I begin by acknowledging the first Australians on whose land we meet and whose cultures we celebrate as the oldest continuing cultures in the human history.
When you say that, it still takes your breath away. It reflects I believe not just the extraordinary privilege we have in this country of having among us our indigenous brothers and sisters, but what parallels that is also the great responsibility which is our lot as well, an extraordinary thing, the oldest continuing cultures in human history and still among us here in this land we call Australia.
Tonight we honour a great Australian.
Tonight we celebrate the contribution to our nation of a great Australian.
Tonight we award the Sydney Peace Prize to Patrick Dodson.
Patrick has been called and rightly so “the father of reconciliation”.
The citation for his award of the Sydney Peace Prize reads, in part:
“For courageous advocacy of human rights, for distinguished leadership of the reconciliation movement and for a lifetime of commitment to peace and justice.”
These are great words and they describe a great man. Throughout his life - as a priest, as the inaugural chairman of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and as a leader of the Lingiari Foundation - Patrick has worked to bring people together.
Through his deeds and his words, he has given us an example of what leadership can achieve, of what leadership can inspire and what leadership can all give us to hope for.
Hope is a precious commodity in life. Hope points to the possibilities of the future rather than simply being weighed down with the despair of the past.
In the United States we have seen the triumph of hope, we have seen the exuberant triumph of hope. The triumph of hope after some centuries of despair.
And with hope now forming the basis of a new program of policy for America, for the world and for the future.
Senator Obama now faces a mountain of expectation.
Senator Obama's story has become the inspiration of a nation and now he carries the aspiration of the world. A world hungry for solutions, a world tired of excuses.
But the world must give him time, because the global challenges we face are great, they are deep and they are broad.
But together as people of good will the great challenges of peace, the great challenges of our planet and its survival and the great challenge and the enduring challenge of a proper sharing of the resources of the earth - these challenges can be met and they can be overcome. That is the message of hope.
Patrick has dedicated his life to closing the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.
It is a goal that this government shares.
Closing the gap is a national priority, it is a national necessity. The gap itself is a national obscenity.
We must give Indigenous Australians hope, we must give Indigenous Australians the rational basis for hope, not pious promises but concrete programs of action to turn hope into reality, that is our charge.
Hope that Indigenous Australians can have the same opportunities for the future that the rest of Australia takes for granted.
We as a Government have set concrete targets.
* halving the gap in infant mortality rates;
* halving the gap in reading, writing and numeracy for children
* halving the employment gap; and
* Over the next generation: closing the 17 year gap in life expectancy - the obscenity of all obscenities.
And, in the next five years:
* giving every Indigenous four year old in remote communities access to an early childhood education.
These are tough targets. And we will be attacked for not meeting them. But we are absolutely determined with every fibre of our being and every element of our political personality to have a go.
And do more than that - to summon forth the resources of the nation, both governments at all levels and with our corporate community and the community at large, to turn these targets into reality.
The alternative, which is not to set ourselves these goals to realise, is simply to wallow. To engage in a rolling seminar of national hand-wringing. I do not believe that is the stuff of which Australians are made. We identify a problem, we identify a path through a problem. We resolve to act. And then we act. And that is the course of action we propose for this enduring scourge on the nation's soul.
Achieving this, that is closing the gap, is a national imperative that will shape Australia's future. It will shape how we view ourselves, it will shape how the world views us. That is a sobering reality.
The national apology has been a necessary first step. But it is only a first step. And it was conceived as a first step to build a bridge called respect between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Because in the absence of respect for one human being and another, nothing, nothing can be achieved. Nothing of permanence, nothing that can endure. Nothing of substance.
To build a bridge of respect. A bridge built by doing the simplest, but at the same time the hardest of things. And that was simply to say ‘sorry'.
But in doing so, building a bridge to the future.
A bridge on which we can now join hands with confidence to forge a common future. That was our aspiration. That must be our destiny.
All Australians have a role in closing the gap.
The targets of which I spoke before form the basis of closing the gap and this in turn forms the basis of a major reform agenda that has put Indigenous Australians at the heart of this Government's agenda.
We are committed to some basic guiding principles in how we go about this.
First, evidence.
The Government's abiding determination is hard data - what actually works.
We're not interested in what is popular or what might be ideologically fashionable with the left or the right or the ups or the downs.
We're only interested in what gets results - hard results, measurable results, results that turn closing the gap from being a policy into a reality. That is the goal.
Second, we know that Indigenous Australians must be deeply engaged in developing the solutions.
Otherwise the solutions simply will not work. They will exist on paper. They will be the stuff of seminars, the rolling national seminar of enduring national hand-wringing of which I spoke before.
What we need instead is deep engagement on the part of our indigenous leadership with the nation's leadership.
