parliamentary office today, express an unthinking and ruthless sense of superiority over the colonised. He wrote, 'I am one of those who think this fine country was never intended to only be occupied by a nomad race who made no use of it except for going from place to place and living only on the wild animals and the small roots of the earth and never in any way cultivating a single inch of the ground.'

This statement of ignorance is laid bare by the prize-winning book Dark Emu, in which Bruce Pascoe carefully disproves the ignorant assumptions my ancestor had about the 'natives' and their agricultural primitivism. In other ways, John Watts was a liberal of his time. For example, he was well known locally for how he treated workers on his land. But on the question of Indigenous Australians he was so blind that he could not even see his own ignorance. His statements on Indigenous Australians reflect the view of inherent Indigenous inferiority that enabled what was done to Indigenous Australians by colonisation.

My ancestor's memoirs describe killings and massacres of Indigenous Australians in South-East Queensland during this time in a matter-of-fact way. In recounting his memoirs he didn't seem to have any sense of shame or relish about what had occurred, but my father and I have since learned that what he left out of those memoirs may reveal a greater truth. Unmentioned in his memoirs, John Watts was also a champion of the Queensland native police, which was effectively a militia group comprising Indigenous men governed by white men and ordered to protect white settlers at any cost, which, in practise, meant slaughter. In justifying the actions of the Queensland native police in the wake of an inquiry into their actions, my ancestor told the Queensland parliament:

… the natives must be regarded in the same light as inhabitants of a country under martial law—and that the natives must be taught to feel the mastery of the whites. He believed that from the natives knowing no law, nor entertaining any fears but those of the carbine—

that is, a gun—

there were no other means of ruling them …

They were ruled by the gun. The Hansard provides further that my ancestor:

… alluded to the atrocities committed by the aborigines upon the whites forming the establishment of Mr. Marks, at Colleroy, on the McIntyre, previous to the establishment of the native police force, as being of so diabolical a character as to make the blood run cold, and to prove that leaving the settlers to defend themselves, tended much more to the destruction of the blacks, than the maintenance of a native force. Before this was established, the settlers had to arm themselves to the teeth, and such men, seeing their children killed before them, could not be expected to refrain from using them indiscriminately.

This was the truth that my ancestor didn't seem to want to recount for his descendants. It's a truth that is the beginning of a brutal legacy that we're now talking about in this place. It's the truth that underpins the need for the Closing the Gap statement and the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and it's a truth that's hard to hear here today. But it's a truth that all of us will benefit from confronting.

Early this month, Bruce Pascoe told assembled parliamentarians in this building that learning about our nation's history, about Indigenous Australians' connection with country and about their understanding of the land, upon which we all live, ought not to be seen as an imposition but as an opportunity—an opportunity to reconsider our history, to renew our bonds and to feel a collective excitement for this act of inclusion and accounting; an opportunity to reconsider ourselves honestly and collectively. This begins with listening to the Uluru Statement from the Heart and acting on voice, truth and makarrata.

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