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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
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Bills

Aboriginal Representative Body Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 13 October 2021.)

Mr BROWN: Mr Speaker, I draw your attention to the state of the house.

The SPEAKER: Attention has been drawn to the state of the house. A quorum may not have been present at the time the matter was called but, in any event, it is now present.

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: I have been generous to the government in similar circumstances, so I intend to continue to be generous.

Dr CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (12:09): I rise to speak about the Aboriginal Representative Body Bill and indicate that there are very grave concerns about the nature and the process of this bill that I will be canvassing shortly.

Before I do that, though, I would like to acknowledge Professor Roger Thomas, who I have known for a remarkably long time, stretching back before I was a member of parliament, before I was a public servant, back to when I had the great pleasure of working at the University of Adelaide. I was at that time relatively young and working out where I wanted to go in my career and working for the position that succeeded the title, Registrar.

One day my manager said to me, 'You're going to have to go and run Wilto Yerlo for a short while.' Not being an Aboriginal person, obviously, it would be completely inappropriate for me to run that unit for any significant period of time, but Mercy Glastonbury, who had been doing a terrific job running that unit in the university, had come down with an illness and needed to leave quickly, and there needed to be an appropriate process to replace her with an Aboriginal person. So I had the very great fortune for a period of about three months to step in and take over the acting director role.

The person who then won that position was Roger Thomas, so I had the pleasure of getting to know him, both in the transition time and then ongoing in our period together at university, and to form a very great respect for him and also a deep affection for him. He is a good human being. He is now, of course, the Commissioner for Aboriginal Engagement. He is a Kokatha Mirning man, and his families are from the West Coast and northern regions of South Australia.

After he was initially the director of Wilto Yerlo, he became the Professor of Indigenous Engagement, an adjunct professor of education at the University of Adelaide and the Dean of the Centre for Australian Indigenous Research and Studies, which was the formal name of Wilto Yerlo. Dr Thomas was the first Aboriginal person to obtain the level of professor at the University of Adelaide and he was the first to receive an honorary doctorate. He truly has been a trailblazer.

In 2017, he was appointed as Treaty Commissioner to lead treaty negotiations to strengthen the relationship between the government and Aboriginal South Australians. In 2018, he took on the role of Commissioner for Aboriginal Engagement. As commissioner, he provides Aboriginal leadership across South Australia, advocating on behalf of all Aboriginal people and communities. Dr Thomas investigates and advises on barriers to Aboriginal people's access and full participation in government, non-government and private services.

Dr Thomas has held various positions on state, national and international advisory committees working on strategic initiatives and has presented numerous papers at conferences and forums, both nationally and internationally. In helping the government to develop this bill, Dr Thomas has worked under incredibly challenging circumstances. The commissioner was, I understand, blocked at many turns by a government and a Premier that simply do not understand or prioritise Aboriginal affairs.

The Premier did not provide any dedicated resources for the consultation, and the commissioner had to rely on the modest resources of the Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation Division in the Premier's department. Then the bill was only allowed to be open for pubic consultation for nine days. Dr Thomas is owed an apology by the Premier, Steven Marshall. The Commissioner for Aboriginal Engagement said on ABC radio on 17 September 2021:

I've expressed to the Premier, I've expressed to the process. I find it very, very insulting that it doesn't give Aboriginal people sufficient time to talk this through because it's such a significant piece of legislation.

A proper consultation period is simply good policy and good practice, but it is even more important for a bill like this. It is unfortunate, and a clear reminder of why we need to do more as a community, that not a single member of this place is an Aboriginal person. Only one member of either of our chambers is an Aboriginal person and he will have a say only after we consider this bill in this chamber.

We cannot fix the damage of more than 200 years of colonisation overnight, but we all have an obligation to right the wrongs of the past: the dispossession, the massacres, the separation of families, the suppression of language and culture. From 1836 to 1962, when it was abolished under the Aboriginal Affairs Act 1962, South Australia had—and forgive me for the language—a Protector of Aborigines. Similar positions existed all around Australia.

