Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Deputy President. I'm not going to withdraw my comment. This continues to be a constant narrative—a constant narrative that is shoved down the throats of First Nations people in this place. People are watching the deliberate, racially motivated narrative that is being churned out as people open Facebook, Instagram and all the other mediums on their phones. Researchers have actually told us that it's like being punched in the face every time there is racism that is experienced by us. It has that much impact, and yet people use this as a platform. It's just horrendous.

This is a continual thing that people use as part of native title—that the native title legislation is racist. Well, how? I want to know how, because if you walk into somebody's house without acknowledging them, without respecting them, and without thinking about what impact you might have on the way that they've been living in that house for a really long time, and then you decide that you're just going to sell that house from underneath those people—'I don't care what they say; I don't even have to ask permission, and I'm not going to give them a dime out of it'—this is why the native title legislation exists. It wasn't just an abandoned house. It is not that Australia didn't have anyone here and there were no sophisticated systems that were set up. We would fish for a day. We didn't have to farm. We had trade routes. We were able to have our tribal boundaries. And it was all removed. The one thing we can agree on is that native title gave that to us. It gifted that to us as First Peoples. Your stone-age interpretation is your warped view of history. We were not part of that. We had sophisticated systems. We didn't need a refrigerator because we had our own systems for keeping our food fresh.

The one thing Senator Hanson did mention is that you can't bring a knife to a gunfight, right? You can't. And that's how we ended up massacred. That's how the frontier wars of this nation happened. The blood is still in the land. And that's the reality of the situation. Yet mainstream Australia, because of people like Senator Hanson and others, wants to come into this place and say we should forget about that, that it wasn't a big deal and that they're just a couple of people's ancestors down the road.

What sort of hurt—the intergenerational trauma of that—do you think exists for First Nations people in this country, from being denied their rights, being denied their children, being denied their culture and being denied any type of economic empowerment for generations? That's not years; we're going to use generations of people. I'm talking about 150 generations of my people that have been denied their rights. The one little shred of right that we currently have and that we hold on to is the fact that we will have native title to identify and to acknowledge that we were here before 1788 and that we have a rich culture, history, knowledges and people.

We don't have formal truth-telling in this country, yet. And the Commonwealth, the government, are denying us that. They can stand up in here and say, 'We respect the law'—I almost thought Senator Ayres was going to break into, 'I'm all for makarrata and truth and justice,' because that's what it felt like. But they're still denying us that.

You have to tell the truth about what's really happening. That's not about, 'An Aboriginal person came to my office and complained about native title because they're not getting their share.' I know that process is not perfect, and I'm not advocating that it is. What I'm saying is that I don't think anybody in this place can possibly sit here and say that they've been hunted off a piece of land, that they've been told not to go there—if they've been respectful—that they've been told that they should get out of the place or that we have ever put up a sign saying 'No whitefellas'. I don't think that's happened. If you can bring evidence of that, I'll entertain it for a little bit. But then I'll go and ask the question: why?

If somebody tells you, 'Don't do that,' there's a reason for it. So what about when someone says, 'That's a sacred site'? I don't see anybody jumping on top of anybody else's grandmothers' and ancestors' graves, yet we think that that's okay? Do we think that climbing one of our sacred sites is okay? Do we think that ruining an area—like the example Senator Hanson used, of Great Keppel Island—and then going, 'We'll just hand it back now; we've come in for a party, we've wrecked the joint and now we're handing it back, and we'll let the First Nations people fix that up,' is okay?

When that's included under native title, or even in the extinguishment of native title, we are questioned about our intention in that. I've read the media statement from the local PBC, who've said: 'Of course non-Aboriginal people can come here to Great Keppel Island. We would never deny that. We want to restore it. We want to make sure that we can share it.'

So I find this myth and the accusation that was made today that First Nations people—the three per cent of Australians that claim to be Aboriginal—are telling people not to go on country absolutely laughable. It's laughable because it's not happening. There are sacred places for men and women's business. There are ceremonial grounds. There are issues that require us to have a little bit of respect for others, whether it be people's religion, their race or their disability, and we've had a whole conversation this week about the NDIS.

But to deny why native title exists is just abhorrent. It is just unbelievable that people can sit in this place, come in here for an acknowledgement of country every morning and still think that they can make accusations that we would run people off country and that we want to money grab. The money was something that was brought in on the boat. That bit you're right about, because we see the value in the land.

We are the custodians of this country, but we cop a lot of negative flack. The racism in this country, since the referendum, has gone up. That is something that is true, and our people have felt and copped the brunt of that. The rise of that is because of this.