Senator Aden Ridgeway
Portfolio: Indigenous Affairs
| Dated: 18 Sep 2003
Location: Parliament House - Canberra
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Senator Aden Ridgeway speaks on the Adjournment: The Anniversary of the First Speech of Senator Neville Bonner |
ADJOURNMENT: Bonner, Former Senator Neville
Senator RIDGEWAY (New South Wales) (7.02 p.m.) —Last Monday, 8 September, marked the anniversary of the first speech of a very noble and distinguished Liberal senator from Queensland, the late Senator Neville Bonner. That first speech was given 22 years ago. I want to put on record that he was the first Indigenous Australian to take a seat in the federal parliament and to acknowledge his contributions to the parliament. He was from the Jagera people of south-east Queensland. I recently had cause to read over his speech, and I was struck by the similarities between the issues he raised in 1971 and the issues about which I and many others continue to speak of in 2003.
He came to the Old Parliament House without the benefit of a university education or a high school education and with only a brief stint at primary school. At that time the education system was officially segregated and there were no schools for Aboriginal children where he lived in northern New South Wales. When the family moved to southern Queensland, his grandmother was able to convince the local authorities to allow him to attend a school with non-Indigenous children. By the time he attended primary school, he was 14 years of age. He went to school for a year, and that was the end of his formal education. Yet he went on to become extensively involved in administration, business, Aboriginal politics and mainstream politics, which eventually led to his filling a Senate vacancy for the Liberal Party in 1971 and contesting elections in ensuing years. In his first speech, he broached the subject of skin colour as an indicator of Aboriginality. Public discussion then was still firmly entrenched in the eugenic racism underpinning the stolen generations, and it unfortunately has not broadly advanced in the past 32 years. He went on to say:
In my experienced opinion, all persons who desire to be so classified, regardless of hue of skin, and who have flowing in their veins any portion, however small, of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander blood, are indigenous people.
It does not necessarily follow that the degree of one's emotional scars matches the darkness of personal pigmentation or that the lightness of one's skin necessarily indicates a lessening of knowledge of and belief in Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander culture and tradition.
Some are shocked by the intensity of the then senator's passion for his people, as history has generally—and unfairly, I believe—cast him as a conservative with little political conviction or teeth. Yes, he was fundamentally conservative and a well-known monarchist; yet when a senator Neville Bonner crossed the floor several times to vote with the Labor opposition on Aboriginal issues. Bonner's time in the Senate highlighted the unique difficulties potentially facing Indigenous people when they need to choose between their political parties and the priorities of their people. His ability to stay true to his personal and cultural views as an Indigenous person whilst being a representative of a mainstream political party makes him something of a role model for me. These are very difficult times but, thankfully, I represent not the Liberal Party but the Australian Democrats—a party with an honest and open record in Indigenous affairs.
In his speech Neville Bonner also spoke at length about the issues of communal moral rights and the importance of economic development for Indigenous people, an issue we are still struggling with today. Neville Bonner searched for somewhere in the copyright or patents acts that would allow the design of the boomerang to be registered and/or protected. That space does not exist even to this day. As a former maker of boomerangs, Mr Bonner felt both culturally and economically offended by the cheap overseas boomerangs that flooded the Australian tourism market. That is a too-familiar story today, but there is now a wider range of art and cultural objects subject to this treatment. The then senator said in his first speech:
I have made inquiries about the possibilities of a patent over the boomerang and have been advised that, as it is by no means a recent scientific invention, it would not be possible for anyone to take out a patent for it.
Likewise, I understand, the law of copyright would apply only to individual design on an artefact. I have been told that the word `boomerang' cannot even be registered as a trade mark as the term is probably too deeply entrenched in the English language to be legally registered now as distinguishing the goods of particular manufacturers or traders. If some solution to this problem can be found it may be one small way of fostering an Aboriginal enterprise which I know surely has considerable potential.
He then became the first senator to give a boomerang-throwing demonstration outside the building to showcase the superior quality of the local product. But Bonner was not all boomerangs and big hair. In 1975, he moved a motion successfully in the Senate urging the then government to admit Indigenous prior ownership and introduce legislation to compensate Indigenous people. When Senator Bonner was at the peak of his federal political career in 1983, the Liberals dropped in to an unwinnable spot on their Senate ticket. And the rest is history. The federal parliament was without an Indigenous representative until 1999 when I took my seat here in the Senate.
More genuine efforts must be made on the part of our political parties to attract Indigenous people into political life of the nation, irrespective of the party, by preselecting them for safe seats or via the consideration of dedicated seats for Indigenous people as exists in New Zealand or following the Canadian example of Aboriginal electorates. First, there must be an acknowledgement of the historically derived nature of Indigenous disadvantage and of the requirement to adopt special measures to provide Indigenous people with equality of opportunity in a very real way. Special measures are necessary and fair so that Indigenous people can catch up. Governments need to do more than simply pass non-discrimination legislation if they are serious about removing disadvantage. Special measures do not lead to separate rights; rather, they are temporary measures designed to remove disadvantage. As Aristotle said, `There is nothing so unequal as the equal treatment of unequals.' Bonner's home state of Queensland has only seen one Indigenous person elected to its parliament in 130 years: Eric Deeral, who held the northern seat of Cook from 1974 to 1977. Neville Bonner said in an interview in 1995:
I would not recommend with a clear conscience that Indigenous people join any one of the major political parties, because political parties in this country want bottle drawn seats, hands in the air at the right time. You have no freedom to express yourself against the party, I can tell you.
Twenty-two years on, on the occasion of the anniversary of his first speech, as the first Indigenous person in federal parliament and as someone who is recognised in the history books of this country, we should never forget the path that Neville Bonner blazed in this place, the price that he paid or the legacy that he has left for so many people who have followed.
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