Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I sincerely welcome that question, which goes to the Garma Festival. If it was somewhere where there were issues and problems, then the Leader of the Opposition would have been first there. But because it was a celebration of what's positive, a coming together of Indigenous Australians, he was nowhere near it. So accustomed is he is to acting in bad faith that he assumes everyone else is too. Those opposite should have attended the Garma Festival.

I'll tell you what is different between last year and this year. Last year the shadow minister for Indigenous Australians and shadow Attorney-General, the member for Berowra, was at the Garma Festival and made a constructive contribution to it. I think that gave the people at the Garma Festival a great deal of hope that there was an opportunity to actually lift up this nation by responding positively to the generous ask that is represented by the Uluru Statement from the Heart. It is a generous ask that arose after many years of process and consultation—including by Tony Abbott, who established a process when he was Prime Minister—on the form of constitutional recognition it should take, not whether it should take but what form. Tony Abbott hoped 2017, with the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum, would represent the year in which the coalition government would take a referendum forward and give Australians a chance to say yes. Instead, we have seen between last year's Garma Festival and this year's a walking away from the process in which Julian Leeser had been involved since at least 2012.

The Leader of the Opposition thought that saying 'sorry' would be the end of the world; now he thinks listening to people will be the end of democracy. That's what he thinks. The conspiracy theories are colliding with one another. He's struggling to get his scares straight.

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