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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 8 Hansard (30 August) . . Page.. 2611 ..

MR SPEAKER: Do you wish to move that amendment, Ms Tucker? If so, do so now.

MS TUCKER: Sorry, yes. I move:

MR HUMPHRIES (Treasurer, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and Community Safety) (11.05): I rise to indicate support for the thrust of what Mr Stanhope has put into his motion concerning reconciliation and the erection of road signs. There is no doubt that the problem of an unreconciled community is exacerbated when the indicators of prior occupation in this region are not there for the community to see. When people come to this place, particularly Europeans and non-indigenous people, they see street names, place names, the names of suburbs and the landmarks of the city, and in many cases they see European names. It is very easy for them to assume that the place was somehow barren and bare and devoid of human occupation beforehand, and to overlook the fact that there was prior occupation by Aboriginal people.

There is no doubt that, despite the dumping of the concept of terra nullius by the High Court of Australia some years ago, many Australians do think of places where they live, particularly urbanised parts of this country, as places that were just vacant land that was moved into and occupied by white settlers when white settlement occurred. It does behove us to remind all in the community that there has been a transition in the use of the land and that earlier occupants of the land left a mark for us to see today, if only in the sense of the names that these people used to describe particular landmarks. Mr Speaker, for that reason I think there should be an appropriate program to erect signage that will see acknowledgment of the earlier occupants of the land.

However, I commend Mr Smyth's amendment about discussion with the local indigenous people. I do not particularly object, I might say, to Ms Tucker's amendment. If she feels that consultation is necessary rather than agreement, I am not going to die in a ditch about it. But I will say this: it has been the government's intention for some time to base any program of this kind on full discussion with local indigenous groups. We have tried our best in the years that we have been in office not to allow the obvious differences between different indigenous groups in the ACT to become an opportunity to divide and conquer. Despite the fact that there are those differences which prevent Aboriginal people in this region speaking with one voice to the government and to other organisations, it is not our intention to allow that to become an opportunity to impose solutions to particular problems that may leave some members of those communities out of the process.

It would have been very easy in the case of a number of issues in the last few years to have taken the view of one or another indigenous group and have acted on that; to have crunched numbers or used a superior power of government to set aside the views of a different group. We have tried to avoid that, Mr Speaker, as much as we possibly can. I would say to the Assembly we should similarly, in this situation, very carefully consider the impact of erecting signage which does not reflect the consensus of the Aboriginal occupants of this area, the people who have ancestral ownership of this area.

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