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

We reflect on the life of the Queen today, from stolen Ngunnawal and Ngambri land, and I pay respect to their elders and to all First Nations peoples across this country, including those in our parliament with us here.

Queen Elizabeth was loved by millions around the world, and as the BBC said in their obituary to her:

The long reign of Queen Elizabeth II was marked by her strong sense of duty and her determination to dedicate her life to her throne and to her people.

I send my love to her family and to all who are mourning her passing.

Elizabeth became Queen eight years before I was born, and I remember hot summer afternoons as a child, browsing through large format picture books of her coronation and her visits to Australia in 1954 and 1963. My school friends and I would daydream about marrying Prince Charles and becoming a princess and then queen. 'God Save the Queen' was our national anthem, and the Queen's portrait was in our schools, beaming down benevolently on my life of white middle-class privilege. God was in his heaven, the Queen was up there on the wall, and all was right with the world. So it's no wonder that Australians like me—products of white settler colonialism, products of empire, of stolen land—are mourning the loss of the Queen, and grieving because their loved monarch, at the apex of the suite of institutions that structure our lives, has passed on. I truly respect that grief, but we have to look beyond the grief, to the experiences and feelings of people who weren't and aren't part of this privileged group.

Queen Elizabeth was by all accounts an intelligent and thoughtful woman, a woman who surely felt that she was working for justice and peace and who surely felt that being truthful was a virtue. The big truth that I'm sure she would have agreed with is that not everyone did so well out of the settler colonialism that she and her forebears presided over and still preside over. Indeed, Senator Pat Dodson has described how his grandfather, Yawuru leader Paddy Djiagween, asked the Queen in 1963: 'Why can't we have the same rights as the white man?' The Queen promptly agreed and indicated her wish that he be given full citizenship. Yet at this time, Australia, the country she was head of state of, was stealing kids from their families, ripping culture and communities apart, and it is doing so to this day, with thousands of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care, not living with relatives, friends or Indigenous caregivers.

Uncle Archie Roach was the same age as my elder sister. While we grew up with our parents' love, knowing our place in the world, his world, like so many others', was ripped apart. We were white; they were black. Now, while my kids have had the opportunities to launch off into satisfying lives of their own, too many young black men their age are locked up in prison. Boys as young as 10 are attempting suicide in youth prisons. Deaths in custody are still occurring with sickening regularity, with the latest young man dying just days before the Queen passed away. Yet where is the outpouring of grief for him? Where is the commitment to implement the recommendations of the royal commission, still as relevant today as they were 35 years ago?

The Commonwealth that the Queen presided over was and still is inherently racist. Our Australian nation is based on a lie of terra nullius: that, at its heart, our First Nations peoples are inferior to the invaders. We stole their land. We killed thousands in frontier wars. We didn't even attempt to sign treaties. The war and the genocide are ongoing, with the imprisonment, the taking away of children, the stealing and desecration of land with coal and gas mines, and the destruction of forests and totem species from logging.

I'm saying this here today because those of us who have benefited from our racist system need to speak up. I was proud to join the protest yesterday because to be silent is to consent. We need to keep on speaking up until justice is done, until we have faced the truth of our history—which is still resonating loud into the present—and until we commit to genuinely moving forward together.

Condolences to the Queen, but let's make our condolences productive and just. Let's work so that a legacy of the Queen's passing is the prompting of non-Aboriginal Australians to commit to using our privilege to work for truth-telling, peace and justice. Australia's First Nations people need more than a voice. Australia needs truth-telling, starting here in this place. We need justice. We need treaties. We need a republic, an Australia that has First Nations justice and First Nations wisdom at its core.