Sue Lines (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Hansard source

I acknowledge that we are meeting on the land of the Ngunawal and Ngambri peoples, and I pay my respects to their elders past and present and to their emerging leaders. I acknowledge that this always was and always will be Aboriginal land and that sovereignty has never been ceded. I want to also associate myself with the statements made by Senators Wong, McCarthy and Dodson, and I also want to say to Senator Siewert: your advocacy on behalf of First Nations peoples will be missed in this chamber when you leave.

I want to start by really challenging the government's response to Closing the Gap, because, as I think both Senator Dodson and McCarthy have outlined, it's built on a failed system. That system has failed, and so we're not really going back to the fundamentals to look at how we need to change things. Despite the Prime Minister saying that we want to do things with Aboriginal people, when you continue to build on a system which has failed, you will never be working hand in hand with First Nations people.

In order for us to re-establish the system, we have to come to grips with the truth. We do need truth-telling. That is the fundamental start: to acknowledge the past wrongs that white people colonisers did to our First Nations people. That's the starting point, and we've never acknowledged that. We've said sorry to the stolen generations, but even that, as proud as I was to be in this parliament and to hear that address, is not enough. We've got to go right back to truth-telling, from the day we as non-First Nations peoples set foot into this country, and move on from there, because that's where true partnerships will emerge from. That is the starting point.

When I look at Western Australia and I see all of the massacre sites which really only a handful of people know about, it's disgraceful. They are part of our history, and they're not that old in Western Australia, sadly. Those generations involved in the massacres and the people who perpetrated those massacres are only a few generations away. It's still living memory.

One of the other issues I want to challenge is the notion that I heard from the Prime Minister last year and this year—it really got up my nose and, sadly, it was repeated by Senator Birmingham in this place—that the government wants First Nations children to be proud. Well, they are proud. It really bugs me to hear that. My granddaughter—a Gija person from Warmun, from stolen generations—is a proud young Aboriginal woman. How dare the Prime Minister of this country somehow think he needs to fix her belief in herself? She's got a strong belief in herself. I'm incredibly proud of her.

A couple of months ago, along with Senator McAllister and Senator Siewert, I had the absolute privilege of being invited to a meeting in Broome held by Kimberley women. It was on June Oscar's report, which the government has made no comment on—a landmark report, based on research and interviews that haven't been done in 30 or 40 years. June Oscar, in her role as commissioner, went across the country, listening to what young Aboriginal girls and women were telling her, and she produced this report, which is from their voices across this country. The Morrison government doesn't have the respect to even respond to that report, but the Kimberley women did. We had about 100 women in the room from all over the Kimberley, and they were so powerful. They took June Oscar's report and they looked at how it might work across the Kimberley. Everyone participated: young women, older women, women from all over the Kimberley.

On day 3, they invited the state minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Stephen Dawson, to come, and they told him very clearly they didn't want a seat at his table. They weren't interested in that. They wanted him to come to their table. That's what true listening is about. It's about acknowledging First Nations people, where they are and how they want that partnership to develop. They were very powerful and they told the state in no uncertain terms what the expectation was. The pride and the respect in that room for each other was palpable. You could feel it in the air. I think some women had come from Senator McCarthy's country. They brought an amazing dance and spirit with them and it lifted the room. It was very, very powerful. It's appalling that the Morrison government completely misses that complexity and the respect that's there. We've just had two Aboriginal women elected to the state parliament in WA, both from the Kimberley. The respect, love, support and pride for those women to be successful was huge. So, Mr Morrison, don't speak to First Nations people about respect and about who they should be, because they already are. We're just not watching, we're not listening and we're not working in the right ways.

As long as we have punitive measures that harm Aboriginal people, such as the cashless debit card, the CDP, and ParentsNext, we are not in a partnership. Those measures are not about partnership; they are punitive measures. I've attended most of the Senate inquiries we've had on the cashless debit card. When we were in Kalgoorlie, who did we hear from? The local councils. Since when do local councils in Western Australia deliver social services? They don't, but it didn't stop them from having an opinion. What I heard in those cashless debit card hearings was all about the deficit agenda. Sadly, that's what I heard from the Prime Minister in his Closing the Gap address, and it was repeated here by Senator Birmingham—the deficit model—instead of stepping back and saying: 'We have responsibility here. We have created some of this harm. We have created these appalling statistics.'

In WA, it is shameful that we are still locking up children as young as 10 who actually don't commit crimes that get them a custodial sentence, but, because we don't have a good bail system, they end up in custody for stealing a piece of fruit or stealing a couple of chocolate bars in a shop. I can say right here and now that, as a young white kid, I stole chocolate bars from shops. Did I end up in juvenile detention? No, I didn't, because the colour of my skin is white. Yet today, right across Australia—it's only the ACT so far that has moved on this—we are still locking up 10-year-olds. If that doesn't do harm, I don't know what does. They're babies; they've barely got their permanent teeth. They're just kids, beautiful kids, and we are locking them up. So I don't quite know how we've met the youth detention statistic in Closing the Gap. I bet it's because we are only looking at children who receive a custodial sentence, not all the ones that we've held in custody awaiting their opportunity to go before a magistrate at the Children's Court. There's the CDP. We have seen some insulting programs across this country. We've seen people breached.

All that those measures are doing is casting First Nations people further into poverty, because they all involve the withholding of money. That is not about working in partnership. That's not about respecting the place that First Nations people are in. That is not about creating partnerships for the future. That's about continuing to be the colonising government that does punitive harm to First Nations people. When you grow out of that system and survive, it shows what an amazing person you are.