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

In 1937 a great Australian, William Cooper, an Indigenous activist and a resident of Melbourne's west, petitioned King George V on behalf of First Nations Australians. His reason for petitioning the King was simple: the Australian government was failing in its obligations to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and the voices of Indigenous Australians were not being heard by the parliament. As Cooper's petition put it:

… all petitions made on our behalf to Your Majesty's Governments have failed.

As such, Cooper's petition sought the King's intervention to 'grant us the power to propose a member of parliament to represent us in the federal parliament'. Eighty-six years on, we can clearly hear the echo of William Cooper's plea for representation in the call from the Uluru Statement from the Heart for a voice to parliament.

As the Uluru statement declares, in 1967 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders sought to be counted. In 2017, at Uluru, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders asked to be heard. And in 2023 Australians will have the chance to make this a reality. Like William Cooper's 1937 petition, the Uluru Statement from the Heart is not directed at the Australian government or the parliament; it aims to speak to a higher power. In 1937 that higher power was the King. In 2023 it is the Australian people.

Later this year, Australians will have the opportunity to respond to this request from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples at a national referendum—a referendum to recognise and to listen to First Nations Australians, to recognise 65,000 years of continuous culture and connection to this land and to listen to those First Nations people through a voice to parliament. It's a chance to listen to First Nations Australians about how best to close the gap in health, education and employment measures between Indigenous and Torres Strait Islanders and the broader Australian people. It is a chance to deliver practical improvements in policymaking because listening to communities leads to better policies and better outcomes. It is a chance to respond to the call from Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander peoples to be heard that has been echoing since William Cooper's petition to the King 87 years ago.

Through this vote Australians will have an opportunity to show what sort of Australia we want our country to be, what sort of Australia we want our kids to grow up in, what sort of Australia we want to project to the world. The Albanese government recognises that 65,000 years of continuing culture and wisdom is an asset for our nation as we engage with the world around us. That's why we've been pioneering a First Nations foreign policy—a policy that, in the words of Foreign Minister Penny Wong, 'seeks to elevate the perspectives, practices and interests of First Nations Australians and how we engage with the world'. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were our country's first diplomats, and they were the first Australians to trade and engage economically with our region. The recently appointed Ambassador for First Nations People, Mr Justin Mohamed, follows in a long lineage of Indigenous Australian diplomacy. Their knowledge is a source of strength for Australia and a source of connection and influence for us around the world.

In my role as Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs, I've seen firsthand that there is enormous interest in both First Nations foreign policy and the process of Indigenous constitutional recognition that we are now pursuing across South America, Africa, South Asia and right across the globe. Indigenous communities I've met across the world recognise our efforts and the need to harness the knowledge of the world's oldest continuing culture in this engagement. Ambassador Mohamed is already working closely with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in a genuine partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. As the foreign minister has said, Mr Mohamed is seeking to build collaboration across communities and the countries of our region and to grow First Nations trade and investment.

But as the foreign minister has also said, our foreign policy begins with who we are. It begins with our national identity. And our response to the Uluru Statement of the Heart and the upcoming referendum on the Voice to Parliament is an important step in Australia's journey as a nation. Through our history we've made terrible mistakes as a nation in the way that we've treated Indigenous Australians. We can't change our history, but we can change the way we grapple with the ongoing consequences of it in the present day.

There will be a time for truth-telling about our nation's history and for makarrata, for coming together after conflict, after the establishment of the Voice. But members of this place should reflect on the context in which we are debating this bill, a context highlighted by William Cooper's petition, a context of more than a century of elected representatives not just failing Indigenous Australians but failing to see them as people, let alone as fellow citizens. Failing to hear them.

When thinking about this debate, I've been thinking about my friend the minister for aged care and sport, the member for Lilley, and her first speech in this place, which enjoined us all to be good ancestors. The way we respond to the Uluru Statement from the Heart is one of those moments that we shape the nation for our descendants. Our descendants will judge us for what we do on the Voice in this place and in our communities during the referendum. In this regard, I've been thinking of my ancestor John Watts, one of the first squatters on the Darling Downs and later a member of the first Queensland parliament.

All people contain multitudes, and Watts had many positive personal characteristics. He seemed to treat his workers well; he was regarded as an honest magistrate; he was charitable. But none of these characteristics redeem his failures with regard to the dispossession of Indigenous Australians. As a squatter, and particularly as an MP, he just couldn't see Indigenous Australians as people with equal rights and dignity. He never listened to them, and the consequences were terrible—and I should warn listeners that the history I now recount is confronting.

