 Good evening and welcome on behalf of the Australian National University to this opening dinner of the First Nations Governance Forum and of course I begin too by acknowledging and celebrating the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and paying my respects to the elders of these lands past, present and emerging. I particularly want to begin by welcoming the very large number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from around the country who are joining us for this event, some of them a little bit delayed by planes but they're on their way, including of course the wonderful Tanya Hosh who's going to guide us through the evening, Professor Mick Dodson who will be addressing us a little later on, the former forum host Stan Grant, Ken Wyatt MP, Minister for Age Care and Indigenous Health, member for Hasluck, Linda Burney MP, member for Barton, Nariya Kit, member for Karama in the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly, Senator Patrick Dodson and ALP, sorry, ANU, that's a slip, ANU Council member, Peter Yu. I very warmly welcome also a wonderful cast of international guests including Dr Fernand Veren, UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, where's Fernand? Right there. Ms Victoria Talley Corpus, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous People and the First Nation representatives from New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Canada and the United States who will all be addressing and I know inspiring us during the course of the forum. And for the home team, I particularly welcome ANU Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt, Mark Dreyfus MP, Shadow Attorney General. The sponsors of this event, the Museum of Australian Democracy, where we're meeting tonight from who's director, Daryl Karp, we'll also be hearing later this evening and Accor Hotels. And the ANU staff finally led by the National Centre of Indigenous Studies director, Azmi Wood, Jabal Centre director and Martin, Policy Hub director, Sean Innes and Marion Irvin who worked so incredibly hard to bring us all together. So, of all the many issues that are now preoccupying Australia's policymakers, none to me is more important than completing the task of reconciliation with Indigenous Australians. A journey which took far too many decades for us to get started but which has begun, one to which many people of great good will on all sides are committed, but which still has a very long way to go before any of us can regard that journey as being completed. At the national level, we have made some progress, starting of course with 1967 referendum which at least acknowledged Indigenous Australians as human and Australians, but didn't do any more than that really to deliver real equality. There was a 1975 Racial Discrimination Act which at least made a start in that respect. There was a legislation of 1983 and 1984 to protect sites of cultural significance to Indigenous people. There was with the historic Marbeau case in 1992 the demolition at last of that utterly indefensible notion that this land was terra nullius, which the government of which I was a part followed up with native title legislation, which has made and continues to make it possible to reunite Indigenous Australians with their traditional lands. The passage of that legislation through the Senate late at night just before Christmas, 1993 after 52 hours of intense debate with every clause contested by the other side, the longest time until then ever taken by any single bill in the Australian parliament was passed with the when that legislation was passed with the galleries absolutely packed to the rafters as many of you here will remember because you were there to experience it. Everyone cheering and stamping and whistling in a totally undignified parliamentary scene that I don't think has ever been repeated before or since. That remains I think the proudest and most single most exhilarating moment in my personal entire parliamentary career. And then of course on top of all that there were those two great prime ministerial speeches of unprecedented gravity, majesty, impact with our leaders in each case speaking not for themselves or their party but for their office and for the country. First there was Prime Minister Paul Keating's Red Fern speech in 1992 launching the International Year of Indigenous Peoples which confronted the squarely confronted squarely the legacy of the past and the absolute need now for as he put it an act of recognition. Recognition as he said that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took 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 practiced discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and prejudice our prejudice and our failure to imagine these things being done to us. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd took that recognition a memorable step further forward in 2008 as I think we can all remember in delivering as his very first act on the very first day of the newly elected parliament a deeply moving apology to Australia's Indigenous Peoples in terms which still resonate I think with all of us to this day. 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 for the pain suffering and hurt of these stolen generations their descendants and for their families left behind we say sorry to the mothers and the fathers the brothers and the sisters for the breaking up of communities we say sorry and for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture we say sorry but while we have as a nation done all these things and done them well on so much else at the national policy level we continue to fail as PDU with us tonight put it so directly and lucidly in his reconciliation lecture at ANU earlier this year for all the rhetoric that's been devoted to closing the socioeconomic gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians the unhappy reality is one as he put it of increasing imprisonment rates appalling health outcomes homelessness and overcrowded houses and family and community violence and for all the huge nationwide effort that's gone into finding a way forward on the issue of constitutional recognition and governance reforms last year's last year's Uluru statement from the heart has fallen on profoundly deaf government ears and consensus on meaningful constitutional change change which is not just symbolic but substantive which does provide a positive place for Indigenous people in or alongside of Australia's decision-making institutions seems in some ways as far away as ever which is why in the hope that we can create here some new momentum for change that the Australian National University is hosting this first nation's governance forum to share the experiences of Indigenous people to generate policy options for Australia drawing on colonial settler state models elsewhere that do enable a serious