Despite the name, this position was more about control than protection. It effectively had the power to dictate where Aboriginal people lived, including restricting them to reservations with few jobs, little education and poor health services. Penalties applied to people who left reservations without permission. Rules were put in place to control who people married and where they could work, among many other issues. A.O. Neville was an infamous Western Australian Protector of Aborigines, who literally encouraged breeding out Aboriginality. He said:

…the children would be lighter than the mother, and if later they married whites and had children these would be lighter still, and that in the third or fourth generation no sign of native origin whatever would be apparent.

Again, please forgive me for relaying these very unpleasant views.

When Aboriginal people were allowed to work, wages were often well below those paid to non-Aboriginal people or they were not paid in money. Despite working hard and even serving in our armed forces in wars, Aboriginal families could rarely save to buy assets like vehicles or land. Until the 1967 referendum, Aboriginal people were not counted in the federal census and the federal government was not allowed to make laws in respect of Aboriginal people.

This meant Aboriginal people could not access federal government support like social security and some forms of education. By not being included in the census, the federal government was not able to provide funding to the states for Aboriginal people like they could for non-Aboriginal people, which resulted in horrific rates of poverty and deprivation. Until 1965, Aboriginal people were either not allowed to vote or were only allowed to vote in very limited circumstances in some elections.

While the 1960s saw significant legal changes in support of Aboriginal people, they were only small steps in addressing more than a century of active discrimination and suppression. Aboriginal people were quite literally not counted as Australians and did not have access to the same rights as everybody else. Over the past 70 years, despite improvements in some laws, Aboriginal people continue to experience poor outcomes in health, employment and justice, among other areas. An Aboriginal person born in remote South Australia still has a life expectancy of around 30 years less than others in the community.

For these reasons and many others, an Aboriginal voice to parliament is an important step in ensuring that Aboriginal people have a greater say in systems that have excluded and punished them for more than two centuries. For more than a century, calls are being made for greater rights and self-determination for Aboriginal people. For most of that time, these calls have been met with objections from people who were happy to continue the colonial way of doing things.

Sadly, some of these objectives seem to genuinely believe that one group of people should be oppressed and treated as less than equal. Even in modern times, we have seen some of these attitudes continue. Who can forget the TV ads in the 1990s in response to Aboriginal land rights court cases and legislation? The Australian public sat through advertisements that literally said that people's backyards could be stolen if we acknowledged that there was a people and a culture in this land before Europeans arrived. We saw advertisements with walls being built between Aboriginal and other Australians.

When Kevin Rudd made the historic apology to the stolen generations in February 2008, a number of federal Liberal and National Party MPs boycotted the speech. Even in the past year, sadly, MPs' offices have received emails from people who claim that a voice for Aboriginal people should be rejected because it elevates them above other Australians. This is not the view of the Labor Party. Labor has long supported a better deal for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

The then Labor Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Don Dunstan, introduced the first Aboriginal land rights legislation in the nation in 1966 that established the Aboriginal Lands Trust. This was followed in 1981 by the passing of South Australian land rights legislation for the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands. This legislation was built on the work of Labor under Don Dunstan in the 1970s.

On 16 August 1975, Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam famously poured a handful of red soil into the hand of Vincent Lingiari. This symbolised the legal transfer of Wave Hill Station back to the Gurindji people. It also meant that the Gurindji people became the first Aboriginal community to have their land returned to them by the commonwealth government:

Vincent Lingiari, I solemnly hand you these deeds as proof in Australian law that these lands belong to the Gurindji people, and I put into your hands part of the earth itself as a sign that this land will be in the possession of you and your children for ever.

Vincent responded:

Let us live happily together as mates, let us not make it hard for each other…We want to live in a better way together, Aboriginals and white men, let us not fight over anything, let us be mates.

That is extraordinary generosity.

