Page 1465 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 1 June 2022
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But there is a lot more to do. We have a vision of achieving joint management of Country. Although there are legal issues to work through, we want to build shared responsibility. This includes working towards joint plans of management, co-management agreements and looking at where we should consider the reclamation of First Nations naming of significant places, as well as employment and land outcomes, and work to ensure that decision-making rights are articulated in our legislation, our policy and our processes.
We have important work to do to more appropriately protect and celebrate First Nations cultural heritage. This work occurs in the context of great trauma and damage that has been the result of colonisation dispossession. It comes in the context of First Nations knowledge and wisdom on how to care for this Country being ignored for at least two centuries. It comes in the context of us now needing to manage the impacts of crises, including the climate crisis and extinction crisis, that the First Nations knowledge would be able to protect us against.
I continue to be humbled by the generosity, the humility and the grace of First Nations teachers, who I am lucky enough to spend time with and who continue to generously share their time, their knowledge and their talents. Thank you for this and for your continued commitment to helping me in my reconciliation journey. I make the pledge to walk with you and make reconciliation an action in my everyday life. I will aim to be brave and be part of the change that we want to see.
MS CLAY (Ginninderra) (11.38): In saying a few words about Reconciliation Week, I will not mimic the comments we have heard today. We have had a really good conversation, I think, by ministers and members. It is a really good time to pause and reflect and learn how to be a better ally. I really liked the theme this year—“Be Brave, Make a Change”. I liked how simply it was put to those of us who are a bit earlier in the journey.
The event at the Arboretum had a lot of easy to understand information about what that actually means at a personal level. We were asked to make pledges—personal pledges, workplace pledges and family pledges—and that was a really good conversation prompt for me with my daughter. I have an eight-year-old and she is often a lot better at talking about these sorts of issues than I am. So it was really good to be able to have that family conversation and to have a good personal conversation about what reconciliation means, what it means to be an ally, what sorts of things have happened in Australia’s past and what things are still happening, and what are some of the simple things and some of the bigger things we can do to make change.
I am grateful that I have the opportunity to reflect on these things as part of my job. It is an amazing thing to have that reflection as part of your working role. It is a real honour to do these sorts of things. It is so important to stop and listen and reflect on our history as a nation and what we can do as individuals in our community. I am really looking forward to the opportunities we have with our new federal government to maybe make some of those bigger changes. I thank all the people who have been working so hard on this. I know that we will do better on this than we have.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
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