participatory role indeed a genuine leadership role for Indigenous peoples in the governance of their affairs one of the key elements in the Uluru statement we will no doubt be addressing and one that's always intrigued me I have to say since I was a member way way back in 1983 of the senate committee which recommended it is to give constitutional recognition to the idea of a Macarata a negotiated reconciliatory compacts between Indigenous and other Australians either as a single overall national enterprise or on a state or more local basis as has now happened in Victoria but under a national framework umbrella the fact that this has from the outset been slammed by the Murdoch press in particular which is always a badge of honour as unworkable unacceptable in principle and counter productive should give us all confidence that this really is an idea whose time has come the other key element in the Uluru statement which will no doubt feature very prominently in our debates this week is the simple and modest but hugely compelling one of giving a formal voice to our First Nations people in the decision making processes of the Australian Parliament when issues affecting Indigenous people are being debated not a decisive voice not a power to block measures not even a power to initiate measures just a voice but a formal voice one that could not be easily silenced and one that would enable meaningful and respectful engagement when I first heard that this was the direction in which the consultation is leading up to the Uluru statement was going I have to confess that I was one of those who thought that this might be too modest an aspiration that surely we needed something more than just another talk forum but one of the things one learns very quickly and working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that I think I really did learn right from the outset of my own first engagement on land rights legal service issues nearly 50 years ago as Tanya has said is that there is just enormous wisdom in the conclusions that emerge from the kind of genuine grassroots consultative processes that produced this centerpiece of the Uluru statement and that the rest of us really ignore or reject that wisdom at the peril of getting things quite fundamentally wrong it was shameful of the government to dismiss the First Nations voice proposal so cavalierly so abruptly and I hope that the voices gathered here this week will make that very clear all that said I do hope that our First Nations people don't rest content with just achieving the constitutional recognition for the voice and for the Macarator Commission and establishing the Macarator Commission as formidable an achievement is of course that would undoubtedly be in the present political environment we all need to remember that there are still shamefully racist clauses buried away in the text of our constitution which should and must be removed and I've always thought well of course it's not a substitute it's not a substitute for more specific action-oriented measures like the voice like Macarator there really is still something to be said for adding an essentially symbolic new preamble to the constitution not in itself justiciable not having executive effect but capturing some core Australian values and including an appropriately respectful acknowledgement of the identity and the role of our First Australians that idea suffered of course a serious setback when John Howard decided to go it alone in 1999 with a catastrophically tin-eared draft which inspired or satisfied no one feeling the need to put my own money where my critical mouth was at the time I I actually drafted a text to my own which read something like this having come together in 1901 as a federation under the crown and the Commonwealth of Australia being now a sovereign democracy our people drawn from many nations we the people of Australia proud of our diversity celebrating our unity loving our unique and ancient land recognizing indigenous Australians as the original occupants and custodians of our land and believing in freedom and equality and embracing democracy and the rule of law commit ourselves to this our constitution that language was actually taken up as a joint submission to the government from the alp the democrats and the greens and it was in fact quite well received wider afield although one colleague was reported as saying who would have thought that gareth could produce an 83 word history of australia he usually takes that long just to clear his throat but it found no favor when mr howard and his words miss continuing my own conspicuous record of failure despite many efforts over the years as attorney general and other officers to make any mark at all on the australian constitution so with that personal record of failure I don't really dare to offer any more suggestions as to how we might now proceed but I do believe that such now is the general goodwill in the wider australian community on indigenous issues that I am optimistic genuinely optimistic that the necessary consensus is achievable even though it's going to take time and patience and a degree of political courage to advance these proposals what I do hope and believe is that some constructive creative ideas on both substance and process will emerge from this forum bringing together as it does so much expertise so much experience and so much wisdom from around australia and from around the world hosting this forum is something that ANU as australia's national university is very proud to do we were established immediately after the second world war by an active federal parliament to provide the nation with a center for research and knowledge that will guide our national future for more than 70 years we've been leading the nation and often the world in public policy focused research and important international and domestic issues we acknowledge that we have a responsibility ANU to continue to search for truth to uphold academic rigor and to share our findings with the world and it's an indispensable part of that responsibility for me for brian schmidt as our vice chancellor indispensable part of that responsibility to lead research and public policy on social issues including inequality and discrimination we at ANU want to be not just passive bystanders or commentators but we want to lead the nation in reigniting the debate and designing policies which remove discrimination and forge once and for all an absolutely equal relationship between average Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and non-indigenous Australians we've been a long time getting there and we've got some distance to go but i believe this week we will take a big step forward with a fantastically productive set of deliberations for which i wish all of us the best so thank you all enjoy the rest of the evening and have a wonderful today conference thank you