Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

If no-one else wishes to contribute, then, yes, Senator Cormann, I presume I will be closing the debate and, in doing so, I thank everyone for their contributions. I particularly thank the last two speakers, Senator Bartlett and Senator Steele-John, for outstanding contributions to this debate. I thank the Labor Party for its support for this disallowance motion and I take this opportunity to condemn, with absolutely no surprise at all, the culture warriors in the Liberal Party who, once again, have prevailed in this debate, who, once again, have exercised their muscle internally inside the Liberal and National parties and who, once again, are demonstrating, as Senator Bartlett just went through in fine detail, their pettiness and their refusal to listen to the most important people in this debate: the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia, our first peoples, the people who had this land stolen from them, at the point of a musket, when Europeans arrived just over 200 years ago. They are the people who—at least in my home state in Tasmania—have faced an attempted genocide, and I do use that term advisedly, in the full knowledge and understanding of what it means in law to say that there was an attempted genocide in Tasmania not long after European people arrived.

I remember attending the first Invasion Day—