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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 4 Hansard (7 May) . . Page.. 1025 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

I can agree with her broad proposition that we need one nation. We certainly need one undivided nation. We cannot afford anything else. But we will not and cannot achieve this under the banner that Pauline Hanson espouses. It is divisive and it is destructive. While she has a nice title for her new party, it expresses a view that simply is unachievable using the brand of politics that she has adopted.

The question has been raised, and somebody else raised it here this morning, as to whether we should simply ignore this phenomenon in the hope that it will simply go away. I do not believe that it will, as it has achieved too much momentum to simply be ignored. It is gathering momentum every day, and it can forever damage this society and this nation if we simply ignore it. Mr Speaker, we, and all thinking Australians, must express strongly and loudly our belief that the politics of hate are unacceptable and will not be tolerated in this nation under any circumstances. Only through that loud and strong expression of public opinion, in my view, will the minority attracting themselves to Pauline Hanson's banner be overwhelmed and subdued, and if we do not express ourselves we will have failed.

MS REILLY (11.37): I feel I must start today by making a confession. I am one of those dreadful people that Pauline Hanson has so much trouble dealing with, because I spent 11 years of my working life working with Aboriginal people, helping them to access various government programs. I did things like go out and actually talk to Aboriginal people to find out what they wanted to do in relation to the other things that some of us just accept as a right; what they wanted to do in relation to getting hold of water, access to housing, access to health services, access to education.

As a community worker in the Northern Territory, one of the special jobs I had was to work with Aboriginal communities in dealing with alcohol. In a way that none of our communities manage to do, as a community they look at the devastation caused by alcohol. They work through those issues and they work out the best way of handling them within their community. We do not have the guts to actually look at the issues of some drug abuse within our own community in the way that Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory have done for many years. It is a simplistic stereotype to say Aboriginals drink a lot; you can see them. That fails to recognise the number of people in the Northern Territory who do not drink at all and who have decided not to consume alcohol at all. But these sorts of statistics are not interesting. They do not make the headlines. They do not make Pauline Hanson's book or 60 Minutes.

It is so easy to take the attitude of looking at health statistics without looking at the most basic issues related to them. Try explaining to people here in the ACT, which I did when I first came to live here, that there are people in Australia who do not have access to potable water. It is not a hardship posting like you get when you go overseas with Foreign Affairs. There are people living within this community, within Australia now, whose access to water is tenuous at the best of times. We need a lot of money to address that issue, but then there are screams about how many dollars it costs to provide services to people in rural and remote areas.

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