Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (24 May) . . Page.. 1712 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

The Chief Minister, the government and this Assembly have all acknowledged, separately and together, the reality of the stolen generation. Apologies have been made to members of the stolen generation and their families. We will all remember the very moving speeches made and stories told at the bar of this Assembly last year. That is the only occasion on which the bar has been used.

People here have used the term "the stolen generation". For this Assembly, that term is not really a point of debate. People liken it to the lost generation of World War I. The term has been used in a lot of similar instances. It is not a problem here. We all know what we are talking about, and the Assembly's position has been made perfectly clear within the ACT and also to our interstate and federal counterparts, particularly by the Chief Minister, who has spoken about this issue at length on many occasions and in many different fora.

The ACT government has acknowledged the stolen generation, but we cannot force another jurisdiction to do the same. We cannot force another democratically elected government in this country to overturn its laws. If they tried that with us, we would rightly tell them where to go. Likewise, we cannot and we should not support one government's attempt to overturn another's laws. For that reason, the government does not support the part of the motion relating to mandatory sentencing. At any rate, we have already dealt with that and we lost. As I said earlier, the Chief Minister has dutifully written letters as the Assembly directed the government to do.

Furthermore, we need to make sure that debates like these do not make us lose the spirit of reconciliation. That is particularly important with the events of the next week, as the Chief Minister has indicated. Too often in recent times there has been a focus on semantics rather than the spirit and on shades of meaning rather than the big picture. Let us go back to the spirit. Let us focus on what we here in the Assembly can do to further the real reconciliation process in the ACT. It is particularly timely now, given what is going to occur over the next week. I have had a look through the Chief Minister's amendment. It is timely and appropriate, given that we have had large sections of this debate before. The amendment would effectively take us a further step forward, rather than harking back to a debate this Assembly had several weeks ago. I commend the Chief Minister's amendment to the motion as the most appropriate thing this Assembly can now do.

MS TUCKER: (5.57) I support this motion as put by Mr Stanhope, and I do not support the amendment by the Liberal government. The first point of Mr Stanhope's motion is related to the mandatory sentencing laws in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. It is true that we have had a full debate on that matter as a result of the motion I put in this place some time ago. Mr Stefaniak is not quite right in saying that Ms Carnell was instructed to take particular action as a result of that motion. I moved:

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .