Speech on the 15th Anniversary of the National Apology
The Hon Dr Kevin Rudd AC
“The Arc of History Bends Slowly Towards Justice”
The Great Hall, Parliament House, Canberra
On this the 15th Anniversary of the Apology, I honour the First Australians on whose lands we meet, and whose cultures we celebrate as the oldest continuing cultures in human history.
I acknowledge the representatives of the Stolen Generation who join us this morning and to all our Indigenous brothers and sisters across the nation.
To all my cabinet colleagues, parliamentary colleagues past and present, Jenny Macklin and others, it’s great to have you here as well. Governor General, you do us a great honour by sharing this occasion with us too. Michael McLeod, thank you for holding fast the flame these last 15 years. You are remarkable, my friend. It’s been 15 years, that’s quite a stretch! Good to see that none of you have changed, I certainly haven’t. Hey Pat [Dodson], how are you, that beard is the same as 15 years ago. It’s taken 15 years for me to grow this one.
It is good that we come together on this day each year. Friends, it was Martin Luther King who reminded us that the arc of history bends slowly towards justice.
Or to quote Dr. King more accurately, he wrote in The Gospel Messenger in 1958 that “the arc of the moral universe is long, and it bends towards justice”. He carefully placed that phrase between inverted commas.
In fact, the phrase itself predated Dr. King by a hundred years when it was first coined by the Reverend Theodore Parker in 1853 and became a rallying cry for the abolition of slavery on the eve of the Civil War.
In our own country, Australia, we too have been on a long pilgrimage towards our own national mission of reconciliation with the Aboriginal peoples of this land.
And viewed through the long lens of our national story, with each passing generation, the arc of history is also bending slowly toward justice.
We should remember that when Cook and Phillip first came to these shores, they were enjoined by the King to establish amity and comity with the Indigenous peoples of this land.
What they found was not terra nullius.
What they found was a vast continent peopled by an ancient culture extending back across the millennia - indeed some 60-70,000 years, more than 50,000 years before Caesar first arrived in what would one day become Britain.
Cook’s original instructions from the British Admiralty in 1768 stated that “you are with the Consent of the Natives to take Possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great Britain”.
Phillip’s instructions in 1787 commanded that the “Natives” be treated with “amity and kindness”, and be given the full protection of British law.
Governor Darling was later enjoined especially to take care to protect the “native inhabitants” in their persons, in the free enjoyment of their possessions, and that you do by all lawful means prevent and restrain all violence and injustice against them”.
As we know, across the bloody pages of the settlement history of this country, it didn’t turn out that way.
According to an academic paper by Hunter and Carmody published in the Australian Economic History Review in 2015, between 1788, when the aboriginal population was estimated at 800,000, and 1850, when it was estimated at 200,000, some 300,000 Aboriginal lives were lost to the 1789 chickenpox (or smallpox) outbreak, 180,000 were lost to other diseases and 120,000 Aboriginal lives were lost to resource loss and conflict, including 20,000 directly killed.
Furthermore, the University of Newcastle’s Colonial Frontier Massacres project has documented 410 massacres for which good documentary evidence exists in colonial sources, in which approximately 10,866 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were killed.
This however is likely to be an underestimate.
I grew up in a little Queensland country town called Eumundi. You may have heard of the beer, you may have been to the markets.
About ten kilometres away lies beautiful Lake Weyba.
One of the streams feeding into it is still hauntingly called “Murdering Creek”, so named from the killing in cold blood of 25 Aboriginal people fishing by the lake at the hands of a group of white settlers from nearby Yandina Station in 1862 who had lain in ambush for them.
These stories are across our land, if we care to look.
The stains run deep and red across our land.
And because of the frontier “code of silence” observed by white settlers across much of the land during the 19th century, we will never really know the full extent of the killings.
This, my friends, is not what was once derided as the “black armband view of history”.
Even less is it part of “critical race theory” hysteria of some. No.
These are simple, hard, confronting, documented facts that we find in the historical record - of course, if we choose to look.
The Parliament
For more than half a century, our national parliament, including both its major political parties, have wrestled with the righting of these great historical wrongs.
It was the Menzies Cabinet in 1965 that first decided to repeal the racist provisions of Section 127 of the Constitution, supported on a bipartisan basis by the then Leader of the Opposition Arthur Calwell.
It finally fell to Holt to bring both this, together with proposed changes to Section 51 on the inclusion of all Aboriginal peoples in the national census, to successful conclusion in the referendum of 1967.
It’s worth reflecting on what the then Liberal Prime Minister, albeit expressed in the language of the time, said in his press statement of 28 May, 1967.
Holt said “... I was delighted with the over whelming vote in every state of the Commonwealth favouring the elimination of those references in the Constitution that smack of discrimination. The grant of power to theCommonwealth in relation to Aborigines that follows from the vote will enable it to play a useful part in ensuring justice and social acceptance for people of the Aboriginal race. The vote will not only help the Aboriginal people. It will contribute to Australia’s international standing by demonstrating to the outside world our overwhelming acceptance of the Aboriginal people within our community.”
While we will wince today at some of its patronising language, nonetheless we the parliament and then the people thorough the 1967 referendum brought about lasting change.
The arc of history indeed bends slowly towards justice.
And so it has been across the five decades and more since.
For Whitlam, the challenge was to respond to the real-world question of land rights in the Northern Territory, and for the nation at last to enact the RacialDiscrimination Act as a new head of power for the Commonwealth to protect Aboriginal Australians and others from any form of discrimination based on the colour of their skin.
