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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
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CONSTITUTION (RECOGNITION OF ABORIGINAL PEOPLES) AMENDMENT BILL

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading (resumed on motion).

Mr SIBBONS (Mitchell) (17:17): I rise briefly to indicate my support for this bill. I too briefly joined the Aboriginal Lands Parliamentary Standing Committee for a period of approximately four months. During that time, though it was brief, I certainly did learn a lot more about Aboriginal people, their concerns and the issues that they face. However, today this parliament comes together for the benefit of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people of this state to jointly advance the cause of reconciliation.

There are of course very special reasons for us to come together today. It was made quite clear in the founding documents of the province of South Australia that the new inhabitants had a responsibility to safeguard the interests of our Aboriginal brothers and sisters. History is clear that many great wrongs have occurred since then. This is a statement of historical fact and one that I am pleased has been captured in the wording of the bill, under new section 2(1)(b). It states:

the making of the above instruments and subsequent constitutional instruments providing for the governance of South Australia and for the making of laws for peace, order and good government occurred without proper and effective recognition, consultation or authorisation of Aboriginal peoples of South Australia.

Also, new subsection (2)(c):

acknowledges that the Aboriginal peoples have endured past injustice and dispossession of their traditional lands and waters.

Indeed, we must acknowledge the heartache that arises from past practices and the sadness that still lingers today.

Just last week we celebrated five years since the national apology was given by the federal government. This is a welcome anniversary. Another important milestone occurred over 15 years ago, when this very parliament confronted our past and acknowledged the shameful events in our state's history. On 28 May 1997, the then minister for Aboriginal Affairs, the Hon. Dean Brown, issued a parliamentary apology on behalf of the people of South Australia.

I believe many benefits will come from the passing of this bill and that history will remember us well for having the courage to acknowledge past wrongs and to reserve in our state's founding document a special place for the oldest living peoples and culture on this planet—a culture which occupied these lands many years before the first free settlers arrived to the province of South Australia; a culture which, not unlike the Australia we know today, includes a mix of people from different sovereign nations who spoke different languages and practised different cultural beliefs and traditions; and a culture which was, and is still today, united by a common thread in the importance of living harmoniously with the land or the sea and with their own people.

I am hopeful that the actions of this parliament in passing a statement of recognition will later be used as an ideal reference point for future information, education and discussion, a further tool to assist and advance reconciliation. Public education and a renewed focus on reconciliation at the local level will also help to move the debate forward, and I am honoured that this place is doing its part.

Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart) (17:21): I rise on behalf of the people of Stuart to very warmly and strongly support this bill, and I do so on behalf of all of the people from Stuart—Aboriginal, non-Aboriginal and any other description they may like to give to themselves. I do my very best to represent everybody as well as I possibly can in here and in the electorate.

Certainly, I support this constitutional recognition; I think it is exceptionally important. As a first-term member of parliament who was elected nearly three years ago, you look forward to participating in some key milestones for your state, and you look forward to participating in some things which are of benefit to the state and which do not involve the two parties trying to bash each other up over issues. It is a pleasure to participate in one of those debates here today.

I would also like to especially thank Ms Khatija Thomas, who was the first person to actually come and see me and sit down and talk about this issue face to face—not that it was something I had never thought about before, because I certainly had; not that it was something I had not considered and bent my mind to a bit, but she was the first person to actually say, 'This is what exists now, this is the sort of work we are trying to do, and these are the things I would like you to consider as a representative for the people of Stuart.' So, I thank her very genuinely for being the first person; there have been others subsequently, but she was the first.

The words are important, but the words are not everything. A lot of time and effort have gone into selecting these words, and I am going to talk a little about the words, and about my views on some of them, and then move on to some of the broader issues. I am looking at the real heart of this constitutional recognition bill, and I will start with 'acknowledges and respects Aboriginal peoples as the state's first peoples and nations'.