In the first decade of the colonisation of the Darling Downs, John Watts was a partner in the Eton Vale sheep station with Arthur Hodgson. The land on which Eton Vale station was established was Aboriginal land. It was the land of the Giabal people, which stretched between Dalby, Millmerran, Allora and the eastern slopes of the Great Dividing Range. The colonisation of this land was resisted by the Giabal people as well as the people of adjoining lands, like the Yuggera, the Jarowair and Bigambul people. Indeed, barely three kilometres from where I grew up was the site of the Battle of One Tree Hill, where on 12 September 1843 Indigenous leader Multuggerah won a famous victory in this resistance. In short, the sheep station of my ancestor was taken from Indigenous people violently.

Writing about his experience in the 1850s, the subsequent decade, Tom Davis, the father of the famed bush writer Steele Rudd and a surveyor on Eton Vale sheep station, recalled:

No doubt many will regard it as strange that I was not molested by blacks during this time. It wasn't strange at all.

The blacks, even this far back, were quiet on the Darling Downs. Hodgson, the Leslies and others by many conflicts had taken the go out of them.

To this day the bones of many an aboriginal still lie bleaching on well-known parts of some Downs stations.

Charles Pemberton Hodgson, the younger brother of my ancestor's partner in the Eton Vale station, reflected:

The earliest inroads of the settlers were marked with blood, the forests were ruthlessly seized, and the native tenants hunted down like their native dogs.

Echoing this, John Watts, my ancestor, told the Queensland parliament in 1861:

In the early days of the colony, murder really was committed—a man would jump off his horse and shoot every black he came across.

Still, he insisted:

For my own part, although I had often been provoked myself by the blacks, and had seen men killed under me while protecting property, I am glad to be able to say that I never fired a shot at one in my life.

Even in the 1860s though, he insisted:

… the people of this colony must be considered to be, as they always have been, at open war with the Aborigines.

The lie of terra nullius was obvious.

In the decades following the arrival of my ancestor, disease, violence and forced resettlement literally decimated the local Indigenous population. This alone is a disturbing legacy to grapple with. Regrettably though, it was John Watts' legacy and his actions as a parliamentarian that caused even greater harm to Indigenous peoples of South-East Queensland. And it was here that the failure to recognise and to listen to Indigenous Australians was even more disastrous. Not long after the initial colonisation of the Darling Downs, the colonial parliaments established paramilitary forces to effect the violent dispossession of Indigenous Australians.

Historian Jonathan Richards described the operations of the Queensland Native Police in the following terms: 'When an attack of any form was made on settlers, the native police responded by tracking Aboriginal people to their camps. Once they had been located, the troopers surrounded the camp, firing their rifles into the sleeping people at dawn. The bodies were usually burnt to cover up the killings.'

Historians' estimates of the number of Indigenous Australians killed by the Queensland native police range widely, from 10 up to 60,000 people, but it was clear that there were many thousands of murders and rapes committed by this state-sanctioned organisation. Historian Henry Reynolds has called it 'the most violent organisation in Australian history'.

The Queensland native police operated under the direct control of the executive council—the Governor, the Colonial Secretary and other senior ministers. And my ancestor, John Watts, as a member of parliament and minister, was thoroughly aware of its activities. He was a member of the Queensland Parliament's inquiry into the actions of the Queensland native police in 1861. There were no Aboriginal or Strait Islander peoples invited to give evidence to this inquiry, neither native police troopers nor members of the broader community. Their voices were not heard in that parliament. No-one questioned the existence of a government-controlled paramilitary force engaged in large-scale extrajudicial killings. My ancestor joined with committee members in recommending that the native police continue its operations in Queensland, which it did for nearly 40 years afterwards. On the tabling of the report, Watts told the parliament that: 'The natives must be taught to feel the mastery of the whites. The natives, knowing no law, nor entertaining any fears but those of the carbine'—that's a gun—'there were no other means of ruling them,' and that, 'the means must be resorted to'. In supporting native police, he saw himself as choosing the lesser of two evils, telling the parliament from 'direct experience' 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 is the context of this debate. This is the history that the Uluru Statement from the Heart responds to—a history of violence and dispossession; a history of refusing to recognise or to listen to Aboriginal Indigenous Australians. It's a history that we continue to live with the consequences of, in the form of extraordinary disadvantage experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. This is why the Prime Minister calls the Uluru statement 'a gracious hand extended to the nation'.

We've made terrible mistakes as a nation when it comes to our First Nations Australians. But our greatest strength as a nation is our ability, as a democracy and an open society, to recognise these mistakes and to change course—to do things differently today, so that our country is greater tomorrow than it was yesterday.

This debate is one of those opportunities. It's a moment that will shape the arc of our nation's history. It's a moment that will define the kind of country that we are in for generations to come. It's a moment that future generations will look back on as a moment when our parliament and our people chose a different future for our country. It's a moment in which our actions will be judged by our descendants.

I encourage those opposite to reflect on this—to see the bigger picture, beyond the short-term day-to-day of politics, the short-term dynamics of a party room or personal career prospects. Take this moment to be a good ancestor.

See this speech in context