Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to take this opportunity to address the Senate on an issue that is very dear to my heart, and that is National Sorry Day. The organisation and establishment of a national day to commemorate, each year, the history of the forcible removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families was one of 54 recommendations made in 1997 by the Bringing them home report, the report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. People may or may not know that the report was brought down on 26 May 1997.

The Bringing them home report is a tribute to the strength and struggles of many thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people affected by forcible removal. We acknowledge the hardships they endured and the sacrifices they made. We remember and lament all the children who will never come home. We give our thanks to and express our admiration for those who found the strength to tell their stories to the inquiry and to the generations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people separated from their families and communities.

I would first like to acknowledge that we are on Ngunnawal land right now. I would also like to pause at this point to pay a special tribute to Mr Rob Riley, whom those from Western Australia will know. For many years he headed up the Aboriginal Legal Service in WA and was a pillar of strength for our local Nyungah community. He was also the one who would get up in the middle of the night when Nyungah street kids got into detention, to go down to the lockup to see if they were okay, that their rights were acknowledged and that they were treated with respect. Rob was one of the people who got the ball rolling in the early nineties with the first report into the stolen generations in Western Australia. This was a very personal issue for him, as he himself had been taken from his mother at the age of 18 months and brought up in institutions, being told lies about how his mother did not want him or that she was dead. He did not find out the truth about his family and his heritage until it was too late.

At the release of the first WA report Rob came out and told his story for the very first time in a very public way. It was a story about which his wife, kids and closest friends had no inkling. It was a story that involved long-term systematic sexual abuse at a very early age. Unfortunately, telling his story was not a release for Rob and, unknown to the community that had looked up to him for years, this brought with it a flood of grief which ultimately lead to a breakdown of sorts and culminated in Rob, very uncharacteristically, being charged with drink-driving and hounded out of his job as leader of the ALS by the media. Within six months the despair had become too much for Rob and he took his own life. This tore the heart out of our local community. The big guy who had done so much for his mob and had always been the first to offer support to those in trouble had himself been unable to reach out and find anybody in his time of need.

The one comment of Rob’s that sticks in my mind, something he shared with his students at the Centre for Aboriginal Studies at Curtin uni in the months before his tragic death, really sums up for me the tragedy of the removal of children and the lasting consequences that it has on Aboriginal communities. Rob explained how hard he found it to be a parent and to take on a role of which he had absolutely no experience. He said he did not know how to hold his kids and comfort them when they were hurt or sad, as nobody had ever held him. He felt that he simply did not know how to love them. He cared so much and wanted to make sure that the next generations of kids had the chances that he had never had. That used to cut him up. He feared that the tragedy of his generation was producing yet another tragedy, as Aboriginal parents who had been brought up in these uncaring institutions and had no experience of parental love and no parenting skills produced a generation of kids who were effectively out of control, living on the streets and getting themselves onto the wrong side of the law. They were doing this at an early age and, ultimately, were themselves ending up in institutions. I hope this story gives you some insight into why I feel so strongly about Sorry Day and the recommendations of the Bringing them home report, which is so very important.

This is the first part of why I have put up the motion that is before the Senate today. The second, more immediate, reason that I have raised this issue is that last year on 12 May 2005 Senator Aden Ridgeway moved a general business motion to change the name of National Sorry Day to National Day of Healing. He did so with the best of intentions and at the behest of the secretary of the National Sorry Day Committee. The motion was co-sponsored by the ALP and the Greens. Unfortunately, the secretary of the National Sorry Day Committee had acted too quickly in requesting such a motion. The members of the National Sorry Day Committee had not agreed to the name change, and community consultation had not taken place. These actions brought about a great deal of unintended distress and pain in many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, particularly for members of the stolen generation. As co-sponsors of this motion, which was put forward in good faith and on the mistaken understanding that it was supported by the community, the Australian Greens wish to bring this issue to the attention of the Senate. We believe that National Sorry Day is extremely important and we support the wishes of the community that it keep the name of National Sorry Day.