This is clearly undisputable, and I think that anybody—Aboriginal, non-Aboriginal—who disputes that or who has any fear of saying that should hang their head in shame because it is a fact, it is true and we should all be very pleased to recognise the fact that Aboriginal people have lived in South Australia for tens of thousands of years. It is a fact, and we should all be proud of that. Non-Aboriginal people came much later: we are a tiny sliver of the whole history of this state. I think that is very important. The next bit:

...recognises Aboriginal peoples as the traditional owners and occupants of land and waters in South Australia.

Again, very true. It is important to recognise that there were disputes between Aboriginal people, as there have been disputes between all people all over the globe for as long as they have existed, but Aboriginal people are the traditional first owners, occupiers, managers, or however you would like to describe it, and I think that is equally important to recognise. The next bit:

...their spiritual, social, cultural and economic practices come from their traditional lands and waters.

Again, very true, and I would just like to spend a little bit of time on this. This is one of the reasons why this is so, so important, because if we all try and imagine 1,000, 2,000 or 10,000 years ago living here, it would be the land and the water that would control absolutely everything that we did. We would interact, we would be just as smart—our brains and our IQ would have exactly the same capacity. Our bodies would be able to do whatever our bodies were able to do.

But thousands of years ago it was the land, the water, the weather and all those other things that actually controlled and led how we struggled, how we achieved, how we had good years and bad years, how we got on, how we did not get on, what we fought for, and what we agreed upon, as well.

That is a very important issue to remember, and I say that because the vast majority of South Australians these days are living in heating in winter, air conditioning in summer and driving cars around the place. This is really fundamental, and I think this is often overlooked: the land and the water were critical to how people lived in South Australia for thousands of years before Europeans ever arrived here.

The next two bits I would just like to put together:

...they maintain their cultural and heritage beliefs, languages and laws which are of ongoing important; and they have made and continue to make a unique and irreplaceable contribution to the state.

I would like to pick up on something that the member for Giles said, which I agree with wholeheartedly: who are 'they'? Who are 'they'? It is not right to say 'they are Aboriginal, and they are non-Aboriginal, and they are more recent migrants'. It perpetuates the whole us and them thing, and I would like to say that my opinion is that, today, there are Aboriginal people who do and do not act in that way, and there are non-Aboriginal people who do and do not act in that way.

That is not a criticism of anybody. We all know Aboriginal people who are living a thoroughly modern life. We all know Aboriginal people who are still exceptionally connected, and through their family values, their stories and their meaning, their cultural pursuits and their recreational activities are very strongly connected to their past and doing everything they can to hold those traditions dear, but they are not the same.

It is very true of non-Aboriginal people, too. There are people, again, living in the modern world: all the technology, air conditioning, heaters, cars, iPads, phones and not particularly connected to the land or the water, and there are non-Aboriginal people who I am not suggesting have the right to pursue cultural activities and things like that but who are far more connected to the land and the water and the weather than lots of other people.

I think for me that is a really important thing to point out, that today, again picking up on what the member for Giles said, it is very hard to say who 'they' are. It does come back to your spirit, it does come back to your internal beliefs, your internal interpretation of things, and it does come back to your life, how you choose to live and what your family values are. I think we would all know people who might have a small amount of Aboriginal blood who are exceptionally connected in that way, and we would all know some people with a lot of Aboriginal blood who are not.

These days, it is not necessarily your race that is the determinant of whether you are one of them or one of them or one of them or whether you are spiritually connected. Just moving on, then, the next bit:

...acknowledges that Aboriginal peoples have endured past injustice and dispossession of their traditional lands and waters.

Fantastic. Why on earth would anybody fear stating and putting in our constitution what is absolutely true? It is an absolutely undeniable fact that Aboriginal people were treated very badly.

I think that is a very good thing to recognise, to put on paper and not to hide away from. So, I support that, as well. Really, the contribution that I want to make in sentiment and in terms of my personal beliefs and what I would like to express on behalf of the people of Stuart is that, if we continue to have Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, or them and them and them and others, problems will not improve. Problems will not go away.

