From: d10652@tanus.oz.au (Paul Parker)
Subject: Redfern Speech -VERY LONG
Organization: Pro-Net Australia
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 92 07:30:06 GMT


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Speech by the Hon Prime Minister, P J Keating MP

Australian Launch of the International Year for The World's Indigenous
People
Redfern, 10 December 1992

Ladies and gentlemen

I am very pleased to be here today at the launch of Australia's
celebration of the 1993 International Year of the World's Indigenous
People.

It will be a year of great significance for Australia.

It comes at a time when we have committed ourselves to succeeding in the
test which so far we have always failed.

Because, in truth, we cannot confidently say we have succeeded as we
would like to have succeeded if we have not managed to extend
opportunity and care, dignity and hope to the indigineous people of
Australia - the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people.

This is a fundamental test of our social goals and our national will:
our ability to say to ourselves and the rest of the world that Australia
is a first rate social democracy, that weare what we should be - truly
the land of the fair go and the better chance.

There is no more basic test of how seriously we mean these things.

It is a test of our self-knowledge.

Of how well we know the land we live in. How wel we know our history.

How well we recognise the fact that, complex as our contemporary
identity is, it cannot be seperated from Aboriginal Australia.

How well we know what Aboriginal Australians know about Australia.

Redfern is a good place to contemplate these things.


Just a mile or two from the place where the first European settlers
landed, in too many ways it tells us that their failure to bring much
more than devestation and demoralisation to Aboriginal Australia
continues to be our failure.

More I think than most Australians recognise, the plight of Aboriginal
Australians affects us all.

In Redfern it might be tempting to think that the reality Aboriginal
Australians face is somehow contained here, and that the rest of us are
insulated from it.

But of course, while all the dilemmas may exist here, they are far from
contained.

We know the same dilemmas and more are faced all over Australia.

That is perhaps the point of this Year of the World's Indigenous
People: to bring the dispossessed out of the shadows, to recognise that
they are a part of us, and that we cannot give indigenous Australians up
without giving up a good many of our own most deeply held values, much
of our own identity - and our own humanity.

Nowhere in the world, I would venture, is the message more stark than
than it is in Australia.

We simply cannot sweep injustice aside. Even if our own conscience
allowed us to, I am sure, that in due course, the world and the people
of our region would not.

There should be no mistake about this - our success in resolving these
issues will have a significant bearing on our standing in the world.

However intractable the problems seem, we cannot resign ourselves to
failure - any more than we can hide behind the contemporary version of
Social Darwinism which says that to reach back for the poor and
disposssesed is to risk being dragged down.

That seems to me not only morally indefensible, but bad history.

We non-Aboriginal Australians should perhaps remind ourselves that
Australia once reached out for us.

Didn't Australia provide opportunity and care for the dispossesed Irish?
The poor of Britain? The refugees from war and famine and persecution in
the countries of Europe and Asia?

Isn't it reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and
remarkably harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can
find just solutions to the problems which beset the first Australians -
the people to whom the most injustice has been done.

And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem
starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.

It begins, I think, with that act of recognition.

Recognition that it was we who did the dispossesing.

We took away the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of
life.

We brought the diseases. The alcohol.

We committed the murders.

We took the children from their mothers.

We practised discrimination and exclusion.

It was our ignorance and our prejudice.

And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.

With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human
response and enter into the hearts and minds.

We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me?

As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all
of us.

If we needed a reminder of this, we received it this year.

The Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody
showed with devestating clarity that the past lives on in inequality,
racism and injustice.

In the prejudice and ignorance of non-Aboriginal Australians, and in the
demoralisation and desperation, the fractured identity, of so many
Aborigines and Torres Straight Islanders.

For all this, I do not believe that the Report should fill us with
guilt.

Down the years, there has been no shortage of guilt, but it has not
produced the responses we need.

Guilt is not a very constructive emotion.

I think what we need to do is open our hearts a bit.

All of us.

Perhaps when we recognise what we have in common we will see the things
which must be done - the practical things.

There is something of this in the creation of the Council for Aboriginal
Reconciliation.

The Council's mission is to forge a new partnership built on justice and
equity and an appreciation of the heritage of Australia's indigenous
people.

In the abstract those terms are meaningless.

We have to give meaning to "justice" and "equity" - and, as I have said
several times this year, we will only give them meaning when we commit
ourselves to achieving concrete results.

