Patrick Dodson (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to honour the life and legacy of a great Australian, the late Sir Gerard Brennan, who was the High Court Justice who wrote the lead judgement in Mabo which led to the Native Title Act in 1993. I was honoured to be asked by his family to say a few words at his funeral in Sydney in June.

I met Ged Brennan many, many years ago, soon after his work with Justice Woodward which led to the Northern Territory land rights act. Someone said of Ged Brennan that he wrestled with the tension between law and justice. Well do I remember a Sunday afternoon in Melbourne at the home of the late Sir Ron and Nellie Castan where, among others, was Sir Ronald Wilson, a former High Court justice himself. We were discussing the long and tortuous pathway of Mabo through the courts, and Sir Ron summed up with his opinion that, ultimately, Sir Gerard Brennan and his colleagues had listened with their hearts to the truth of the law, and justice was the outcome. Injustice and illegality are the foundation pillars of our nationhood. On that day, they were discarded to the wastebasket of history. Gone was the legal fiction that had, for centuries, justified the legal dispossession of First Nations peoples, with all its disastrous effects.

The court bequeathed both a gift and a challenge to our nation, and today we are presented with a new gift: the Uluru Statement from the Heart. I know that Sir Ged Brennan would join with me in urging all Australians to accept the generous invitation which the Uluru Statement conveys. Vale Sir Ged Brennan.