Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Having had the benefit this morning of sitting in the chair—as you are right now, Acting Deputy President Chandler—and hearing the contributions on this very important debate, I was forced to cast my mind back to 2013, when I first came to this chamber, and my first speech in this place. In it I indicated that one of the things that concerned me was that the Closing the Gap statement, which was an historic event of 2007 and was replicated every year in the House, was actually not marked here in the Senate. I make this observation because it is several years down the track—2013 through to now—and today is, in fact, the first day that we are having a time-unlimited debate on the Closing the Gap statement. It's not February—we've changed so much, and here we are in August—but this will be an annual examination of the conscience of the nation. I use those words as a person of the Catholic faith who has that thing called the sacrament of confession. That's unfamiliar to many people, but it gives me a language to talk about the concept of reviewing and thinking about what is right action and what is good action. The question for us is: What is appropriate action? What is right and good action for the people of this country with regard to our First Nations?

This morning, Senator Siewert made a contribution, and she acknowledged the Lowitja Institute. She spoke about Lowitja indicating that there are ways of knowing, ways of doing and ways of being. That is the journey that we need to undertake as Australian people—to understand the ways of knowing of the First Nations peoples, the ways of being of the First Nations peoples and the ways of doing of the First Nations peoples—because God knows when we got here, at colonisation, we didn't look for the wisdom of a nation; we declared its absence.

Indeed, Senator Dodson, in his contribution this morning, spoke about the challenges that face us, even with these years and years of recognition under the Closing the Gap mantle. He spoke about the fanfare around the announcement, just last week, of implementation plans. He spoke about the first target, prescribing a 15 per cent increase in Aboriginal landmass to Indigenous rights and interests and a 15 per cent increase in their rights or interests in the sea, but he spoke about the incapacity to actually even agree on those targets in recent days. We can't do that. He said that the meeting agreed to defer, and I loved the expression of hope that he gave this morning that things can still be resolved. He said:

… I hope that goodwill will prevail. But this demonstrates the perennial challenge of negotiating at a table which rests on the unresolved legacy of terra nullius and the denied sovereignty of First Nations peoples.

There is the heart of the challenge we face.

We are making some progress. I note the difference in terms of how we acknowledge country and how that's happening in schools and at places where we gather around the country. But, in the same way that we need to make that an authentic gesture of acknowledgement—that the First Nations people are our First Nations—we need also to make sure that this annual report is not simply a box-ticking exercise. We need to guard against it becoming a pointless ceremony on which we should drop a few meagre words here and there. Of all the ministerial statements we review, this has primacy above all, in my view, given the outrageous realities of disadvantage that prevail after all these years of colonisation in our country. For ordinary Australians, five out of 1,000 children might be removed from their home. But for First Nations people, in 2021, 56 out of 1,000 children will be removed. I'm heartened by the acknowledgement of the suffering of the stolen generation, but it's not just one generation that has been removed. We're talking about 56 out of a thousand First Nations children being removed from their home today. This is an enormous challenge for us to face, and we need to make great changes to our policies to address that.

I want to acknowledge the contribution of Senator Bridget McKenzie, who spoke about education and its impact. Of all the things she said, I want to particularly note that she indicated that we need to close the gap at the beginning of life. I can only endorse that. I also want to acknowledge the contribution of one of the few speakers from the government who have come out today, and that is Senator Bragg, who spoke about language. What I want to do this evening is to put on the record what might yet be unknown to many First Nations people, and that is the experience that I had, and learned from, under the tutelage of my colleague in the Senate Senator Nova Peris, when we visited Elcho Island with the standing committee on health. It was the first occasion that I had been in a community where language—their own Indigenous language—was so prominent, and, because of her knowledge and her understanding of culture, Senator Peris revealed to me how important it would be if we were able to take the evidence in language, and that's what we did. We actually got a translator on the day and we took evidence in language. The day commenced with all the English—all the magic words that we say—but it changed, and the whole tenor of the room was transformed as First Nations people spoke to the parliament in their own language. We now have, within our standing orders—and perhaps this is not widely known—the capacity for all of our committees to take evidence in language and for that language to be reported and recorded in Hansard in language as well as in English. This is not only a just and right thing to do; this is a powerful thing to do—to recover language and to prize the multitude of beautiful languages of the First Nations people.

These are small things, and it will be a combination of many small things that will help us advance from this moment, when we can continue to hope and strive towards a better nation in which the glaring failure of our previous policies is writ large in the revealing of the Closing the Gap targets. There has been far too little progress on these matters over many years, but in the last eight years it's been a wholesale disaster. Last year, the government basically wiped the slate and re-established a different scheme where there would be 17 new targets. I'm heartened that three of those 17 targets were met: improving birth weight and early education attendance and reducing the number of Indigenous teenagers in youth justice. But it is horrifying to see the 14 commitments that are not on track. There has been no progress on Indigenous life expectancy, no progress on reducing the rate of overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids in out-of-home care, and no progress on reducing the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults held in incarceration. And, tragically—

Debate interrupted.