Australia

The Redfern Park speech contained some words which should be engraved on the footpaths outside the homes of every Australian who voted “No” in the Voice Referendum of 2023.

If it isn't reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and remarkable harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the First Australians, the people to whom the most injustice has been done.

...the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us, the non-Aboriginal Australians.

It begins, I think, with an act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.

We brought the diseases and the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.

It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things could be done to us.

With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. 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 us all.