An engagement based on mutual respect and mutual responsibility.
In all of this, indigenous leadership is fundamental. And we know that efforts to rebuild indigenous communities won't get far unless indigenous leaders themselves drive this change. That's why tonight is so important.
Because we are recognising, and together we are honouring, an Australian leader.
A leader for Indigenous Australians, a leader for non-Indigenous Australians. A leader for all Australians.
Patrick Dodson is a bridge builder. He has been fundamental in moving the nation forward to a new phase of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations.
He's a man who understands the past, but a man who is focussed on the future.
Someone who understands the importance of the cultural ties that bind. A true Australian leader. A man of forthright views. A man of plain speaking. Sometimes exceptionally plain speaking, Patrick. But we forgive you for that, we understand the reason why. And we respect you for it. Because these are the signs of the strength of leadership.
We are determined as the government to find more ways of supporting and nurturing indigenous leadership. Leadership from elders, leadership from young people, leadership from women, leadership from men, leadership in the most remote communities. Leadership in regional communities, leadership across our urban communities.
A starting point, of course, is forging new approaches in Indigenous education.
Because education is the key to expanding young people's life chances.
And a decent education means real choices about life and work opportunities.
It means new pathways to employment and higher living standards.
A decent education is the most powerful antidote to disadvantage that there can ever be.
And a decent education also helps to develop community leaders.
We are also working with dedicated teachers in local schools in remote communities who are working hard to turn around school attendance and improve student achievement.
Teachers however, do more than provide an education.
They inspire their students. They help to develop the next generation of leaders.
And that's why teachers are so important. They are the unsung heroes of the nation.
They have the nation's future in their hands and that is so much more the case in the Indigenous communities of Australia as well.
And that is why our teachers deserve our absolute support and our absolute respect.
A decent education can transform children's lives.
Take Patrick Dodson's own story.
A student first at local schools in the Northern Territory, and later a boarder and school captain at Monivae College in Victoria, Patrick Dodson is the embodiment of the power of education. And its forceful link to leadership.
Of course, education is part, but unless we move also on health and on housing and then cross the entire spectrum of reform, our targets of closing the gap will not be realised. That's why we must advance on all fronts and advance together in partnership with the Indigenous leadership of our nation.
Employment is important. We are reforming the Universal Employment Service program and indigenous employment programs to give Indigenous people the skills and training they need to get and to keep a job.
We are also developing a business action agenda to harness the commitment and will of the corporate sector to help close the gap.
Last week here in Sydney I helped launch the Australian Employment Covenant, a major private sector initiative driven by Andrew Forrest to create 50,000 jobs for Indigenous Australians.
Once again, this will be hard to do. It is easy to say, it is much harder to do. But if I experience one thing as we launched that Aboriginal and Australian Employment Covenant last week, it was this: the resolve of the corporate leadership of the nation to again end the hand wringing and get on with the business of creating jobs and permanent jobs for indigenous Australians across the country.
We see this in the corporate community. We see this in the education community. We see this in our sporting community. We see an extraordinary spirit across the entire breadth of the Australian community to take the spirit that was alive in the apology and to turn it into something new and good for our nation.
Much needs to be done and each of you in this great hall here in this great university in Sydney tonight have a role to play. And as you leave tonight I challenge you to reflect on what that role might be in your life.
A major and consistent thrust of Patrick Dodson's leadership has been to emphasise the importance of culture.
Culture and economics, tradition and jobs, these are not mutually exclusive propositions. They are mutually reinforcing propositions, seen correctly.
That is why we will begin the dialogue necessary to acknowledge the unique contribution of Indigenous Australians into our founding document, the Australian Constitution.
Closing the gap and respecting the inherent wealth of Indigenous cultures is a great national challenge and a great national opportunity.
And we all have a role to play - governments, Indigenous Australians, the corporate world, the community sector, the wider community. Each of us as individuals.
And it is a challenge that needs many more leaders to turn into reality, leaders of the calibre of Patrick Dodson.
A true leader, of whom all Australians can be proud.
We are here tonight to celebrate a peace prize, a Sydney Peace Price. On peace in this country, we often take that thing called peace for granted. But peace is much more than the absence of conflict.
Peace ultimately is the presence of justice. The presence of fairness, the presence of equity, the presence of opportunity, the presence of dignity. And therefore, for social justice to be realised, each and every one of us, animated in the deepest pit of our souls, must become warriors for justice, each of us.
Because in so doing we become warriors for peace.
Patrick, as Prime Minister of Australia I congratulate you on being the recipient of the 2008 Sydney Peace Prize.
It is a recognition of the leadership role you have played in our nation for many, many, many years. And as Prime Minister I am honoured to present you with this, the 2008 Sydney Peace Prize.