CONSTITUTION (RECOGNITION OF ABORIGINAL PEOPLES) AMENDMENT BILL

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 20 February 2013.)

Mrs GERAGHTY (Torrens) (12:46): We have had considerable debate on this and, certainly from my colleagues on this side, it has been most interesting. This bill is a long overdue—

Mr Gardner: That's a bit unfair—from both sides.

Mrs GERAGHTY: —both sides, sorry; yes, I am sure that is true on most occasions—but is a historic milestone in the history of South Australia since colonisation. It enhances the moral standing of this parliament and of South Australian society in general. As I said, we have heard a number of speeches about the rightness of formally recognising the first peoples of South Australia in the state's constitution. We have heard some of the oral histories given to the advisory committee that remind us of the long history of poor treatment meted out to Aboriginal people by successive governments from colonisation to recent times. We are now all aware of those past practices for which the former prime minister apologised in 2008 and which gave rise to the South Australian parliament's apology to the stolen generation in 1997.

Indeed, there are a few of us in this chamber old enough to have witnessed the implementation of policies such as the removal of children and the exploitation of Aboriginal workers. This historical understanding of why we need to recognise Aboriginal people in the constitution must always be with us if we are to achieve real reconciliation. I say this because at times there have been attempts to brush this history aside.

For example, in the mid-1980s some commentators began to criticise a tendency amongst some Australian historians to interpret our past in negative or rueful terms. Historian Geoffrey Blainey called it 'black armband history'. The term took flight and was widely used to refer to histories that examined the relationship between Aboriginal and European Australians. Because detailed investigation of the Indigenous experience has, in the main, revealed an Aboriginal struggle for survival against seizure of lands, oppressive government policies, racial discrimination and destruction of culture, an ugly side of Australia's past was exposed.

Implicit and often explicit in this analysis was moral censure of non-Indigenous Australians. This type of self-reflection and moral judgement was viewed by some as unpalatable and unnecessary. However, as professor of politics Robert Manne pointed out, Australian history need not always be specifically about Aborigines but should always be written with an awareness of the tragic destruction of Aboriginal society and its long aftermath. It is the long aftermath that leads us to the bill that we will, hopefully, finalise today.

In the past couple of decades the royal commission into the Stolen Generation, the formal apologies and the poignant voices of the Aboriginal community and its leaders have moved many non-Aboriginal Australians to a new level of understanding of the history and support for such actions as constitutional recognition. Happily, we approach this bill and the recent commonwealth recognition bill in a bipartisan manner, and I commend the bill to the house. I certainly look forward to our dealing with it this afternoon, through its final stages.

Debate adjourned on motion of Mr Gardner.

[Sitting suspended from 12:51 to 14:00]