We live in 2013. People have a right to live their life however they want to. There should not be an expectation that if a person has Aboriginal blood they are automatically connected to the past or their culture. What is a fact is they have a right to be and have an opportunity to be and very often they are, but it is not automatic that that is the case. There are plenty of people who have decided to take a different path in their life.

It is also not the case that non-Aboriginal people are different again and cannot ever have a compassion, a persuasion, an interest and a genuine desire to learn and participate. Non-Aboriginal people can never participate and can never understand to the same extent that Aboriginal people can, but I think it is really important, as we move forward, to recognise the history, recognise the past and pay credit to people who found a way to live in this part of the world for tens of thousands of years that was absolutely perfect.

If you think particularly about Central Desert people, it would not have been possible to live in the Central Desert any other way. Without certain traditions, without certain customs—some of them exceptionally hard and some of them exceptionally fierce really, in terms of penalties for stepping out of line and not following laws—if you did not have a system that worked that way, everybody was going to suffer. It would not have been possible to survive without those laws, customs and traditions. So, that is a very important thing to recognise.

Moving forward, particularly as we go on decades and decades into the future, what we are doing here today is not about something that is just right for today: it is about trying to put words in place that are right for the future. Down the track, I do not know when it will be but it will be hard to say this is an Aboriginal person with full Aboriginal blood and this is a non-Aboriginal person with no Aboriginal blood.

The world moves on and people interact. If things are going well, if we genuinely do have integration and we genuinely do have tolerance, acceptance, reconciliation and all of those sorts of things, down the track it will not be so clear cut as to exactly what group you fit into. I think that is an important thing to recognise.

For me, we should recognise what has happened in the past, pay tribute to the success of Aboriginal people in the past and also recognise that the only way for any of us to move forward is to try to get away from the 'us and them', to get away from the Aboriginal and the non-Aboriginal and having people put in different groups. We actually have to get to a world where we get to male and female, children and adults, healthy and unhealthy—those need to be the descriptions that we have of people, not their race.

Ms THOMPSON (Reynell) (17:32): I had not intended to contribute on this bill, but I have been so moved by the many speakers that I feel it is important to recognise the historical nature of this bill and to comment on it. I would like to particularly commend the member for Giles, not only for her speech today and her basic good sense and good heart but also for the fact that she introduced into this parliament the recognition of the traditional owners of this land in morning prayers every week. It is only once a week, but it is an awful lot more than was there.

This bill, as has been mentioned, has been laboured over, consulted about, carefully deliberated on and we finally have some words. The words that particularly stand out to me are in clause 3(2)(c):

acknowledges that the Aboriginal peoples have endured past injustice and dispossession of their traditional lands and waters.

I had personal experience of how much that recognition means to Aboriginal people when I was presenting an Aboriginal flag to Coorara Primary School students. It was fairly early in the year. I was addressing an assembly that contained children who had only just come into the school and could scarcely sit still on their sitting bones for more than two minutes at a time and year 7s who thought they were pretty sophisticated, being at the top of the school now.

I realised I had to find something to engage all those children because it had been a fairly long assembly, so I talked about why we had an Aboriginal flag and about how, when white settlers came here, they really did not understand what was happening on this land, that they used their values, which were primarily male values, patriarchal values, to make judgements and assessments about the peoples they found. The new settlers believed they had superior technology and knowledge and therefore treated the Aboriginal people as savages who did not understand what was going on. Indeed, there was a law that said that this land was empty.

The children seemed to understand what I talked about. I went on to talk about the diseases we brought, the disruption and devastation that caused their communities, and about how we then carelessly moved one group of Aboriginal people to the traditional lands of the others, particularly for things like the Maralinga tests. We were not mean, we were just stupid; we did not really understand what we were doing. It was words to this effect that I spoke to the children of Coorara Primary School.

Afterwards, the Aboriginal education worker came up to me in tears and said that it was the first time she had heard anybody of any official position acknowledge that story. I thought that was appalling. There was I just popping in to deliver a flag and yet it meant so much to that woman and, apparently, to her students as well. My understanding of the lack of recognition was furthered by my brother, Gavin Malone, an artist who works extensively with Kaurna people, particularly with Karl Telfer. Gavin has recently been awarded his PhD, and his thesis, in the field of cultural geography, is:

...the exclusion and inclusion of Aboriginal peoples and cultures in the symbolic value of the public space in Adelaide through monuments, memorials, public art and other commemorations.