On 10 December 1992, the official opening of the International Year of the World's Indigenous People, Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating delivered the Redfern speech. He outlined the outrages committed against Aboriginal people since colonisation and asked us all to imagine if it were us:

…it might help us if we non-Aboriginal Australians imagined ourselves dispossessed of land we had lived on for 50,000 years—and then imagined ourselves told that it had never been ours.

Imagine if ours was the oldest culture in the world and we were told that it was worthless.

Imagine if we had resisted this settlement, suffered and died in the defence of our land, and then were told in history books that we had given up without a fight.

Imagine if non-Aboriginal Australians had served their country in peace and war and were then ignored in history books.

Imagine if our feats on sporting fields had inspired admiration and patriotism and yet did nothing to diminish prejudice.

Imagine if our spiritual life was denied and ridiculed.

Imagine if we had suffered the injustice and then were blamed for it.

It seems to me that if we can imagine the injustice we can imagine its opposite.

And we can have justice.

Those are very moving words from a superb former Prime Minister.

In 1995, federal Labor Attorney-General Michael Lavarch instigated the Bringing Them Home report. The report was delivered under the Liberals, but some findings were rejected and John Howard refused to say sorry. On 13 February 2008, Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made a formal apology to the stolen generations, whose lives have been blighted by past government policies of forced child removal and Indigenous assimilation. Kevin Rudd said:

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

In 2015, South Australia became the first mainland state to introduce a stolen generations reparations scheme under Labor Aboriginal affairs minister Kyam Maher. In 2017, under Labor in South Australia, the first agreement in a treaty process was signed anywhere in Australia, and in 2019 SA Labor committed to a state-based implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Labor supports greater respect and protection for the oldest living culture on our planet. Labor supports a voice to parliament and a voice to government for Aboriginal people. For too long these voices have been silenced or ignored. The historic referendum in May 1967 was an important step in changing this. It saw Aboriginal people included in the census and allowed the commonwealth to make laws in relation to Aboriginal people. Despite these changes, as the decades wore on improvements in real life outcomes for Aboriginal people were slow to emerge.

Aboriginal people remained the most incarcerated people on earth. Life expectancy, especially for people born in remote communities, remained decades below other Australians. Huge gaps remained in access to health and education. Fifty years after the referendum, in May of 2017, Aboriginal people gathered and developed a new plan for inclusion and reconciliation.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart is short but it is incredibly powerful and was the basis for renewed calls for an Aboriginal voice. With the indulgence of the house, I would like to read the statement so that members can consider how it affects our approach to this bill:

We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart:

Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from ‘time immemorial’, and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.

This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.

How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?

With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.

Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.

These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.

We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take arightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.

We call for the establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution.

Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination.

We seek a Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history.

In 1967 we were counted, in 2017 we seek to be heard. We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country. We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future.

The statement called for three things: voice, truth and treaty.

It was very sad when just two months after the Uluru Statement our then opposition leader and now Premier said that treaty was 'a cruel hoax'. It might reflect the Premier's approach to treaty but it does not reflect the view of the Labor Party.

The Labor Party was disappointed when our now Premier described the treaty as a cruel hoax. The Labor Party was even more disappointed when one of Steven Marshall's first actions as Premier was to cancel the treaty process that had begun under Labor. We were the first jurisdiction in Australia to sign an agreement under a treaty process in 2017. Sadly, we have gone from being a national leader to falling behind. The years lost in this process can never be recovered.

I was so proud in July 2019 when the member for Croydon, the leader of the South Australian Labor Party, committed a future Labor government to a state-based implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The Guardian newspaper reported at the time, and I quote:

The South Australian Labor party has pledged to introduce a state-based version of the Uluru statement, including establishing a representative body to act as a voice to parliament, if it wins the next election.

The proposal has been welcomed by Aboriginal leaders who say they are not prepared to abandon the resolutions of the 2017 First Nations National Constitutional Convention at Uluru despite a lack of support from the federal government.

Opposition leader Peter Malinauskas told Guardian Australia that the policy reaffirmed SA Labor's support for negotiating with Aboriginal nations, a process that began in February 2017 but was halted when the Marshall Liberal government was elected just over a year later.

