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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 3807 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

Canberrans full access to the Territory's social, political and economic life regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, language, gender or place of birth, and that our commitment to the ongoing process of reconciliation is truly a commitment to a process and not just a principle.

MS McRAE (9.48): Mr Speaker - - -

Mrs Carnell: I thought we were having only one speaker.

MS McRAE: Since when?

Mrs Carnell: I thought that was what Mr Humphries had organised. It is all right.

MS McRAE: No, not at all. I want to have my say.

MR SPEAKER: You have the call, Ms McRae.

MS McRAE: Thank you, Mr Speaker. I want to add to this debate by focusing attention on one of the most complex and interesting issues. Too often, when we are talking about people from other cultures, people from other places, it seems to me to be a very wooden debate.

Mrs Carnell: There goes the one speaker.

Mr Humphries: Yes. We had agreed on that.

Mr Whitecross: No. We were honest. We did not promise.

MS McRAE: There was no agreement that I knew of. I hope I did not break anybody's word, but there was no agreement that I should not speak.

Too often we talk about it as if it is not about human beings coming to live in this country and it is not about indigenous people already established with their language encountering another culture. I want to add today from some of the best writing I have ever found on the complexity of this process and then make a plea around those sorts of issues. I will begin with one quote:

The world and we ourselves only come really to be familiar presences to us when we speak about it and about ourselves in our own language. The images of reality in the borrowed language are no more than pictures seen through the lens of a camera, never with the eye of the senses. In the borrowed language, in the language which is not growing within us but rather settling within us like sediment, we are anonymous not only to others but also to ourselves.

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