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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 8 Hansard (26 August) . . Page.. 2486 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

should be the beginning of a new partnership between all Australians. Mr Speaker, my dream is for this community, this multicultural and diverse community, to be a seamless one. There is no difference. The difference, in fact, is only the difference in ideas and the difference in how we can attack the future. Anything else is just not acceptable to me, Mr Speaker.

It is really the responsibility of all members of this Assembly to promote reconciliation amongst all Australians. How many times have we been to gatherings and thought that most of the people there had not embraced it at all? They actually take their lead from people like us. I think that we live each and every day of our lives on show for these people and we need to go out there and take every opportunity we can to tell people that we are sorry. Saying that you are sorry for what has happened is something that you do in your daily life; we do. Mr Speaker, what we have here is an opportunity to do that.

This activity on the part of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation is a step in a very widespread educational exercise. We know that educating our schoolchildren about reconciliation is a really good way to go because, hopefully, the minds of children going to school are a greenfields site and they are ready to be influenced. If we influence them in the proper way - with tolerance, expressions of regret, sorrow and desires for a seamless society - it will come off. However, Mr Speaker, we need to address the core issue and resolve those underlying problems that many of us would take for granted. That is the role of the adults in this world. We have to go back and make good what has happened before so that the kids can get on with it in a seamless society.

We have to address the many scars that exist among indigenous people. It is our job to promote the healing process and to see the healing process finish. Let us hope that it will not take 200 years for us to say sorry for something that it took us 200 years to do. Our desire for reconciliation must be incorporated in our laws, in our constitution, in our customs and in the way we live our lives. Mr Speaker, it is very easy for us to talk about reconciliation with indigenous people on a global basis. It is very easy to say, "Let us worry about Aboriginal reconciliation", and then in our minds to start thinking about the outback. I suggest that people should take a look in their own backyard, that we should not be NIMBYs as far as reconciliation is concerned. We should be starting to think about our own backyard here.

Mr Humphries quite appropriately said that we have many issues to address with respect to the indigenous people who live in the ACT and surrounding areas, and he is dead right. If people think that it is a question of having control of disease, unemployment, housing and lifestyles and that is limited to outback New South Wales, outback Queensland or outback Western Australia, I suggest that they take a look at outback Red Hill, outback Narrabundah, outback Griffith, outback Wreck Bay, and the list goes on. If we embrace all of these things on a global basis and say how wonderful it is that we are doing these things for the good of all indigenous Australian people and we let down the people in our own neighbourhood, we will be a sad and sorry lot and we will have failed miserably.

Mr Speaker, I would like to conclude by congratulating a particular piece of reality here. A year ago, or thereabouts, a couple of people in the ACT decided to do something real about reconciliation, not leave it to the leaders like ourselves and some of the high

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