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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 6 Hansard (17 June) . . Page.. 1610 ..

MS REILLY (continuing):

I am sure that this motion will be unanimously supported. The round table discussion yesterday indicated that people wished to support this action. I think it is very heartening that we could come to a form of words that we all agreed on. As well as that, I would like to urge further action from all of us individually and from all of the ACT community individually. We have the opportunity as members of the Assembly to apologise in this way, but we also have the opportunity as individuals to personally apologise for past actions. I would urge you all to make this personal apology, either by writing to the Ngunnawal community in the ACT or by writing to the head of the reconciliation process as a personal indication of apology. I would urge all people in the ACT to take this action.

In conclusion, apart from urging support for the motion, I hope we have a future where we listen to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. I hope that we take account of the recommendations in the Bringing them home report and that we have a future that is open, tolerant and fair for all Australians.

MR WOOD (11.16): Mr Speaker, it has been just over 200 years - not a really long time - since the life of Aborigines and islanders changed forever. Pauline Hanson says that she should not keep on paying for something that happened over 200 years ago. Some Australians - really, quite a minority - agree with her, but what are they paying? They are paying just a very small part of their taxes. Aborigines and Islanders have been paying for that change, and paying every day since - dispossessed, degraded, punished, ignored, patronised, too little supported. Australians of my background, even in the most recent times, have been ignorant, or uncaring, self-interested or misguided. It is long past the time when we should act.

Four issues have emerged to tell us that this is the time to pursue that reconciliation we must have. Those issues are Mabo, Wik, Pauline Hanson and the stolen children report. These issues present great challenges to Australians which we must successfully face. I wish all Australians would see them not as problems but as opportunities to bring about that long overdue reconciliation.

Our focus today is on the stolen children. I am one of those who knew and did not understand. Thirty or 40 years ago I read the stories in the old Women's Weekly, for example, of Aboriginal children being brought up in white families. As a young political activist, I may have looked askance at that, but this concern was not placed on my agenda. I did not recognise the full implications of those stories until later, until I came in close contact with Aborigines and islanders in the late 1960s. Then, as a political candidate in a different part of Queensland, I began to understand the extent of the European impact and the continuing enormous problems that followed.

On Thursday Island I saw the islanders queuing outside the office of the then Native Affairs Department, queuing for access to their bank passbooks and having to justify a withdrawal and even the amount of money they could take out. That was not long ago. At the top of Cape York Peninsula I listened to the Aborigines who only recently had been rounded up and forcibly moved from their homes at Mapoon and relocated further north with other groups who were all located on one site at Bamaga - for their good, they were told. Actually, it was for administrative convenience.

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