Australia awaits apology
Australia awaits with anticipation next week’s long-overdue apology to the survivors of the Stolen Generations, their families and descendants. This landmark step towards reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians is something the previous Prime Minister, John Howard — that formidable opponent of human rights — conspicuously failed to do, despite the 1997 Bringing Them Home report being submitted to his government.
In contrast with the new Rudd Government’s decisive action to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and end the ‘Pacific Solution’ by which Australia has detained asylum seekers overseas, John Howard will be remembered for his 10 Point Plan to unpick the ‘bundle of rights’ inherent in Native Title, and his grand, departing insult to Aboriginal Australia: the Northern Territory military intervention.
Other Australian governments and institutions have apologised already. But this is the big one: the Federal Government acknowledging responsibility for the grievous harm it did with its racist assimilation policies — formalised in 1937 — that included forcibly removing indigenous children presumed to be of mixed heritage from their home, their family, their country, their culture, their mother.
Indigenous Australian children were forcibly removed from their families from virtually the start of European settlement in 1788, and the practice did not end completely until the 1980s. In the period examined by the Bringing Them Home inquiry — 1910-1970 — somewhere between 10 and 33 percent of all indigenous children were stolen. Most families have been affected. Proof of neglect was not required before indigenous children could be ‘stolen’ – their Aboriginality sufficed.
I have argued elsewhere that these practices constitute genocide. The UN’s 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide in a number of ways, including the forcible transfer of children of the targetted group to another group (Article 2e). Australia is a party to that Convention.
The life-long anguish of the children and their families surely constitutes the “serious mental harm” referred to in Article 2(b) of the Genocide Convention. Their forcible transfer has also impaired survivors’ education, employment prospects, income, health and relationships, while increasing the incidence of illicit drug use and adverse contact with (white) law.
Intent is also important in the definition of genocide. The Bringing Them Home inquiry found that the ‘ultimate purpose’ of the practice of forcible transfer was to control the reproduction of indigenous people with a view to complete biological and cultural assimilation into the non-indigenous population.
Leading opposition parties today announced they would support next week’s apology which may therefore be made on behalf of the whole Parliament rather than just the government. The text of the apology is still being finalised. It is not expected to include any commitment to compensation.
Whatever the final wording, they could do worse than Ross Stevenson and the incomparable John Clarke’s effort, written improbably enough for an ABC comedy series called The Games which parodied the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Check out Gina Riley, John Clarke and (the actor named) John Howard making Australia proud.
[…] Debate continues as to whether a national apology to the Stolen Generations will expose the government to compensation claims by survivors. Or whether wording the apology in a certain way can limit that exposure (as the government claims). Surely, this is to miss the point. If compensation is owed, it should be paid. Justice demands it. Australians should not be seeking to weasel out of it. […]