National Reconciliation Week

The Hon. J.E. HANSON (15:40): Yesterday marked the end of National Reconciliation Week 2025. I used to look forward to it, and I guess I still do, but lately even just the word 'reconciliation' has brought up a lot of feelings for many people. The last couple of years have been very difficult for many Aboriginal South Australians and indeed First Nations people right across the nation. It has also been a difficult time, I think, for many non-Aboriginal Australians who care deeply about the advancement of rights for First Nations people and who care deeply about reconciliation.

Speaking for myself, the referendum result was a pretty bitter pill to swallow because those of us who were on the yes side were asking for something that I think is pretty heartbreakingly simple: let First Nations voices be heard; that is all, just let them be heard.

When Australia said no, it felt like a pretty deep rejection. It felt like an erasure, if you like, of tens of thousands of years of human history that had unfolded before any European boots were on this soil. It felt like a repudiation of the value of the world's oldest living culture and the value they bring to this nation. It felt like a very heavy door closed on those of us who hold aspirations of making meaningful progress towards reconciliation that can bring, I hope, real change. It was a pretty hard moment and, like many, I suspect I am probably not over it. My yes corflute is still very much in my kitchen window, facing outwards to the busy thoroughfare next to my home. I do not think I am ready to take it down.

It is no wonder then that I felt such trepidation and, I guess, a few times pretty genuine dread during the federal election campaign. If I was feeling that way, as a non-Aboriginal person, I cannot imagine the excruciating tenterhooks that many of our First Nations people had been on for months and maybe years surrounding the election and the referendum vote.

But after voting no in the referendum, Australians had another big chance to vote and to leap backwards on reconciliation: the federal election. They had a chance to vote for a Coalition led by the man who walked out on the apology to the stolen generations, the man who would decline to engage in the simplest possible gesture of respect that I can think of and that is standing in front of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags. He was basically the godfather of not giving a stuff, and there was a repudiation, alright, a pretty massive one, but it was probably not the repudiation that the Liberal Party suspected or perhaps hoped for.

If Australians had a strong appetite for disrespecting and denigrating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, Peter Dutton, with the enthusiastic support of people like Senators Liddle and Price, gave them a golden opportunity and the nation, in pretty truly remarkable unison, made a wise, I think, collective decision in choosing to give that opportunity a huge miss.

I choose to believe that Australia did not vote against moving forward. Instead, I choose to believe that, amid a truly repugnant campaign from the other side, we simply voted against constitutional change and when the same repugnant attitude was rolled out in the federal election—and it was—this time the constitution was not part of that discussion.

The referendum was a big chance to do good, but it was not our only chance. Reconciliation has come so very far in the last half a century or so. We have done things in this parliament that have, I think, really mattered, and our next step is to just keep doing them.

I am so proud that I was here in this place to listen to Mr Bilney deliver the first annual address of South Australia's First Nations Voice to Parliament. We have so much left to do. As we mark another National Reconciliation Week and another anniversary of the Mabo decision, all we can do really is to keep taking steps forward, one foot after the other. We are very fortunate to have incredible leadership from Aboriginal people in this state, inviting us to walk with them together on that positive and hopeful journey and showing us the way to do it.