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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 13 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 4489 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

to continue to work to ensure that Aboriginal reconciliation is of real importance to our community, not just about lip-service but about reality. Certainly, that is the approach this Government will continue to adopt, and I believe, as I said earlier, that it is to the credit of this Assembly that it is an approach the Assembly as a whole has always adopted, certainly in my time here.

MR WHITECROSS (Leader of the Opposition) (4.40): Mr Speaker, it gives me pleasure to speak to this motion. I commend the Chief Minister for her initiative in proposing this motion today. I am glad that she and I were able to work together to come up with a set of words that appropriately express the sentiments of people in this place about this issue. The words of the motion are, as Mrs Carnell indicated, words that parliaments were encouraged by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation to use in reaffirming their commitment to the reconciliation process, and I think it is a sign of the maturity with which these issues are viewed in the Assembly that we have been able to listen to the encouragement of the council and its chairperson, Pat Dodson, and adopt his words in this motion today.

The vision statement of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation says that its aim is to achieve "a united Australia which respects this land of ours; values the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage, and provides justice and equity for all". Patrick Dodson, in a speech earlier this year to the National Press Club, put this in another way. He said that Aboriginal reconciliation "must mean some form of agreement that deals with the legacies of our history, provides justice for all and takes us forward as a nation". I think that notion of taking us forward is fundamental to understanding Aboriginal reconciliation, because Aboriginal reconciliation is a process. It is not a concept or an idea; it is not a proposition we can all agree with. It is a process of bringing us together and taking us forward as a nation.

Sir William Deane, the Governor-General, during the inaugural Vincent Lingiari Memorial Lecture to the Northern Territory University, referred to these steps as signposts. He identified, using the example of Gough Whitlam's 1975 return of land to the Gurindgi people at Daguragu, eight signposts. These were acknowledgment of the past; recognition of the need for redress; Aboriginal right of choice; the heart or spirit of reconciliation; representation of the relevant parties; recognition that reconciliation can progress even though there are things that remain undone; consensus about how we move forward; and some formal ceremony or recognition of what we have achieved at each stage in the process.

These steps need to be understood and supported and to be actively promoted. It is important that Australians not only understand that Aboriginal reconciliation is a process but also understand the steps and support those steps. Governments play an important role in promoting the steps of Aboriginal reconciliation and so do parliaments. The Federal Government has done this through the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. The ACT has played its part, under both the current and the former governments, through the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Council as one step in that process.

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