'Enacting a state-based version of the Uluru Statement from the Heart is an opportunity for Aboriginal South Australians to finally have their aspirations realised,' Malinauskas said.

It is 4½ years after the Uluru Statement and the Premier has presented a bill to this place that proposes to act on just one of its three key elements. While Labor is committed to implementing all three elements of the Uluru Statement, it is fair to say that we have reservations about the bill before us today.

The bill was available for public consultation for just nine days. It has been almost 4½ years since the Uluru Statement, which is around 1,600 days, and this bill was available for consideration for just nine of them. There was no media release from a Premier who will announce almost anything for a quick media hit. The bill was only posted on the website of the Commissioner for Aboriginal Engagement. The only additional resources provided were a map of proposed electorates and a two-page set of frequently asked questions. The bill was not put on the YourSAy website, an online consultation hub managed by the Better Together team in the Premier's own department.

The government has 19 current consultations on YourSAy and has had hundreds more in the past. It was used for the Attorney-General's consultation on the freedom of information bill, even though her agency asked that public comments not be allowed. YourSAy is currently asking people for their views on the Civil Liability (Serious Invasions of Privacy) Bill. That consultation runs for eight weeks, from late September to late November.

The Premier's department is even using YourSAy to promote the Minister's Recreational Fishing Advisory Council election. The Public Transport Diversity and Inclusion Framework gets a spot on YourSAy but, bewilderingly, not the Aboriginal Representative Body Bill.

Comments on the draft Aboriginal Representative Body Bill had to be emailed and then they were not available for anyone else to read. It is almost as if the government did not want to hear what people had to say and, if they spoke up, the government did not want their voice to be heard. This simply does not line up with a bill that is supposed to be about giving people a voice.

While the federal government has dragged its feet on an Aboriginal voice, at least it did a proper consultation. It ran for four months, from January to May this year. It was supported by media releases, videos, in-language fact sheets and local round tables. There were even special advisory bodies for young people and those with disability. Summaries of the local consultations were posted online and thousands of pages of submissions from the public were published and available for everybody to see and read.

The bill before us today just provides a voice to a committee. The first body would be completely appointed. When elections do happen, only five of the 13 members would be directly elected. The remainder would be appointed by the Governor and only two of those on the recommendation of elected Aboriginal bodies. The bill is silent on treaty and truth.

Despite these concerns, Labor will listen carefully to the government's argument for the bill in this place and the other place. It is unfortunate that, after a lightning-speed public consultation, we are debating this bill with just a few parliamentary sitting days remaining before the election—that we are aware of. We want a proper community consultation. We want proper parliamentary debate. We want to maximise elected representation in any body. We want the greatest level of self-determination. We want a genuine voice, and we want 'truth and treaty' to stand alongside 'voice'.

In closing, I would like to say that beyond all the statistics and history books, the experience of stories of real people in our lives so often changes our minds and touches our hearts and that is why we have an obligation in this place to do justice to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Mr HUGHES (Giles) (12:34): I also rise to contribute to this debate and I do not necessarily want to be in a position to repeat all that has been said. The member for Port Adelaide was very comprehensive in both the history and context surrounding the Uluru Statement from the Heart and the history in this state.

There are clearly deficiencies here. I think we all in this place would want a genuine voice to parliament and the question is how we get it through this bill. I have a number of Aboriginal communities in my electorate and it is my belief that this bill is deficient. The point that the consultation process in relation to the bill itself has been incredibly truncated is an accurate point. The people in communities I represent in the APY lands, Oak Valley, the Maralinga lands and the Flinders Ranges area have not been effectively consulted when it comes to the shape of this bill, which is not to say that Roger Thomas did not do a solid body of work in good faith.

