Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It was just wild, and people have been deprived of their capacity to earn. I will get this right, because I do not want to mislead the parliament: the Bligh government has ruined the economic opportunities of Indigenous people by ignoring their rights and imposing unilateral development constraints across vast river basins covering 80 per cent of the cape.

You must totally underestimate the Aboriginal community. You want to give them beads and mirrors. That is past: they want education and they do not want welfare. They have had 80 years of welfare, and all it has led them to is total misery. You have deprived them of their livelihoods; you voted against them yesterday. You have deprived them of their livelihoods, you have deprived them of their land, you have deprived them of their rights and you want them to sit there and, as Noel Pearson said, pick berries in the sunset. That is what you have locked them into. Only yesterday you locked them into that, and today you come in with a mealy-mouthed proposition to have welcome to country ceremonies. If there was ever an empty, clanging gong, that was it.

I do not know how you can have the audacity to put this proposition to the parliament after you completely took away every right that the Aboriginals had in Cape York. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. What makes it worse is that you are rubbing salt into the raw wound. If only you had any thought for Aboriginals; if only you ever considered Aboriginals and not just the preferences organised by the Wilderness Society and the Greens—you have lost the right to call yourself the political home of Aboriginals. You walked out on that last night. You do not deserve it and the Aboriginals will wake up to you. You give them clanging gongs and symbols. You do not give them a right to earn their own living. You do not give them a right to own their own land. You give them a right that is frozen in time—that they can have a ceremony on the land, they can fish and they can hunt.

That is all they can do with those millions and millions of hectares of land that were given to them by various governments. You have walked away from native title. You do not deserve ever to get another Aboriginal vote. You have sold out to the Wilderness Society for 30 pieces of preferences. You know, and it is well known and well documented, this Wild Rivers deal was done by the Wilderness Society to get preferences for Queensland Premier Anna Bligh. What a betrayal of the Aboriginal people. Do not come in here with this stupid, mealy-mouthed welcome to country, which we have no objection to. What you are trying to do is give them beads and mirrors and take away their right to earn a decent living.

You have closed down a mine that would give them 400 to 500 jobs if they wanted them. That is not going to happen overnight, but there has to be a start somewhere. But you are driving them backwards. And you come in here and put forward a mirror and symbols. I cannot believe that you would ever do this, that you would have the audacity to do it. Surely you could have put this off for a couple of days or addressed it next term. The Labor Party and the Greens have no right to call themselves the friends of Aboriginals ever again.