For Keating it was to respond to the question of land rights for the nation at large ( not just its territories) after Brennan CJ, writing the majority opinion for the High Court in Mabo, overturned terra nullius and affirmed the continuing existence of unextinguished native title.
For me it was responding to the Bringing Them Home Report on the Stolen Generations which had been gathering dust on the shelves of this parliament for more than a decade after Keating had first commissioned it.
Once again, with this series of actions by the legislature, the arc of history has been bending slowly towards justice.
The Apology
Many doubts were raised about the Bringing Them Home Report.
Some asked, why should we apologise today when all these things were done in the distant past?
Well not really. Children we’re still being placed forcibly into church and state institutions well into the 1970’s. This was not exactly ancient history.
But beyond the arbitrary proximity of time and responsibility, we should perhaps reflect in this: if we as a people and parliament were happy to own and appropriate the acclaimed achievements of our more distant past ( for example the heroism of ANZAC, despite the fact that none of us were on the beaches at Gallipoli back in 1915, and when those who were have long since passed away), then by the same and equal measure we should also be prepared to own and accept the darker chapters of our nation’s story.
We can’t have it both ways, through the processes of selective historical memory, when the uncomfortable history of 410 documented massacres are wilfully erased from popular and political consciousness.
Put simply, it is the mark of a mature nation when its people can recognise from its past both the good and the bad.
There was another reason for the apology as well.
The question I posed to the nation that day was a stark one. What if that which had happened to IndigenousAustralians had happened to those of us who are whiteAustralians?
What if the children of white Australians had simply been ripped away from their parents without cause, without any case-specific evidence of maltreatment but simply as a matter of general policy?
Our reaction would have been outrage, anger and the deepest sense of injustice.
So too should it be today if we were to put ourselves in the shoes of our Indigenous brothers and sisters, our fellow Australians.
But there was a further reason for the Apology as well.
Aboriginal people themselves wanted it done. They wanted to hear the simple word “sorry”.
Remember the long decade of the “sorry marches”.
Delivering a formal national apology in this place was part of healing the profound emotional wounds of the past, rather than simply sweeping them under the carpet.
The apology did not solve everything.
Nor did the national strategy of “closing the gap” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians that I announced the same day.
We have seen both progress and regress in each of the “closing the gap” annual report cards delivered annually to the parliament since then, although again I argue it’s the mark of a mature nation to measure both our successes and our failures.
Ask for example the thousand plus Aboriginal kids who have benefitted from the Australian IndigenousEducation Program who now work as doctors, lawyers, engineers, nurses, tradesmen and entrepreneurs whether the gap is closing for them, and you will find that for many it is.
Ask also the kids who were among the first to have universal access to early childhood education under “closing the gap”.
But so too should we ask why the incarceration of Indigenous kids continues to grow.
Success. And failure. Let us have the honesty and the courage to acknowledge both.
The arc of history still bending towards justice, however imperfectly, however unevenly, however slowly.
Recognition, the Voice and the Referendum
This brings us to the next stage in our long march towards reconciliation:
Constitutional recognition, the Voice and the upcoming referendum on the same.
Let me offer you all a small word of encouragement in midst the customary tumult of this place.
Prior to the Apology, there was a general fear, particularly among those who cautioned me against doing it, that we would be over-whelmed by racistreaction.
The truth is it didn’t happen.
That’s because the Australian people came with us. They were ready.
From right across the nation, country and cities, bigstates and small, black, white and all shades in between.
That’s because the Australian people are a good and decent people with an intrinsic instinct for a far go for all.
They had concluded in their own hearts and minds that Aboriginal Australia hadn’t been given one. And they wanted it fixed.
That’s the thing with big social reforms like the one before you today.
It always looks much harder before the event than after.
Much more frightening in the anticipation than in the execution.
So it was with the Apology.
So it will be with this referendum.
As in 1967, the Australian people support constitutional recognition of the first Australians.
It passes the pub test.
It simply recognises an historical fact.
And does so with humility and respect.
As for its partner reform, the Voice, it seeks simply to give practical effect to this constitutional recognition of the first Australians by providing them with an advisory body to this parliament.
Not a third chamber.
Chambers have legislative power.
This does not. It simply advises.
Advice which may be
accepted or rejected by the executive or the legislature of the time.
Constitutional recognition, and the national advisory body that will be the Voice, are two sides of the same coin.
And the currency of which that coin is part is the continuing national mission we all support and share: the realisation one day of a fully-reconciled Australia.
There is a further reason for this referendum to succeed: as with the Apology, our Indigenous brothers and sisters have requested it.
The Uluṟu Statement commands our respect.
It is, as its authors wrote, a statement from the heart.
And given what Indigenous Australians have been through across the long centuries since European settlement began, are we now to be so hard of heart that we simply ignore it?
Echoing Holt’s reflections 55 years ago, I shudder to think what the reaction will be across the world were this referendum to fail, if we are seen to turn our back on so simple a request from those who have been the custodians of this ancient land since the Dreamtime.
Constitutional recognition, the Voice and the outcome of this referendum will not have an impact on the lives of 25 million Australians.
But it will offer dignity, hope and the possibility of change for the nearly one million Australians who belong to our First Nations.
As it was with the 1967 referendum, Whitlam and Lingiari, Keating and Mabo, and the Apology and Closing the Gap.
And the August referendum, I believe the arc of history will still be bending toward justice.
But Dr. King also reminded us of something else, just before he was murdered, for those who seem always to urge near-permanent delay: “The time is always right todo what is right”.
We never know how much time we have in this place, or on this earth.
So for us, for this generation, and for IndigenousAustralians today as we approach this great national referendum, that time is now.