You would have to question whether that good faith has been treated well by the government, given the process that has now been entered into and the rush at virtually the last minute in the dying days of this parliament to get this bill through. This is not the way you do this sort of thing when it comes to Aboriginal communities. It might be occasionally the way we do it with one or two bills in this place, not the greater body of bills that we consider. Sometimes they are very protracted processes.

But when it comes to this bill itself, it has only been a matter of days where consultation (if that is what it can be called) has been enabled. There has been no opportunity for people in the APY lands to gather, discuss and take the time—and I put the emphasis on the word 'time'—needed to come to a view when it comes to this particular bill. The same can be said for other people in my electorate, Aboriginal people in my electorate, when it comes to this bill. Indeed, Roger Thomas is on the record in relation to his concern about the rushed nature of the consultation on the bill.

It has also been mentioned about the resources available to Roger Thomas as regards going out to communities and meeting with people—the lack of resources—and these resources were not commensurate with the challenge that was faced. In some respects, we get one opportunity to get this right and, in order to get it right, we need to do it in a comprehensive and respectful fashion, one that acknowledges that this does take time.

When you look back at the Uluru Statement from the Heart, what a powerful collection of words when it came to expressing the commitment and the link to country and the fact that sovereignty was never ceded by the Aboriginal people of this country. They were incredibly powerful words that we should treat with respect, and I do not believe that this process is treating those words with respect. I do not reflect on those opposite because I think we all have a genuine desire to get this right. However, I would ask them to think about this and to think about the bill coming before the parliament and the fact that hardly any time has been given at all when it comes to consultation.

We know that the processes that are gone through in Aboriginal communities can be time consuming, and they are time consuming for a reason: because everyone gets to have their say, gets to have their input and gets to really have a look at what is going on, and this process is not going to do that. It has been mentioned that the first body is not even going to be an elected body: it is going to be an appointed body. That is an incredible weakness. We have had elected parliaments in the state going back over a long period of time, so the idea about a direct election is nothing foreign or alien.

The body then morphs into a combination of some elected members and some appointed members, and you would have to question whether this is the best way of going about this. I would say that it is not, but, once again, let the Aboriginal people of this state have the time and have the space to reflect upon this bill that is before the parliament. If that was done and if that time was given we might have a more considered bill, a bill that would attract the fulsome support of this parliament. However, because of the process this is not going to attract that fulsome support, which is a great pity.

Once again, and notwithstanding the good work by Roger Thomas, it is a bunch of white people imposing their direction and their wishes. We all mention the Uluru Statement from the Heart and that it was a powerful set of words, and the Redfern speech has also been referred to. Whether it was Paul Keating or Don Watson who wrote it, or a combination of both of them, in my mind is neither here nor there, but they were incredibly powerful words, and it was an invitation for us all, given the history of colonisation on this continent, to walk in the footsteps of the traditional owners of this continent and what happened as a result of colonisation to the original owners of this continent.

I know that the word 'owners' is not the correct word given the linkage between the Aboriginal people and the land that they walked. I remember when I first came to this country as a young lad many years ago. During the history lessons of that period there was hardly any reference to Aboriginal people. There was a passing reference to someone with an Anglicised nickname, Jacky Jacky, assisting an explorer. That was about the sum total of exposure to what happened on this continent when I was a student.

Things have improved since then. I did have the benefit of quite rigorous history lessons in the later years of high school. I ended up studying the history of China, the history of India, European history and Russian history. It was a good education, but there was very little about the Aboriginal people of this continent and the interaction between the colonisers and the Aboriginal people of this continent. That was to come later.

As someone of near Irish descent with an Irish mother, we would visit Ireland every year. I had to stay with my grandparents before coming to Australia. Ireland was one of the first places that the English colonised—the English ruling class if you like. It was the first place they colonised. What was interesting was the use of the language and the use of a whole range of oppressive mechanisms to suppress the people of Ireland over hundreds of years. When I came to Australia and did some of my own study, I found a replication, to a degree, of what was done in Ireland, mirrored here in Australia and, indeed, in some of the other places the English colonised over an extended period of time. It was incredibly oppressive.