He has presented his research paper in several important places, but he also had an exhibition at Tandanya to which I, as a sister, dutifully went, and I was shocked to learn how recent is any representation of Aboriginal peoples in our public space. My recollection is that the first representation of Aboriginal work was not done by an Aboriginal artist but was led by a white artist. I think there were some Aboriginal people involved, but the lead artist was a white artist, Carol Ruff, who is the daughter of Jan Ruff O'Herne, a very eminent South Australian. This was the mural on the back of the Festival Theatre. It is no longer there, but I think many of you might remember it.

The second representation, according to my memory, was a statue on the corner of Gulfview and Galloway roads in Christies Beach, which is about to come into the electorate of Reynell, and I am very proud that that monument is about to come into the electorate of Reynell. This was donated by the German developer of the Housing Trust area in Christie Downs and Christies Beach in thanks to the people of South Australia and in recognition of the traditional owners of the land. So, it was a German person who actually recognised that it was about time we displayed some recognition of the original occupants and caretakers of this land.

The next major representation was the Dowie sculptures in Victoria Square. I think we all see that fountain as something very special in the heart of Adelaide. So, we have moved from the fact that in the early 1960s we had no representation of Aboriginal people in our public space, to the fact that today probably most people here have an Aboriginal artwork in their home.

We have representations of the Aboriginal community as part of our every day life. We have it in smoking ceremonies, we have it in recognition of the elders, we have it in the name of the electorate of Kaurna and we have it in the name of the electorate of Hammond, in recognition of Ruby Hammond a very eminent South Australian who died far too young and we did not benefit from the wisdom that she had in walking with two cultures and in bringing much greater understanding of the issues faced by Aboriginal people in our community.

I am very pleased that we are acknowledging in the constitution the fact that Aboriginal people have been here, that we did them harm, but that we do not want to continue that and that we need to walk forward together. It does not quite go in those words, but I know that is the sentiment held by people here.

Mrs REDMOND (Heysen) (17:41): It is a pleasure to be participating in this debate, given that it is one where we have bipartisan support for the bill recognising Aboriginal people in the constitution of this state. In passing, I comment on the comments made by the member for Stuart. Not only do I want to endorse a lot of what he has said, but I have been to the electorate of Stuart several times and on each occasion I have noted how the member for Stuart goes out of his way to ensure that he meets with people from all of the communities in his electorate, and in particular makes his way to all of the Aboriginal settlements so that he can sit down with the people in the Indigenous communities and make sure that he is listening to their concerns and not simply representing the non-Indigenous sector of the community of the electorate of Stuart, which of course is about one-quarter of the size of the state.

As has been mentioned, this bill was introduced on 29 November of last year, which was the very day after the federal Gillard government introduced the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Recognition Bill in the federal parliament. I note that has also received bipartisan support. It was important, I think, for us to have this recognition. This state has been mentioned as somewhat different and, in many cases, somewhat ahead of other states in giving appropriate recognition to Indigenous people and in overcoming the dreadful lie that was held for so long that Australia had been terra nullius when the first white settlers arrived and proclaimed that this was now going to be a British settlement.

Indeed, in this state not only did we have, 11 years before the apology given by then prime minister Kevin Rudd, an apology given by the Hon. Dean Brown in this house, being the very first apology made in any parliament in Australia, but if we go even further back in history, it gives me great pride when I bring people on tours of the parliament, as I do regularly, to let them know that in this state we actually gave Aboriginals the right to vote way back in 1894 when we gave women the right to vote. In this chamber, of course, we celebrate the fact that more than 100 years ago we gave women the right to vote. We were not quite the first place in the world to give women the right to vote, but we were the very first place in the world to give women the right to stand for parliament and we have made some inroads in that regard since.

