Page 456 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 8 March 2011
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The Prime Minister of Australia has announced that she is prepared to sponsor an amendment to the national constitution to similarly recognise Indigenous Australians in our national constitution. I believe that the parliament of South Australia has done the same—and Tasmania. We alone of the Australian jurisdictions cannot do that—we alone. This parliament cannot decide on behalf of the people of the ACT that we will similarly recognise prior custodianship of the ACT by the traditional owners of these lands.
That really is not acceptable. It is good enough for every other state and territory; it is good enough for every other parliament. It is good enough for the Northern Territory, but not, it seems, for the ACT, at least in terms of a priority that has been expressed by successive national governments now in relation to requests that this place has made for our self-government act to be reviewed.
There is another issue that I believe is becoming increasingly urgent, and that is the issue around the size of this parliament. There is a range of views, as they say, within this place about what an ideal, appropriate or optimum size the Legislative Assembly should be. We can argue that here, but any argument that we have in this place in relation to that would at one level be fruitless, because there is not a power or a capacity which we have unilaterally to deal with it.
It is an urgent issue. Despite the urgency of the issue, and I believe it is becoming increasingly urgent, the point of principle is that of all the parliaments in Australia, including the other two territories, including the parliaments of the Northern Territory and Norfolk Island, we are the only parliament in Australia that cannot decide basic machinery issues around our own size, configuration, structure and nature—the only one. That is simply not acceptable. That is simply not acceptable as a principle.
Similarly, there are other issues that are deserving of thorough review. We are constrained and it is inappropriate. It is a pity, and it is wrong, frustrating and demeaning that the national debate, and much of the national commentary in relation to Bob Brown’s quite simple amendment, has been enmeshed in an argument around the rights and wrongs, the morality, the ethics or otherwise of euthanasia and gay marriage.
It is a simple amendment, a simple amendment that goes to a principle—that goes to the most fundamental principle of all, which is democracy. The amendment is about democratic rights—the most fundamental principle, the principle essentially on which most wars have been fought or justified. I find it remarkable in a way that it was the very argument used to justify the invasion of Iraq. We invaded Iraq as part of the coalition of the willing in order to assure the democratic rights of the people of Iraq.
Irrespective of one’s views about that, it brings into focus the essential nature of this debate, when one has regard to the extreme levels that peoples and nations go to in the name of democracy. We are having a debate here, in the heart of Australia, in the national capital of Australia—the great bastion of democracy, the great defender of democracy, the nation that has never shied away from its commitment to democracy—arguing about the democratic rights of the people of the national capital of Australia, having their simple, basic democratic rights respected and acknowledged.
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