National Apology Anniversary Breakfast

The Hon. T.T. NGO (15:22): My question is to the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation. Can the minister tell the council about tomorrow's National Apology Anniversary Breakfast? I know many members here on the Aboriginal Lands Parliamentary Standing Committee will also be attending, so could he tell the chamber about the breakfast tomorrow.

The Hon. K.J. MAHER (Minister for Employment, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation, Minister for Manufacturing and Innovation, Minister for Automotive Transformation, Minister for Science and Information Economy) (15:23): I thank the honourable member and the Chair of the Aboriginal Lands Parliamentary Standing Committee for his important question and his strong interest in this matter.

As the member outlined, tomorrow I and, I suspect, many members of this chamber and the other place will be attending the apology breakfast. I will be very proud to attend it for the second time in my capacity as the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation in South Australia. Tomorrow morning at the breakfast, Archie Roach is the key speaker. Many people who are attending and, I am sure, many members in this place will be excited to hear Archie both speak and perform.

Each year we stop and mark the anniversary of the apology to Australia's stolen generation. It is important to the Aboriginal community, to our whole community and to me personally that we gather each year to mark this important anniversary. It is important for a lot of reasons. One reason in particular that I want to highlight today, and for me perhaps the most striking reason that it is important is that, no matter how far we believe we have come as a nation or as a community, in 2016 there are still people, even prominent people in the media and the community, who deny the historic reality of what happened.

They deny that successive governments of this nation forcibly removed children from their families and communities and placed them in institutions that led to lives of deprivation and hardship. It is denied by many that thousands of children were denied the right to grow up in an environment of love and belonging and to have their legacies of history and culture recognised and understood.

There is no denying the truth, and that is why we are committed to the Stolen Generations Reparation Scheme that was announced last year. It is an acknowledgement that a person's place in this world is fundamental to who they are and how they see themselves. As I said in the chamber last year, for members of the oldest living culture on the planet it is possible to place yourself in a context that stretches back for many thousands of years, but there are many, many Aboriginal Australians who know little of where they come from because governments denied them the opportunity to know.

Forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families, which occurred for many decades of our history in every state and territory, broke apart thousands of important legacies of history and culture. We acknowledge that. We have apologised as a state parliament and, eight years ago, the federal parliament apologised. That is fundamentally important, but so are the next steps of what saying sorry means.

That is why this year we will commence a scheme that will allow for members of South Australia's stolen generations to make an application for an ex gratia payment of up to $50,000. The second part of the scheme extends to the broad Aboriginal community. It is a $5 million whole-of-community reparation fund that will involve extensive consultation with Aboriginal people, with a particular focus on ways we can recognise, for all the community, the significant wrongs of the past. The scheme will get underway at the end of next month, and I am sure that members in this place will help us promote the scheme and make our people aware of it. It has been a long time coming.

At tomorrow's Apology Breakfast there will be more than 1,600 South Australians attending, remembering the national apology eight years ago and reflecting on those wrongs of the past with Archie Roach. The theme for tomorrow's breakfast is 'Heal our past, build our future, celebrating our heroes', and I think it is fitting that Archie Roach is a keynote speaker for this event.

Archie was taken from his family at an early age and has devoted his life, as a musician and an activist, to sharing his own experiences and those of other Aboriginal Australians. I am sure it will be very moving when he performs and speaks tomorrow, particularly if he plays his song Took the Children Away which, in the very early nineties, really focused public attention on the experience of members of the stolen generations. With the theme being 'Heal our past, build our future, celebrating our heroes', I think for many people Archie Roach is certainly one of those heroes.

Tomorrow we will remember and share our shared hope and vision for the state and our nation as a whole, for a future in which all Australians feel they are better understood by one another and in which all Australians belong in this community.