Lidia Thorpe (Victoria, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, President. Gammin, as we know, is a fake, pretend, a joke. And that is what I think a powerless voice to this place is. We have fought for over 200 years against colonisation. The Constitution is an illegal document. It's illegal. The occupation of this country is illegal. You are following the King—the King! We are all bound by the King. And now, poor little black fellas are begging for a seat at the table, and all we get is to become advisers with no power. Well, I am ashamed. I am ashamed that we are not standing here for a treaty, or for some truth to happen in this country, and that we have followed a conservative regime—John Howard's regime—Labor. His position, and the King's position, is to wipe us out. We're a problem. We're certainly a problem to this mob. We're just a problem that needs to be fixed all the time, and you are just tinkering around the edges. You won't implement the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. You've had ample time to do that in the last 32 years. You've had ample time to implement the recommendations regarding the stolen generations. You are completely gammin—fake; you're not genuine. You wave your flag, wear your deadly black earrings and feel really good about it. We're hearing all of these beautiful heartfelt stories about how this is going to fix our lives and solve everything. But we can't even do anything until after this referendum. In estimates we were told, 'Wait till the referendum; wait till the referendum.' Meanwhile, our children are being tortured in prisons. Our babies are being stolen from their mothers' arms. Our people are taking their lives. Young men are telling me about the hanging points in their cells. They're passing the word around because they've had enough.

What does the Labor government do about that? They say, 'It's state and territory responsibility; we're washing our hands from this.' But there are federal responsibilities that you also ignore. The Blak sovereign movement is a voice that you never allowed at the table. If that is anything to go by, then what hope has your tokenistic Voice got? Who's going to listen to a token voice? Do you—just you—want the Voice to tell you that you need to stop killing our people? I hope the Voice is going to tell this parliament that they've got to stop killing our people. They've got to stop the suicides. They've got to stop assimilating us into their system.

We, First Peoples in this country, have the oldest constitution on the planet. Why are we begging like paupers, again, to go into a white, racist, colonial constitution that was set up to deny everything that we are, to destroy our lands and our waters, to destroy everything as quickly as they could, to extract as much resource as possible from stolen land, and to dispossess us and make a nice life for yourselves? There is not one law in this country that has ever, ever been good for us—not one. And now we're meant to accept a powerless voice. It is truly assimilating our people so we fit nicely as your little Indigenous Australians. It's what you want us to be, right? You don't want us to speak our language. You don't want us to practise our culture—except when you go to some festival and feel good about it. That's the only time you want to look at our culture—when it suits you; when you want to hang a painting in your Senate office. It doesn't back up what you're actually doing. You are crucifying us again, giving us no power.

If you are genuine, give us Senate seats in here, like they do in New Zealand. Have a treaty like they do. Why can't we do that? What are you scared of, Labor? Hawke got sidelined by his conservatives at the time, and was told not to pursue treaty. You know that. Keating tried and he got shut down. And Albo obviously has no guts to even go there—