Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm glad I have three minutes because I don't know how I could possibly speak for five minutes about the Voice, because there's no detail about the Voice. We don't even know the date the referendum is going to be held. You would think, after 14 or 15 months in government—and all we ever seem to talk about is the Voice, not the cost of living or the real issues that the majority of Australians care about—that the Prime Minister could have, at the very least, set a date for this referendum. I think it's a deliberate distraction and nothing more than virtue signalling to the Marxists who want to divide the country on race rather than focus on the real issue of cost of living in this country.

I took up Senator Payman's offer to read the Uluru statement while I was waiting here, and I just want to touch on this: 'That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia'. It's interesting that, when I was growing up, I was told that the Aboriginals had been here for 20,000 years. Then it got extended to 40,000 years. If you actually look up the oldest known remains of any biped in Australia, it is Mungo Man. The dating on that is disputed, but it's somewhere between 24,000 years and 40,000 years. So what I want to know is: where does the claim for this 60,000 years come from? I'm not saying that bipeds haven't been here for 60,000 years, but the other thing is that, if you look it up, apparently Homo sapiens left Africa 60,000 or 70,000 years ago. Did they cross the Asian mainland and cross the Wallace line to get here, wiping out the Denisovans, Flores Man and whoever else was in Indonesia and wherever?

I find that history very interesting, I have to say, but I just think we're stretching the truth when we try to claim that a particular race has been here for 60,000 years when there's no actual archaeological evidence to prove that. Even with Mungo Man the DNA is disputed and the stratigraphic detail is disputed. The argument is that he was too shallowly in the earth to have been there for 40,000 years. I don't know—I'm not saying I know the answers—but I do know that the goalposts has been shifted in my lifetime from 20,000 years to 40,000 years and then to 60,000 years. Of course, that matters because we've crossed two ice ages in that time. It's more that it's all feelings are no facts.

Anyway, we really need to be focusing on the cost of living. Can we call a date for the referendum? Let's get on with it.

Question agreed to.