For example, consider the issue of Anzac Day, which is a day of very great importance to Australians for what it remembers and commemorates. Many people in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community feel just as strongly about National Sorry Day and believe it is an important day for remembrance and commemoration. What explanation can we give to children whose parents, family, community and culture have been taken away from them by the ill-founded and paternalistic policy and the misguided notion that what was best for them was a kind of integration based on institutional care that aimed to prepare them for life as farmhands and domestic servants?

In recent times the notion of the family has come to take a central place in government policy and rhetoric. We have even seen a new party, Family First, come into existence. It is extremely ironic that this whole debate has excluded Indigenous families, particularly given the very central place that family plays in their cultures and their lives. Their ideas and experiences of family are much larger and more inclusive than ours, as are their families, and their family obligations and ties are much stronger. The whole issue of the removal of children and the intense trauma created by the ripping apart of families is absolutely central to what the idea of Sorry Day, the journey of healing and the reconciliation process is meant to be. I ask you to look into your hearts and look at decent Australian values, to which everyone is committed and which play such a central role in the life of our nation, and I ask you to reconsider the importance and the need for reconciliation and social justice for Aboriginal Australians. To me, part of this is recognising the hurt that has been caused in the past and recognising and acknowledging National Sorry Day.

I would like to acknowledge the members of the National Sorry Day Committee who brought this matter to my attention. I thank Helen Moran in particular for her assistance and recognise the work done by the state and territory stolen generation Link-Up services and Sorry Day committees, as well as that done by ANTaR: Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation.

Returning to the issue of the Bringing them home report, I wish to reflect on what has and has not happened with the 54 recommendations of this report. We are coming up to the ninth year since it was released. I urge everyone to revisit these recommendations because I am deeply concerned that the vast majority are practical, sensible and relatively easily achieved but have not been implemented. It is disappointing that, nine years on, very little has been done with them. I believe this is a source of national shame.

The implementation of these recommendations into government policy and into the delivery of mainstream and directed services to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities would provide, I believe, a productive and constructive route into tackling the pressing and seemingly intractable issues of Indigenous disadvantage. In recent times, with the dismantling of ATSIC, the federal government has taken upon itself direct responsibility for addressing the plight of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, ensuring the delivery of mainstream services and guaranteeing that they are able to participate in the economy and the workforce so as to live constructive and meaningful lives with a level of health and a standard of living that is comparable to that of non-Aboriginal Australians. Unfortunately, there is a very long way to go to achieve these stated aspirations.

I want to take these commitments at face value and assume that the government, the Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination and the mainstream departments responsible for delivering basic services to Aboriginal Australians—including health, education, employment and housing—are sincere in their efforts and are merely struggling to work out how to deliver on these responsibilities. They are struggling to work out how they can make up for their past and ongoing failure to deliver basic services to Aboriginal Australians. It is extremely disappointing that, when we have so much largesse in Australia, the budget did not commit the resources needed to address Aboriginal disadvantage. For example, the Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma, pointed out that $2.1 billion is needed to address Aboriginal housing and $250 million to $500 million per annum is needed to bring up Indigenous health services to the standard of those of non-Indigenous Australians. These are the resources that I believe we need to deliver and can deliver in this country to Aboriginal Australians.

The young leaders forum earlier this year found that Indigenous disadvantage was the No. 1 problem facing Australia. We need to commit to achieving this aim of equality of access to primary health care and equality of access to basic services such as education, employment and housing within a decade, as Tom Calma points out. We need to commit to equality of outcomes for Aboriginal Australians within a generation—in other words, in 25 years. At a time when most Australians have never had it better, it is a national disgrace that the majority of Aboriginal Australians continue to live in Third World conditions.

I believe it is vitally important that we commemorate and remember National Sorry Day on 26 May. The attempt to change the name is not appropriate. The Aboriginal community does not believe it is appropriate and as I understand it the stolen generations do not believe it is appropriate. I urge that we retain the name ‘National Sorry Day’ and use it as a day of remembrance to ensure that we do remember that Aboriginal Australians face massive disadvantage in this country. It is imperative that we as a nation address this disadvantage.