Transcript of the Proceedings of the Conference
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AUSTRALASIAN STUDY OF PARLIAMENT GROUP (Queensland Chapter) PARLIAMENT AND THE PEOPLE: PARTICIPATION, REPRESENTATION AND ENGAGEMENT TRANSCRIPT OF PROCEEDINGS FRIDAY, 11 JULY 2008 Brisbane 2008 Australasian Study of Parliament Group Conference FRIDAY, 11 JULY 2008 2008 Australasian Study of Parliament Group Conference Conference met at 9.10 am Ms MALONE: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, honoured guests, one and all. It is my very great pleasure to welcome you to the 2008 Australasian Study of Parliament Group Conference, Parliament and the People: Participation, Representation and Engagement. We are very grateful to have such a wonderful turnout for this conference; thank you all for attending. I would like to pay my respects at this stage to the traditional owners of the land on which we meet and especially to pay my respects to Uncle Joe Kirk, who has come to give a welcome for us this morning. For those who have not had an association with the Australasian Study of Parliament Group before, the Australasian Study of Parliament Group was formed with a charter to bring together parliamentarians, academics, members of the media, parliamentary staff and other interested persons to foster research and debate about our parliamentary institutions. The conference that we are holding will certainly contribute to that debate and has stimulated considerable research. The proceedings for this conference are being recorded by Hansard and will be available in August on the ASPG web site. It is now my very pleasant duty to introduce to you the Deputy Speaker of the Queensland parliament, Mr John English. Mr ENGLISH: Thank you very much. It is a pleasure to be here this morning. Before I give you my official welcome, it is much more important that I introduce Uncle Joe Kirk, one of the Turrbul elders, to give you a formal welcome to country. Please welcome Uncle Joe. UNCLE JOE KIRK: Good morning, everyone. I will give you a little bit of information about myself from the Turrbul people in the Brisbane area. I was born and raised in the Cherbourg Aboriginal community in the South Burnett, which is only a 2½ hour drive from here. I left the community at the age of 15 after 13 years of living there and then I moved to Brisbane where my family is now living at Inala and Ipswich. I live in Ipswich at the moment, but I have been around the Brisbane area now for over 28 years. I was around in the old days—in the rock n’ roll days—when Cloudland existed and we would go ballroom dancing and do our traditional dances as well. So I have been around in this area, which is the area of Turrbul and the Jagera people across the river, for many years. In saying that, I would like to give you a bit of information about the Turrbul people and my family. My mother was part of the stolen generation. She was moved from the Ayr area in north Queensland and moved to Cherbourg as a young woman. My father was taken from St George. He is part of the Kamilaroi people and he was moved to Cherbourg also. He walked from the Woodford area to Kilcoy. They walked and it took them over six weeks to walk to Cherbourg in the South Burnett. My father’s mother was Eliza Lane and she was part of the Turrbul elders. My mother is from the Fisher family which is Birri Gubbi from north Queensland. My mother and father met on Cherbourg many years ago. She was a housemaid in Murgon and my father worked on the state forestry in Wondai. Later on they then moved into other areas as they became older and had children. From this area and the Turrbul people, my grandmother in our Dreamtime would tell us stories about the great river in Brisbane and about the great fire that Brisbane had. They can remember way back in the early days when Brisbane’s Queen Street caught on fire and many of the shops and businesses were burnt down. There are eight tribes all told for the Brisbane area and they all lived in harmony with one another. They had their differences of opinion. Just like parliament does today, they used to meet. If you know Brisbane at all, they used to meet at the old flour mill on Wickham Terrace on the hill. They used to congregate, too, at the old Newstead hotel and motel. They also used to go out to Mount Coot-tha and on Coronation Drive down the Brisbane River and canoe and raft across the Brisbane River to the southbound people. They had a really enjoyable time. They lived in harmony with many of the tribes around here, even when the Waka Waka people from the South Burnett would come down and the Birri Gubbi people would come down. They would have celebrations down here and share their language and their traditions with one another. On behalf of the traditional owners and my ancestors in the Dreaming, I would like to welcome you here today to Parliament House and hope you have a terrific time acknowledging what goes on here, like we do as traditional owners. I am involved also in social justice in Ipswich. I am part of the elders group in Ipswich and in Brisbane here sitting on the bench of the Murri Court. We relay to the magistrate the things that Indigenous people can benefit from by having their own Indigenous court. It has been a wonderful time in that process of acknowledgement in the justice system so that now the Aboriginal people have a voice with community elders sitting on the bench and making things a little bit better for the justice system across-the-board, because we know that the justice system is important to all families and the court is open because we have mixed marriages in Aboriginal culture now too. So it is not only a Murri court. Murri is a word for Aboriginal within this state and it is Kurris in New South Wales. In saying that, I would like to welcome you all to this traditional land of ours. Uncle Joe Kirk then gave a traditional welcome. That means hello and welcome to this land and parliament today. Thank you very much. Brisbane - 1 - 11 Jul 2008 2008 Australasian Study of Parliament Group Conference Mr ENGLISH: Thank you very much. I respectfully acknowledge the traditional owners of the land upon which this event is taking place and the custodians of the sacred land of our state. I would like to acknowledge honourable members of parliament from across Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. I would like to acknowledge the Hon. Kev Rozzoli, ASPG President; Nonie Malone, ASPG Queensland Chapter chair and the conference organiser, and I will be saying more about Nonie’s hard work soon; Dr Elaine Thompson, the ASPG journal editor; parliamentary staff; academics; distinguished guests; ladies and gentlemen. I am here representing the Speaker this morning. As is usual, I have been provided with a speech. It is quite lengthy. I had a look at it to see if I could do some editing. However, I have to say that I found it difficult to edit because there are some acknowledgements of people’s hard work, which of course you cannot edit out. Queensland is unique in that we are the only unicameral parliament. So I think it is important that I try to work my way through this speech. I hope I do not bore you this morning, but I found the speech interesting and I hope you do too. Welcome to the 25th annual ASPG national conference, the fourth such ASPG conference to be held here in Queensland. In particular, I wish to welcome everyone who has travelled from interstate and internationally to be here today. I am sure you will enjoy your time here in Queensland. The theme of this conference is Parliament and the People: Participation, Representation and Engagement. I am here to welcome you to the Queensland parliament today in my capacity as Deputy Speaker of the Legislative Assembly. The Speaker, Mr Mike Reynolds, is returning from Adelaide this morning after attending the 39th Presiding Officers and Clerks Conference. I am sure we are going to have a better time here than he had in poor old Adelaide! My apologies to the South Australian representatives. The Speaker has asked me to pass on his apologies to you all for not being able to deliver this welcome. However, he will be joining us during the day to participate in the conference. As the member whose electorate covers Carbrook, you will understand that I have other matters on my plate at the moment and I will not be joining you for the conference, so my apologies for that. I am very happy to be here in Mr Speaker’s place and welcome you all to Brisbane on this lovely winter’s day. I trust that you all enjoyed the reception at Government House last night and enjoyed meeting our Governor and our soon to be future Governor- General. The next two days promise to be action packed and thought provoking. At the outset, I wish to congratulate Nonie Malone and her team of conference organisers for putting together such a diverse and interesting conference program. Nonie has been the ASPG Queensland Chapter chair for five years. She has done a fantastic job of organising a number of functions each year. But I am sure she will acknowledge that the organisation of this conference has been her biggest achievement to date.