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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 6 Hansard (17 June) . . Page.. 1609 ..

MS REILLY (continuing):

We must discuss the concerns of the past; we must discuss past actions. It is very heartening to see historians now putting onto the public agenda some of the issues that did happen in the past. We must look at the real history of Australia. I think that 1988 gave us the opportunity to recognise that when the British colonists arrived in 1788 they invaded a country that was already inhabited. Now we need to take it one step further and look at our colonial history. We need to have a real history, not some carefully sanitised version that I am sure most of us here were taught in our schools. We also need to recognise that we are not talking about some long-past time. We still had massacres of Aboriginal communities and unexplained murders up until the 1930s. If you look at some of the history of the Northern Territory, a quite large number of deaths happened that have not been fully explained. That was not a long time ago. It was less than 60 years ago.

Now we have the opportunity, and this Assembly has the maturity, to recognise the indigenous culture of Australia as an intrinsic element of our national identity. The process of apologising today is a very important part of that. We are recognising the rights of indigenous people to the same quality of life and opportunities that all Australians have; to have access to services within our community; to have access to health services, to housing, to education and to jobs; to have access to jobs for themselves and to have hopes of jobs for their children in the future.

We are also recognising, through what has been said today, that it is not the end of the road if we apologise today. We must back up our words with actions. We must take further action through the reconciliation process. We must take further action on the native title claim in the ACT, as this Government is doing. It is very heartening that the Government is negotiating with Aboriginal people on the native title claim. We must take action on the stolen generation report. We must take action on those recommendations and look at what is happening to the children within our society.

As I said previously, we are not talking about history in this case. We are talking about the fact that children were still being removed up until the 1970s and beyond. We are talking about people still within our community who suffered from these past actions. We need to take care of those people and listen to what they want. We must listen to what their needs are and provide assistance with counselling. We must provide assistance in linking them up with their own families and their own communities again. This is important action that the Government should be taking to help those people in a way in which they wish to be helped.

That leads us to consider the development of programs to assist or to provide services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We must listen to what they say and negotiate with them to get the best results. So often in the past we have consulted from the top down. We have decided what is the best. In this area there are many good people working on what they think is best, but let us change the system now. Let us listen to and negotiate with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We must find out what they want, rather than say that we know best. In the past we decided that our culture was more important and thought we knew better than anyone else. So let us address that as well in any actions we take in the future. This apology must lead to future action.

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