We all know now to a far greater degree the history of what happened in the Frontier Wars. There is still no recognition on our war memorials of what happened in the Frontier Wars, the first defence of this country. People are surprised by the number of those killed in parts of that Frontier War and, in places like Queensland, the number of people who died in defence of their country.

One famous Australian anthropologist specialised in work on Central America and, when she turned her gaze to Australia, she went into incredible detail about what happened in Victoria and the numbers of Aboriginal people who died in an incredibly short period of time—80 per cent of the population. I cannot even imagine what it would be like to be exposed to something like that, to be at the receiving end of something like that. That was direct killing, that was murder, that was disease, that was dislocation and all the other things that came with it.

As I said, we have an opportunity here to do the right thing. I would counsel patience when it comes to doing the right thing. This now appears to be ticking off a box to get this through in the dying days of this parliament: 'We've done this.' It is important that, irrespective of whether the next government is a Liberal government or a Labor government, we take do that time, that there is patience, that there is genuine on-the-ground consultation on this bill.

If I am not misreading it, this is not even a voice to the parliament directly: it is a voice to a committee, which is then a voice to the parliament. There is the removal of the Aboriginal Lands standing committee and, if I am reading this correctly, another body will be put in its place. The Aboriginal representative body will be a filter. I am on the Aboriginal Lands standing committee, and I have been since I was elected in 2014.

I remember my first meeting of that particular committee as a complete newbie to parliament. I turned up, and some of the members were very keen to go on a study over to New Zealand to look at Maori culture. I know a little about Aboriginal communities in my state, and I thought, 'Why on earth are we going over to New Zealand? It's different in so many respects.' At the time, I spoke out against it and we ended up not going to New Zealand, which would have been at taxpayers' expense, so we did not go there. The next suggestion was to go to the Torres Strait Islands, and I thought that was not appropriate either.

My first visit out to the APY lands left me feeling deeply uncomfortable. Essentially, it was a bunch of white people piling into a chartered jet to go to Uluru to stay at a luxury resort and then each day fly in and out of Aboriginal communities in the APY lands. At the next meeting when we came back, because I had just been exposed to this I said, 'I'm not doing this anymore. If this is what we're going to do, I am not going to go on these trips.' I thought it was not acceptable. If we are going to the community, we should be living in the communities or staying in the communities, more accurately, we are visiting. I have to say that it did change: we now stay in the communities we are visiting.

I put the emphasis on the word 'visiting'. We are not part of these communities. Being part of any community takes time. I have been part of the community of Whyalla since more or less the age of 10. Am I fully across my community? I think I have a reasonably good take, but communities are complex. They change. You need that lived experience in a community. That visit is no reflection on the Aboriginal lands committee. Their motivation is good but, at the end of the day, they are visitors. You just get a snapshot.

We need in this state, we need in all the states, we need in the federal parliament, a genuine voice. When I say a 'genuine voice', I mean a voice that reflects the complexity of the different communities that exist in South Australia. They are scattered far and wide across the great breadth of our state and here in the metropolitan area. That voice will be a complex voice and that voice will be a nuanced voice.

I do not believe this is the way to go. I think most people in this place are entering into this in good faith, but I would ask them to step back and reflect on what is going on here. To attempt to rush this bill through in this way and not give it the time that is needed is just not the way to go. If it was in my community in Whyalla, I know that I would feel insulted if there was a bill before the parliament that affected us directly and we had only a few days to have a look at it, to reflect on it and to have the internal debates that go on. People here should feel far more insulted.

These are people who have been on this continent now, according to science, for 60,000 years. And we take a few days to consult on this bill? A body of work has been done, so it is not as though we are going right back to the beginning, but we need to do this in a way that is going to provide serious resources when it comes to developing a voice to this parliament. It should be a direct voice to this parliament, not a voice that has to go through a conduit or a filter. I think that needs to happen.