We also gave Aboriginal people the right to vote in this state. Sadly, when the founding fathers of Australia got together, through the late 1880s and 1890s, and negotiated the terms upon which we would federate in 1901, women managed to retain the right to vote but our Indigenous people lost it. To me, that was a fundamental flaw in what happened when we did form our constitution and federate in 1901, because it took until after the referendum in 1967 for that right, that very basic human right, to be restored. I think in many ways we should hang our head in shame that it took so many long years, when in fact in this state we had given them the right to vote for those few short years from 1894 to 1901.

In addition to that, of course, for a long time we did not recognise that there were various tribes of Aborigines, that they actually did have the notion of landholding and indeed recognition of some of the seas. People in this house would be familiar with the fact that I acted for a number of years for an Aboriginal tribe in a native title claim. Indeed, the group I represented, the Mirning, had a claim across the Nullarbor Plain and referred very much to the Norman Tindale map from about 1905 that showed various locations of the tribes around Australia.

As part of my acting in that particular matter, I had the privilege one night of sitting down to dinner in the Dog Rock Cafe restaurant in Albany in Western Australia and sitting with the person who had represented Eddie Mabo in the Mabo claim. He talked about the fact that they had had quite a lot of evidence about the ownership of particular parts of the sea where Eddie Mabo lived, because they actually had fishing rights in particular areas, but in fact they decided to let that go for some time so that they could get the outcome that they really wanted, which was of course the famous Mabo case and the fundamental shift in the official recognition of Aboriginal people in this country.

From there, of course, we have then had native title legislation and subsequently the apologies and the current moves for recognition within the constitution. In this state for the longest time most of our pastoral leases actually gave Indigenous people the right to go onto the land of the pastoral leaseholders, and our negotiations in the native title sphere were largely directed towards trying to come to an appropriate modern-day arrangement of that existing right.

This is just another step, and in many ways I think we have to be careful not to just rest in this area of what could be seen as tokenism. It is a hard thing to find the right balance between tokenism and actually trying to make right. Other speakers have already spoken about the fact that we still have a huge gap to close in every area: in education, in health, in all aspects of the lives of Indigenous people. Their longevity is so far behind ours that we should hang our heads in shame that we have not managed to address it as yet, notwithstanding, I believe, a lot of goodwill on the part of a lot of people in our community.

That said, we do need to do the other things. We do need, verbally and in our written approach through the constitution and through other documents, to make it clear that we do recognise, we do acknowledge and we do apologise for the vast wrong that has been done in assuming that this was terra nullius all those years ago. I acknowledge the work done by the advisory panel. Their names have already been mentioned, of course: Professor Peter Buckskin, Shirley Peisley, Khatija Thomas and two people known to me through my time in the law: the Hon Robyn Layton and the Hon. John von Doussa. That advisory panel did quite an exceptional job.

I will say that the government, I think, failed us as an opposition. They have done much talking about the fact that this is bipartisan, and certainly they have the opposition's support, but we were deliberately excluded from a lot of the discussion that went on about this matter. Indeed, I think that some members of the panel, if not all, were quite concerned when they discovered that we had been quite deliberately excluded from invitations to participate at various times and only in fact got to participate because we forced the issue, instead of having being included in the invitation in the first place.

That was not the fault of the advisory panel in any way. They rightly assumed that it would be done; it was just wrong to assume that this government would do the right thing. In fact, Robyn Layton was the very first person I engaged, when she was still a QC before she went onto the Supreme Court bench. She was the very first person to be my counsel in the Supreme Court in relation to the initial matter that I had in acting for them all those years ago.

I do want to place on the record a concern, not about the value of the work that the panel did, because I think they did an excellent job in going out to as many communities as they could. However, I think that we still have a long way to go before the community at large is even aware of this issue and accepts the need for it. I believe that most of the people who turned up to the various consultations around the state were probably the 'preaching to the converted' group; the people who were already alive to the issue and wanting to move it along.

