* In 2010, towards the end of the year, when most politicians were already on holiday, fifty asylum seekers died in a wreck…. The survivors of the wreck were detained on the island but asked that their dead family members be buried on the mainland. The Labor government agreed. Nine weeks later, near the end of summer, several were flown to Sydney, along with other relatives of the dead, to attend the funerals….
The Canberra Times recounted an extraordinary political attack:
Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison told 2GB radio he believed Australians would be ‘angry’ to learn the Government was paying for grieving families to fly from Christmas Island to the mainland to attend the funerals.
‘Well, there’s nothing in the refugee convention which covers this situation and places an obligation on us and I think people would be, rightly from what they’ve heard, angry about this,’ Morrison said. ‘I think they’ll be wanting an explanation from the minister.’ And they did: talkback radio switchboards, from 2GB to Canberra’s 666 ABC, lit up with irate callers. Morrison repeated his criticism of the Government paying for the funerals throughout the day of the funeral.
That night television bulletins carried heart-rending scenes of a woman screaming and collapsing collapsing in grief, and a bereft little boy now identified as nine-year-old Seena Akhlaqi Sheikhdost, who lost both parents and a brother in the tragedy, clinging to relatives for comfort.
* Morrison was also asked about the Uluru Statement from the Heart, then a year old. With no preamble, Morrison – perhaps to placate the members of his party upset by his proposal for a new Indigenous day – stated his position: ‘I don’t support a third chamber.’
The Uluru Statement from the Heart had been agreed upon, after formal discussions lasting two years, at a meeting of Indigenous people near the great and sacred rock Uluru, in the middle of a desert in the middle of Australia, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 referendum. The statement connects present harm to ancient wrongs, and calls for redress and repair. One form that should take, the statement says, is a Voice for Indigenous Australians enshrined in the Constitution.
In the plainness of its language and the clarity of its arguments, the Uluru Statement from the Heart is one of the most beautiful documents in Australian history. It has the potential to be one of the most significant. Here is a small section (the full statement is less than 500 words long):
Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people. Our children are aliened from their families at unprecedented rates. This cannot be because we have no love for them. And our youth languish in detention in obscene numbers. They should be our hope for the future.
These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country.