Premier Jay Weatherill has baulked at Opposition calls for a conscience vote on a bill to establish a compensation fund for the state’s indigenous stolen generations.
Liberal leader Steven Marshall is set to re-introduce a private member’s bill that was defeated last year and lapsed when parliament was prorogued, designed to streamline compensation claims for Aboriginal people who were forcibly removed from their families by the state.
Marshall is urging a conscience vote, citing internal division within the Labor Party on the bill, which ALP sources have confided to InDaily is considered by some on the Right to be an expensive investment with “no votes in it”.
But Weatherill denied the party was split, arguing: “I don’t think it’s a conscience issue.”
“It doesn’t fit within our definition of a conscience vote,” said.
The rejection comes as his Trade Minister Martin Hamilton-Smith today urged a conscience vote on a bill to wind South Australia’s clocks forward half an hour, in line with the eastern seaboard.
Nonetheless, Weatherill maintains there will be “a Government position” on stolen generations reparations.
The issue has been on the parliamentary agenda since 2010, a year before he took over as Premier from Mike Rann.
“It’s all been going very well,” he said this week.
“It may well be that there’s a third way and that’s what they’ve been discussing (with the Opposition).”
He said the Government wanted to promote a package that went “beyond just individual compensation” to also deal with “community reparations, if you like”.
Attorney-General John Rau said he was yet to examine the issue “in great detail”, and “we need to have further discussions with the Opposition about it”.
“The model, I think, that offers the greatest opportunity for fairness inasmuch as we’re talking about an individual compensation scheme, is one broadly similar to children in state care arrangements,” he said.
“I’m optimistic, from what I’ve heard, that there will be a satisfactory landing on this…I’m positive there’s a will on our side of politics to find a solution to this problem; we’re really down to the point of discussing what the fine grain of that solution looks like, and how it can be implemented in a way that’s not unnecessarily burdensome or legalistic, or subject to infinite impediments in the courts through judicial review or appeals or goodness knows what else.”