If we improve the living conditions in one town, they will improve in
another. And another.

If we raise the standard of health by twenty percent one year, it will
be raised by more the next.

If we open one door others will follow.

When we see improvement, when we see more dignity, more confidence, more
happiness - we will know we are going to win.

We need these practical building blocks of change.

The Mabo Judgement should be seen as one of these.

By doing away with the bizarre conceit that this continent had no owners
prior to the settlement of Europeans, Mabo establishes a fundamental
truth and lays the basis of justice.

It will be much easier to work from that basis than has ever been the
case to the past.

For that reason alone we should ignore the isolated outbreaks of
hysteria and hostility of the past few months.

Mabo is an historic decision - we can make it an historic turning point,
the basis of a new relationship between indigenous and non-Aboriginal
Australians.

The message should be that there is nothing to fear or to lose in the
recognition of historical truth, or the extension of social justice, or
the deepening of Australian social democracy to include indigenous
Australians.

There is everything to gain.

Even the unhappy past speaks for this.

Where Aboriginal Australians have been included in the life of Australia
they have made remarkable contributions.

Economic contributions, particularly in the pastoral and agricultural
industry.

They are there in the frontier and exploration history of Australia.

They are there in the wars.

In sport to an extraordinary degree.

In literature and music.

In all these things they have shaped our knowledge of this continent and
of ourselves. They have shaped our identity.

They are there in the Australian legend.

We should never forget - they have helped build this nation.

And if we have a sense of justice, as well as common sense, we will
forge a new partnership.

As I said, it might help us if we non-Aboriginal Australians imagined
ourselves dispossessed of land we had lived on for fifty thousand years
- and then imagined ourselves told that it had never been ours.

Imagine if ours was the oldest culture in the world and 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 ignored in history books.

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

And we can have justice.

I say that for two reasons:

I say it because I believe that the great things about Australian social
democracy reflect a fundamental belief in justice.

And I say it because in so many other areas we have proved our capacity
over the years to go on extending the realms of participation,
opportunity and care.

Just as Australians living in the relatively narrow and insular
Australia of the 1960s imagined a culturally diverse, worldly and open
Australia, and in a generation turned the idea into a reality, so we can
turn the goals of reconciliation into a reality.

There are very good signs that the process has begun.

The creation of the Reconciliation Council is evidence itself.

The establishment of the ATSIC - the Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islanders Commission - is also evidence.

The Council is the product of imagination and good will.

ATSIC emerges from the vision of indigenous self-determination and
self-management.

The vision has already become the reality of almost 800 elected
Aboriginal Regional Councillors and Commissioners determining priorities
and developing their own programs.

All over Australia, Aboriginal and torres Strait Islander communities
are taking charge of their own lives.

And assistance with the problems which chronically beset them is at
last being made available in ways developed by the communities
themselves.

If these things offer hope, so does the fact that this generation of
Australians is better informed about Aboriginal culture and achievement,
and about the injustice that has been done, than any generation before.

We are beginning to more generally appreciate the depth and the
diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures.

From their music and art and dance we are beginning to recognise how
much richer our national life and identity will be for the participation
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

We are begining to learn what the indigenous people have known for many
thousands of years - how to live with our physical environment.

Ever so gradually we are learning how to see Australia through
Aboriginal eyes, beginning to recognise the wisdom contained in their
epic story.

I think we are beginning to see how mch we owe the indigenous
Australians  and how much we have lost through living so apart.

I said we non-indigenous Australians should try to imagine the
Aboriginal view.

It can't be too hard. Someone imagined this event today, and it is now a
marvellous reality and a great reason for hope.

There is only one thing today we cannot imagine.

We cannot imagine that the descendants of people whose genius and
resilience maintained a culture here for fifty thousand years or more,
through cataclysmic changes to the climate and environment, and who then
survived two centuries od dispossession and abuse, will be denied their
place in the modern Australian nation.

We cannot imagine that.

We cannot imagine that we will fail.

And with the spirit that is here today I am confident that we won't.

I am confident that we will succeed in this decade.

Thank you.

   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

 The speech by the Prime Minister of Australia,
 Mr P.J.Keating MP given at Redfern 10 December 1992.


 Please cross post any comments to: "soc/australia"




 * SLMR 2.1 * Only a fool has no predjudices.

Sorry,
      not for the length, but late posting, I thought it had gone up OK last
week.
However none of my postings went up and out ...
Regards,
         Paul