Transcript
Redfern Speech (Year for the World's Indigenous People) – Delivered in Redfern
Park by Prime Minister Paul Keating, 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 that 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 indigenous 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 we are 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 well we know our history.
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 dispossessed is to risk being
dragged down.
We practised discrimination and exclusion.
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 devastating 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 Strait 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.
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 art and music.
In all these things they have shaped our knowledge of this continent and of
ourselves. They have shaped our identity.
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
Transcript
Redfern Speech (Year for the World's Indigenous People) – Delivered in Redfern
Park by Prime Minister Paul Keating, 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 that 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 indigenous 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 we are 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 well we know our history.
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 dispossessed is to risk being
dragged down.
We practised discrimination and exclusion.
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 devastating 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 Strait 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.
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 art and music.
In all these things they have shaped our knowledge of this continent and of
ourselves. They have shaped our identity.
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
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