To spend a little bit more time is not to the detriment of anybody here. It will not be to the detriment of the government. It would be a positive thing to do, to take this seriously and it is not just seen as part of a short-term political agenda. What we want to achieve here is something that will stand the test of time. In some respects, South Australia has a proud record. It did some of the first things in the country when it came to—and this is a long time ago—setting up the Aboriginal Lands Trust, the APY lands and the freehold and all that goes with it in the APY lands.

It is all powerful stuff. We have moved on and there is an opportunity here to get this right. I have said it again and again and again. It is one of the most important elements of the democratic process. There is dissent, there is dialogue, there is deliberation and decision, but it is often deliberation that is not given the weight that it is due. It is deliberation that assists us to do something in the right way.

Ms COOK (Hurtle Vale) (12:54): I rise to speak on the Aboriginal Representative Body Bill 2021. In doing so I would first like to acknowledge that we are on stolen Kaurna land that has never been ceded. I find it highly appropriate that we as members of parliament can take this opportunity to acknowledge these stolen lands and acknowledge that we respect the elders of those lands across the whole of our state. Of course, we are here on Kaurna land, but people here represent all the lands across South Australia, and some have been on lands interstate as well, and we do acknowledge all elders past, present and emerging.

I still get questioned about doing an acknowledgement at all when I am at many public events, large and small. It is surprising in this time that people still do not quite understand the meaning of that acknowledgement and why we acknowledge. Of course, there are scripted ways of doing acknowledgements and there are other ways that have been given to you from elders. Mine has been one that I have taken counsel on in regard to why we should push that point, that this land is the land of the traditional owners and it was taken and, even though we have had apologies of sorts and acknowledgements, I think we can do better.

I want to use these few minutes before lunch to perhaps have a discussion about how elected people can get this so very wrong. I have the great privilege of attending many citizenship ceremonies in the City of Onkaparinga. In terms of the process, we have had the absolute privilege of having an elder, Auntie Georgina—who has been in that area for the whole time that I have been in parliament—who has delivered beautiful acknowledgements, Welcome to Country. I have sought counsel and used my acknowledgement as a way of acknowledging that that land has never been ceded.

So it was to my surprise that I received a letter from the Director of Citizenship Ceremonies, federally, from the Department of Home Affairs. I will not read the whole letter, but it was ostensibly telling me that I could not use the speech to be political and that I had to keep my speaking in line with the Australian Citizenship Ceremonies Code, which of course I thought I was. I found that a councillor, Sandra Brown, had made a formal complaint. I will read a bit of what I wrote to her:

Dear Councillor Brown, I was incredibly disappointed and shocked to have received correspondence in November 2019 from the Director of Citizenship Ceremony Services at the Department of Home Affairs, Mr Geoff Fearns, regarding purported comments during the Citizenship Ceremony held on 16 September 2019.

Following the advice from Mr Fearns that comments made by me were 'not in keeping with the spirit of the occasion, including references to a proposal to sell land that is considered sacred to Aboriginal people,' I made an application under the Freedom of Information Act 1991 (The Application) to the City of Onkaparinga asking for:

'All correspondence (including letters, email etc) between all Councillors and the Department of Home Affairs (Commonwealth) and/or Staff of the Department from 16th September to November 2019 relating to Nat Cook MP.'

The results of the application found that the complaint, which was made directly to the Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs, the Hon David Coleman MP, was made by yourself [insert councillor's name] in an official capacity as Councillor for the City of Onkaparinga; and indeed, you [the councillor] decided to include South Australian Liberal Party Members for Davenport, Black, Gibson and Waite, the latter three whom do not represent any portions of the City of Onkaparinga.

Now who is getting political? The letter goes on:

I found it particularly interesting that you did not include South Australian Labor Party Members the bulk of which—

I seek leave to continue my remarks.

The SPEAKER: Thank you, member for Hurtle Vale. I am sorry to interrupt debate. This is an important matter, and I acknowledge the presence in the chamber of the Premier and the Deputy Premier, signifying the significance of the matter.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

Sitting suspended from 13:00 to 14:00.

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