However, I think that if you went out into the streets of Adelaide today or, indeed, most communities right around the state, you would find that most people in our community are singularly unaware; they are unaware of the state constitution for a start, but they are then further unaware of this particular amendment proposed for our constitution and they are certainly unaware of why it would be needed. I expect that they have a great fear about the legal implications of it, notwithstanding that it is very clear that it is not intended to give rise to new legal rights or to diminish any existing legal rights.

I think that in spite of the valuable work done by the advisory panel there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to inform the community more widely. I think that there is not a lot of point in having words written into the constitution unless people actually understand why they have been put there and what they are intended to do.

I think a large majority of people in the community recognise now, as the member for Stuart said, that it is simply a statement of fact that this land was occupied and, in the terms of the actual bill, that we should recognise the Aboriginal people as traditional owners and occupants of the land and waters South Australia—and then going on to talk about their spiritual, social, cultural and economic practices which come from their traditional lands and waters.

I think that it is absolutely essential and important that we move down this path, but I do not want us to do two things. The first is that I do not want us to lose sight of the fact that this really, in practical terms, does nothing to close the gap. It is an important step for us to give that verbal and written recognition of the things stated in this amendment, but it does nothing to narrow the gap.

I went to the APY lands in the middle of last year and discovered that 75 per cent of the children as they start school have some level of hearing impairment and that one in three of that 75 per cent actually need hearing aids. So, we have a long way to go and we must not take our eyes off the ball just because we are putting this through. The second thing is that, in my view, we need to make sure that the broader community is made more aware than I think it currently is of what this bill is about, why we are doing it and what is hoped to be achieved by it.

Mr GARDNER (Morialta) (17:53): I will take the opportunity to commence my remarks this afternoon, although I understand we may need to adjourn in a couple of minutes. I rise as the member for Morialta to wholeheartedly support this bill, which I am very passionately in favour of and have been for as long as I can remember. I feel humble to take part in the debate, I must say, thanks to the extraordinary contributions of those who have come before in this chamber. I particularly make note of the strong words of the member for Giles and the member for Heysen. The words of the Leader of the Opposition and the Premier were also very good and very appropriate.

My interest in supporting Aboriginal recognition in the constitution came early in life. In fact, my very existence here would have been impossible without the contribution the Aboriginal people of Australia have made to my family in getting my mother to decide to come to Australia. In 1969, she took what I suppose you would nowadays call a gap year from her nursing career, which was just starting in England, when she went to the Northern Territory to work as a nurse with the Pitjantjatjara people at the Areyonga community, 200 kilometres west of Alice Springs.

She had a very profound experience in that role. It was a small community of some 250 people, and I believe that it is still a similar size today. My mother, Veronica Gardner, was welcomed into that community. She was taken for walks for bush tucker and she was taught stories of the dreaming. Afterwards, she continued with her intention to travel to Australia to work in Melbourne for a little while.

Then, when she was due to go back to the United Kingdom, she felt that that was not what she wanted to do, so she returned to the Northern Territory. In 1972 and 1973, she worked at Warrabri (now known as Ali Curung), which is 170 kilometres south of Tennant Creek, where she worked with the Warlpiri and the Warramunga people, who involved her in women's corroborees. They called her a Nabarnardi and told her that she needed to marry a Jambajimba.

Obviously, my mother did not marry a Jambajimba: she married a Gardner instead, but she brought me up with stories of the Dreaming and with professions of a very great passion for the status of the Aboriginal people within Australia's foundation documents, such as our constitution. It was one of the issues that she instilled in me from an early age to have an interest in politics, as well as the practical measures that need to be taken to close the gap.

So, I place on the record my mother's own commitment in this area, private as it may have been, which also led to my own previous commitments in the public space in this area as a Young Liberal agitating during what I would consider in many ways the absolutely sterling contribution of John Howard, who was one of the nation's finest prime ministers.

I found it very frustrating and disappointing that he resisted calls to undertake an apology in the Australian parliament, as Dean Brown, as the minister for Aboriginal affairs, did in 1997. I was very proud when Brendan Nelson, as leader of the Liberal Party, joined with Kevin Rudd in 2008 to undertake that apology. I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

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