Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] I'm very pleased to be able to speak on this Closing the Gap statement today, because closing the gap with our First Nations peoples is such a fundamental thing that we need to address in Australian society. I want to acknowledge that I am speaking today from the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation from my office in Brunswick. I want to acknowledge their elders, past and present, and I want to acknowledge all First Nations people, all around the country. I want to acknowledge that the land that we're all on is sovereign Aboriginal land. It always was and always will be Aboriginal land. I also want to acknowledge the First Nations people whom I am very proud to be able to share the Senate with: my colleagues Senator Lidia Thorpe, Senator Malarndirri McCarthy, Senator Pat Dodson and Senator Jacqui Lambie.

I'm very aware that I am speaking today as a person with immense privilege. I have the privilege of having always had a roof over my head, good health, good education, and being very confident of my own abilities. As a white person I've never experienced racism. I haven't experienced intergenerational trauma. I can only imagine and empathise with people who haven't had the same privilege and commit to using my privilege to working alongside First Nations peoples for justice. I am a product of the settler colonialist project that is Australia. I live on stolen land. I work on stolen land. Australia was violently wrested from First Nations peoples who had lived here for 60,000 years or more. People were massacred. They were poisoned. Food systems, life support systems, culture and families were ripped apart, destroyed. The very existence of our First Nations peoples was denied through the concept of terra nullius.

When I was growing up, my understanding of the First Peoples of this land and the First Nations of this country was extraordinarily limited. The culture I grew up in, which still pervades mainstream Australian culture today, was that First Nations peoples were basically peripheral to mainstream Australia, that they were primitive peoples living in the outback or fringe dwellers on the edge of towns, and there was a process of assimilation going on, that we whites were superior and that eventually they, the blacks, would assimilate with us and become like us. I now know just how wrong, how damaging and how destructive these mainstream cultural attitudes were—and still are—to our First Nations peoples.

I find it extraordinary to think that it's only in my lifetime that the First Peoples of this country were finally recognised as citizens of Australia. At the time I was born, First Nations babies were being taken from their parents. They were being taken—stolen—from their community, their culture and their language. And they were being fostered with nice white families like mine, or corralled into children's homes that did their best to destructively hammer their blackness out of them. This is Australia's violent history of dispossession, and it's ongoing: the number of First Nations people in custody, the suicide rates, the early deaths, the child removals and the massive numbers of First Nations people, including children, who are brutally imprisoned. The deaths in custody show that this history of dispossession is an ongoing present reality.

The huge gaps between First Nations peoples and the rest of us show that this is the case: we are still a colonial country and our First Nations peoples are still treated as second-class citizens by most people in this country. There is still racism against our First Nations peoples. It is still rife in our community, as Senator Hanson's contribution this morning made clear. We are never going to close the gap unless we acknowledge that this is our reality, unless we acknowledge our history and unless we acknowledge the ongoing injustices in Australian society. We will never close the gap until we can tell the truth and then move on together. We cannot undo the past. The past has occurred. We are now a multicultural community of over 25 million people here in Australia. But what we need to do is acknowledge the truth, acknowledge the dispossession and the trauma and then commit ourselves to making amends.

While we are still celebrating Australia Day, instead of acknowledging it as Invasion Day or Survival Day, while mainstream Australian culture doesn't acknowledge this truth, doesn't acknowledge that we are living on stolen land, doesn't commit to a process of decolonisation and doesn't acknowledge the underlying racism that pervades our country, we are not going to close the gap. We are never going to close the gap until we have leadership that commits to decolonising, commits to truth-telling, commits to treaties and commits to genuine self-determination by First Nations peoples, rather than ongoing neo-colonial control. We need leadership that acknowledges the racism that is still rife in our communities, and we need leadership that then says we need powerful, antiracism strategies to address it. We need leadership that commits to protecting country and to genuinely consulting with, listening to and not overriding the wishes of First Nations peoples—leadership that is actually First Nations peoples alongside other peoples.

We need to be managing country hand in hand with our First Nations peoples and, for example, not proceeding with fracking vast tracks of unceded land in the Northern Territory without consent. We need to be protecting our precious forests and their wildlife, rather than destroying them without consent. We need to be taking urgent serious action to slash our carbon pollution to zero so that we can have climate justice, and it can be racial justice as well. We need to be protecting country, protecting our future, making sure that we have a safe climate for all of us to be living in. We need to be protecting the web of life, to be respecting and nurturing the entanglement of relationships between every living creature and every part of the world that we are a part of. We have to do this for all of our sakes, for Australia's sake. We can never be at peace with ourselves as a country until we do.

All of us have so much to gain by truly acknowledging and valuing our First Nations peoples as First Peoples who are the traditional owners and custodians of all of this land and who maintain that ownership and custodianship of the land. We can learn, we can listen and we can embrace wisdom and knowledge and commit to protecting country. We can celebrate culture and then work powerfully and creatively together in our evolving shared culture, proudly rather than hypocritically. It's only by doing that that reconciliation with our First Nations peoples can become a reality and we will truly be on the journey to closing the gaps that are currently impacting so harmfully on all of us.