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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (24 May) . . Page.. 1716 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

In relation to the Senate inquiry into the stolen generation and the subsequent inquiry into the implementation of the Bringing them home report, the federal government, in a most offensive and gratuitously insulting way, represented to that committee that in fact there is no stolen generation of indigenous or Aboriginal people. That is an offensive and gratuitously insulting statement which must be rejected. No thinking or feeling person could possibly endorse it. We find that sort of statement being made by the federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in a context in which we are genuinely seeking to achieve reconciliation with indigenous people and we are genuinely engaging in that process.

We find in relation to the declaration from the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation that the Prime Minister feels it is his prerogative to pre-emptively reject the declaration before it has been received and to present his own form of words which he knocked up in his office overnight.

I think in the most disparaging and patronising way, two weeks before the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation is to present to the government, to the people of Australia, its proposed declaration of reconciliation, the Prime Minister unilaterally rejects it and presents his own form of words that permit him to shirk an apology. The Prime Minister, for what must simply be some poll-driven or ideological reason, cannot bear the thought of apologising to Aboriginal Australians.

That is the context in which we today debate a motion on reconciliation, a motion which this Assembly has debated over a number of years. The purpose of my motion today is to put some force to the protestations of this Assembly of its commitment to reconciliation. If the members of this place are wedded in a genuine and sincere way to the notion of reconciliation with indigenous Australians, there is absolutely no reason why they can refuse to endorse the motion that I propose.

This motion is a concrete indication of this Assembly's genuineness about reconciliation. It declares to the federal government that this Assembly, the people of this territory, find the mandatory sentencing regime, particularly in the Northern Territory, so offensive and so racially discriminatory in its impact that it simply cannot be permitted to remain on the statute books of one of the jurisdictions of this nation, and says that the federal government has an obligation to remove that stain from the statute books of this nation. That is what we are asking here today-that this Assembly, on behalf of the people of this territory, indicate to the Prime Minister that it is not acceptable to the people of the ACT that this racially discriminatory form of imprisonment or incarceration, particularly of Aboriginal youths, be allowed to persist.

The federal government does have the power to do that. We hear much of states rights and the sanctity of states rights, but there is no sanctity for states rights. When it comes to an arm-wrestle between states rights and human rights it is so easy to simply embrace states rights. There are examples in the past.

I challenge members of the government to suggest to me that they do not endorse the stand which the Keating government took in relation to laws then present in Tasmania that required that consenting homosexual males be imprisoned for up to 20 years for engaging in anal intercourse in Tasmania. Are members of the government or those who do not embrace this suggestion going to say to me that it was not appropriate for the

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