Paul Keating's 1992 Redfern speech

MAN: It now gives me great pleasure to introduce the Prime Minister of Australia, Mr Paul Keating, to officially launch the International Year of the World's Indigenous People.

PAUL KEATING: Well, I'm very pleased to be here today at the launch of Australia's celebration of the 1993 International Year of the World's Indigenous People. It will be a year of great significance for Australia. It comes at a time when we've committed ourselves to succeeding in the test which so far we've always failed. Because, in truth, we cannot confidently say that we've succeeded if we've not managed to extend opportunity and care, dignity and hope to the Indigenous people of Australia — the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. 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 that 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. The message should be that there's nothing to fear or to lose in the recognition of historical truth or the extension of social justice or the deepening of Australian social democracy to include Indigenous Australians. In fact, as all of us, I think, here know, there's everything to gain. Even the unhappy past speaks for this. Where Aboriginal Australians have been included in the life of Australia, they have made remarkable contributions. Economic contributions, particularly in the pastoral and agricultural industry. They are there in the frontier and exploration history of Australia. They were there in the wars. In sport to an extraordinary degree. In literature and art and in music. In all these things, they've shaped our knowledge of this continent and of ourselves. They've shaped our identity. They are there in the Australian legend. And we should never forget they've helped build us this nation. I think we're beginning to see how much we owe the Indigenous Australians and how much we've lost by living so apart. I said we non-Indigenous Australians should try to imagine the Aboriginal view. It can't be too hard. Someone imagined this event today, and it's now a reality and a great reason for hope. But there's one thing today we cannot imagine. We cannot imagine that the descendants of people whose genius and resilience maintained a culture here through 50,000 years or more, through cataclysmic changes to the climate and environment, and who then survived two centuries of dispossession and abuse, will be denied their place in the modern Australian nation. We can't imagine that. We cannot imagine that we'll fail. And with the spirit that is here today, I'm confident that we won't fail. I'm confident we will succeed in this decade. Thank you very much for listening to me.