Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Let me first pay my respects to the traditional owners of the land on which we gather and pay my respects to elders past and present.

I welcome the Prime Minister's Closing the Gap statement today and I also acknowledge those who have delivered previous statements. I think it is worth recalling from where we have come to this, the sixth, Closing the Gap statement.

We recall that this in many ways began—to give credit where credit is due—with former Prime Minister Rudd, who at the opening of the 42nd Parliament made a formal apology to the Indigenous peoples of Australia and then a year later delivered the first Closing the Gap report. But, of course, the journey to where we are now is a much longer story and in many ways a much more tragic story. It is a story of dispossession, disadvantage and inequality. It is a story of unacceptable gaps in infant mortality and life expectancy. It is the story of the only developed nation among 57 listed by the World Health Organization that still had blinding trachoma. It is the story of much, much more.

I think it is important when we have the discussion, as we should and do today, for us to understand what we are engaged in as members of this parliament. In this place we are privileged as senators, as people elected to come to this place, to be part of what might broadly be described—and I think the Prime Minister described—as the national conversation. That is one way of talking about how it is that parliamentarians can be part of, as all Australians are in different ways, a discussion, an imagining, of who we are in this country—of how we see ourselves, of how we look at and how we speak of our history and, importantly, of how we imagine our future.

In many ways how we have come to this place has been one of the most important contributions to that national conversation of which we are all privileged to be a part. There are many things which are important in the conversation and the imagining of the Australian nation and we have debates about those things in this place all the time. But I do not think it is being overblown to say that if you want to go to the heart of who we are as a nation, if you want to go to the heart of how we must imagine our future and how we must reconcile our past, we must do what is right when it comes to our first peoples, and we must do what is right both in terms of how we talk about ourselves and how we structure our laws, what our Constitution says to us about who we are, and we must do what is right in terms of the detailed and practical measures which are referenced in the Closing the Gap targets. We must do both.

As Mr Shorten said in the other place, Labor is committed to working with the government on the task of recognition because our Constitution should recognise all Australians, including our first Australians. I do not believe—as some, perhaps not in this place, have said—that this is a theoretical debate. This is a discussion about the document that in many ways gives form to what this nation is and who we are. That document should properly respect and recognise our first peoples.

There are a great many aspects of the Closing the Gap targets which have been discussed today. I went back to the first Closing the Gap statement and reminded myself of some of the disparities that we were confronted with as a parliament but most importantly that our first peoples—our Indigenous peoples—are and continue to be confronted with. For example, in 2009 we discussed that Indigenous males die on average 18 years earlier than non-Indigenous males. Indigenous females lived to 65, on average, compared to 82. And in many ways the saddest of facts is the mortality rate of Indigenous Australian babies, which in 2009 was a rate nearly three times that of non-Indigenous infants.

Those few facts explain why it is so many people in this place, and I do believe this applies across parties, have such a personal commitment to the process of reconciliation and creating real equality. There has been a lot of talk about bipartisanship as well and I welcome that. I welcome that we are no longer in a debate about whether or not we should be saying sorry. I welcome that we are no longer in a frankly dry and unhelpful, and at times painful, debate about the difference between symbolic and practical reconciliation. I genuinely welcome the commitment from all parties in this place to the Closing the Gap framework and to reconciliation and equality.

But the fact of bipartisanship ought not to mean that we cannot say when we believe we cannot speak—when we believe that the actions do not measure up to the rhetoric. We will have debates and discussions in this place, as we should, about what the best way forward is—about what the path to equality and true reconciliation is. I say to the government: we will, as an opposition in this place, be saying to you that we believe your actions should live up to your rhetoric. We have raised concerns in this place before about the effect of legal aid cuts and cuts to Aboriginal legal services—not to make a partisan point but because of all that has been written, all that is known and all that has been experienced about the rates of incarceration of Indigenous peoples and what that means.

This topic of discussion often does, and I hope will continue to, bring out some of what is great in our parliament. Despite the bad press that a lot of politicians get, the overwhelming majority of people who come here—disagree as much as we do at times—come here with a genuine desire to improve our nation. We differ greatly on what that path should be, but that is the desire with which we come. There are a great many matters that we ought to debate; a great many issues that go to who Australians are, what this country is, what it means to be Australian, how we envisage our rich history and how we imagine our future. But in many ways none of them is more difficult, nor more central to Australia's identity and future, than reconciliation with our Indigenous people.

I am very pleased to have the opportunity to lead off for the opposition and make some comments in relation to this important statement. As Mr Shorten has said, we continue to commit ourselves as an opposition to the Closing the Gap framework—to working with all parties to try to bring about real equality with a policy approach that is built on consultation, empowerment and consensus; to providing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with the tools and resources to complement the solutions they own; and to building reforms that reach well beyond the life of this parliament, because in doing so we will truly create a more just, a more equal and a more reconciled Australia.