Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate that—although it appears we will be sitting for some time tomorrow. I might make the same request about alcohol, but I think a very large truck indeed would be required to come to the Senate. The point to be made here—Senator Crossin has made it—is that, even where regulations or laws have been in place, the Commonwealth has failed in some circumstances to carry those out. When it comes to alcohol, the entreaties to this government by Indigenous people over the last 11 years failed. We regret that. Now the government is coming in and saying, ‘We’re not consulting with you; here’s a set of laws.’ How much better it would have been had representations been listened to by the government and had there now been a spirit of consultation with the people who know best—and that is the Indigenous people of Australia—about the impact, about what they require and about how to handle the terrible situation that has occurred, instead of now having a sledgehammer racist set of laws put through here with no consultation with the very people who have asked repeatedly to be given, through law, the protection they have been denied but which is being brought in now in this unsatisfactory fashion.

Going back to the permit system, I just want to make the point that the government must take responsibility for removing the rights of Indigenous people to the permit system in the way that has been debated here in the last hour or two, and the government must accept and shoulder the outcomes of that. But there is one outcome that they will not take responsibility for, because it is not measurable—and that is the death of culture. The powerful Western culture is moving in on an Indigenous culture which has nowhere else to go, no place to flee and no defence mechanism. Defences like the permit system are now being removed by law—and behind that is the thinking of this government that Indigenous people must integrate.

I listened to the former Minister for Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, Senator Vanstone, talking about the prospect of ending many remote communities. Talk about that prospect would never have been dreamt of if they were non-Indigenous communities, but these are Indigenous communities. What is being put forward here is ‘integrate or else’. In this legislation we are talking about the death of culture, and enormous damage. The permit system, which is being interfered with here, is a major factor in that. I do not think the government has done any assessment whatsoever of that.

Yesterday or the day before, I listened to Senator Milne talking about the government removing the support for Indigenous languages. I have not heard the minister in this chamber say that part of the suite of measures that we are dealing with tonight is the re-funding of Indigenous languages to make sure that, now that we have removed the permit system and everybody can go to these communities, the languages will be kept alive. With those languages comes culture and pride. We know from experience right around the world—from the Gaelic experience to the experience of people in the Americas—that the loss of language brings great anguish and depression, which visits people for centuries afterwards. Yet this government seems to have put that aside in the move—which must be very clear about here—to say to Indigenous people, ‘Take up the predominant culture or else.’ And we will be dealing with that a little bit later with the next motions to be dealt with here.

I want that on the record, so that no-one reading about this moment in history 10, 50, 100 or 500 years from now can say, ‘If only they had known what they were doing to Indigenous culture in Australia.’ We all know. The government has made its choice. It has the bulldozer; it has the numbers, and we do not. But let nobody in this place say that it did not know what this would do to Indigenous culture, custom, law, language, pride and wellbeing into the future of this nation. And if there has been a measure of what the impact will be, besides selling more paintings to more tourists, which the minister was talking about—but I will not go into that in any length; that is an obvious matter—the government has in this debate made no contribution on that hugely important assessment for the Indigenous people of Australia and this nation.

I want to make that part of the debate tonight and I want it noted. I want to put it on the record that we all knew that this was going to have a massive impact on Indigenous culture, particularly across Northern Australia where its stronghold exists after the devastating of such culture across southern Australia. Here we go again, but this time many of us care—and this time the eyes are wide open. And the government has made no assessment of the impact.