Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today is a great day for all Australians. I suppose you could say it is a new dawn for the original custodians of Australia. I am a farmer and occasionally I pretend that I own the farm. In fact I am only the custodian of the farm; and, even if you live a long time, you actually do not live very long. This is just a great new opportunity for all Australians and I am very proud of the fact that Australians have displayed great generosity of spirit. Today is the day for our Indigenous people—or as I say in the back country, ‘my blackfella mates’. It is not a whitefella day.

I am not interested in some of the disadvantages where, if you go to different parts of Australia, you will see third-generation unemployed whitefellas in pretty dire circumstances. Today is a great day for Australia to display its generosity. I am not interested in the nuances of who got what. Ever since we got here, the whole thing has been a national disgrace and whitefella habits have inflicted great pain on a lot of our Indigenous people. So I can only say: thank God we have got here to this point today.

My view is that there are people—and there are those who have a different view—who are innocently ignorant of what has gone on in the past. There are a lot of people like that. When I left school I did not know that at Cootamundra, 30 miles from where I lived, there was a place full of young girls who had been taken away. We had no idea. So you can be innocently ignorant of the facts. There are some people—and you can pick it by their language or by their silence—who are passengers of political convenience on this particular issue and are not in favour of it, but there are other people, in my view, who are just simply moral cowards.

With all human endeavour there is human failure and, sure, some of the things that have been put together over the years have not worked out as they should have. As senators would know, you can go out into any remote community now and find that things are not like they ought to be. The position in some of these communities is still a continuing national disgrace. But if today is going to help heal people who have been seriously disadvantaged directly by what has gone on in the past, and raise their self-esteem by seeing the display of generosity of spirit of the wider Australian community, then I think today is just a magnificent day for everyone to celebrate. It was a great pleasure for me today to see people with smiles on their faces around this place. Sure, one size does not fit all. There are several remote communities that want to live traditionally. They might want to live traditionally with a LandCruiser to assist them, but they still want to live traditionally and share their goods with all the neighbourhood and all the rest of it. That is fair enough.

There are a lot of Indigenous people who want to leave something in their will just the same as whitefellas do. If they get the opportunity they want to better themselves and leave a better situation for their children. I think that we have got to aspire to all the things that have been repeated many times in this place about education, health and all the rest of it. We have got to aspire to putting people in a position where they can own their own home on their own country and leave that home in their will to their kids. It is a pretty simple aspiration, but it is a great builder of spirit.

I am pretty upbeat about the future for our Indigenous people. As I said, ever since the 1700s they have had a pretty rotten deal for various reasons which, today, I am not interested in. Today is a day of celebration. But I have to say that, if you analyse the science of climate change in Australia—the predictions of declining run-off of somewhere between 3,500 and 11,000 gigalitres in the Murray-Darling Basin, which has a total of 23,000 gigalitres and produces 40 per cent of our food from water and 70 per cent including the dry land—and then look at the north, we are the only island continent globally, in my view, that is going to deal with climate change. I know this is a long way from this particular motion, but it is certainly where it is going to finish up. In 50 years time, if the science is right, 50 per cent of the world’s population will be water poor, a billion people will be unable to feed themselves, 1.6 billion people will be displaced by climate change, 30 per cent of the productive land of Asia will have disappeared and the food task will have doubled. If Australia can maintain its sovereignty, the new wealth creators are going to be our Indigenous people. That is because, gladly, they own in the Northern Territory, for instance, 45 per cent of the land mass. A lot of that land mass is going to be greatly enhanced by climate change if the science is right.

The ILC is a wonderful opportunity for enhancement by our Indigenous people. They own many, many great properties in Australia, scattered right across the Top End as well as the south end. We have a duty of care to our Indigenous people to make sure that they are the beneficiaries of this new wealth that will come, and that a bunch of shysters and crooks do not intercept it all. So I am greatly gladdened by recent events. I am not interested in the intricacies and the nuances of the language. I just think it is a great day for all Australians and I am so pleased to see our Indigenous people celebrating that, as well as our whitefellas. I went today, as Senator Moore did, to see the people who feel that things in the Northern Territory are not what they ought to be. What that said to me, Senator Moore, is that all human endeavour has some human failure. One size does not fit all. Obviously there are serious problems, but I am not going to go through them now because today is a day of celebration. I am mightily proud to have had the privilege to be in a parliament that did what we did today. I think that is a great privilege. And, like most things in life, you do not really appreciate them until they have passed you by. I am so proud of everyone in this place today and of the wider generosity of spirit of the Australian people. It is no more complicated than that.

I would hope that the people out at Wadeye see light at the end of the tunnel. For Tobias, who is the associate principal out there, today has gladdened his heart. When you have seen kids who want to go to school but who have no school to go to, it is a great thing that the government has listened to the concerns of the people at Wadeye. They have now got a Centrelink person at the office instead of a phone in a hole in a wall. I think they are all little indicators that Australia is waking up to the rotten deal that our Indigenous people have got. There is an old saying: you should walk a mile in my shoes. The critics who are, in my view, innocently ignorant of the facts ought to try walking a mile in their shoes. I felt like knuckling a few people out there. I struck a bloke out there who has thousands of cattle on an Indigenous property, and I will not repeat the rotten deal that the Indigenous people got out of it, but I felt like smacking him in the ear. It is those things that we want to put behind us. We want to make sure that the people of our Indigenous communities—who are the original custodians of Australia and whose heritage is the most precious thing that Australia has got—who want to live traditionally are allowed to and that those who want to go off and become doctors, lawyers and Indian chiefs can do that too. This is a very complex matter, but it is a day of celebration. I am not the least bit interested in anyone— (Time expired)

Debate interrupted.