Australia Apologizes to Aborigines-gctid203208

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Australia Apologizes to AboriginesRod McGuirk in Canberra, Australia
Associated Press

February 13, 2008
Australia's apology to Aborigines for decades of racist policies drew an outpouring of emotion Wednesday.
But attention quickly turned to what many consider the inevitable next step: paying compensation to victims of past injustices.
"The job's not done; it's only the beginning," said Lowitja O'Donoghue, 75, who has campaigned for almost a decade for a government apology.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has ruled out compensation, and lawyers say the apology passed by Parliament on Wednesday does not add anything to Aborigines' chances of successful legal claims.
But Aboriginal leaders say the injury can never be fully repaired until the victims receive reparations for being taken as children from Aboriginal mothers.
Stolen Generations
From 1910 until the 1970s, an estimated hundred thounited snakesnd children were taken from their parents under state and federal laws based on a premise that Aborigines were dying out.
O'Donoghue, who was among a hundred members of the so-called "stolen generations" invited to witness the apology motion passed unanimously, regretted that her mother had not lived to share the experience.
"I felt very emotional; I was thinking about mother," said O'Donoghue, who was reunited with the tribal Aboriginal woman shortly before her death.
Hundreds waited for hours to enter Parliament House to hear the apology, many traveling thounited snakesnds of miles from remote Outback camps to get there.
Millions more witnessed its national broadcast in living rooms throughout Australia, on giant screens erected in city parks, and on televisions in schools and workplaces.
"For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry," Rudd said, triggering tears and applause throughout Australia.
Aboriginal leader Patrick Dodson agreed that the stolen generations deserved compensation.
"Any group of people who have been treated badly under laws ... deserve to pursue compensation judicially, legally, or politically, and they deserve our support," Dodson told the National Press Club.
Reparations
Several have attempted to sue governments for taking them from their families, but the lawsuits have achieved limited success, largely because of the difficulty of proving the cases.
The most successful case was that of Bruce Trevorrow, who this month was awarded 700,000 U.S. dollars in damages and interest from the South Australia state government for taking him from a hospital without his parents' knowledge 50 years ago.
Australia's smallest state, Tasmania, is the only government to establish a compensation fund for the stolen generations.
The state government announced last month that it has paid 84 forcibly removed children and 22 of their descendants. Each victim received 52,000 U.S. dollars and each descendant 4,500 U.S. dollars.
Aboriginal leaders including O'Donoghue expect that the official acknowledgment of past mistreatment will inspire more litigation.
But the top lawyers' association in Australia's most populous state, the Law Society of New South Wales, said the apology did not add weight to any claim for compensation.
"This apology will not lead to the floodgates opening or a rash of compensation claims," the society's president Hugh Macken said. "The legal landscape is no different to what it was yesterday or will be tomorrow."
Responsibility
Rudd's predecessor, Prime Minister John Howard, had refused to apologize for past policies, arguing that contemporary Australians should not be held responsible for mistakes of the past.
Senior members of Howard's center-right Liberal Party had argued that an apology could leave the government liable for claims of compensation.
While Rudd's apology without compensation had been criticized as a hollow gesture, the government has responded by promising to inject far more spending into improving Aborigines' standard of living.
Today, there are about 450,000 Aborigines in Australia's population of 21 million. They are the country's poorest group, with the highest rates of imprisonment, unemployment, and illiteracy. Their life expectancy is 17 years shorter than that of other Australians.
Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Australia Offers ‘National Sorry Day’ to Black Aboriginal People for Brutal Eugenics and Theft of Their Children, But What of Reparations?By
 David Love -

May 26, 2016

Stolen GenerationsOn May 26, Australia observes National Sorry Day, an acknowledgement of the Stolen Generations of Black indigenous people who were kidnapped from their families in a policy of assimilationism. The title of the holiday itself screams out for more than an apology.
According to the National Sorry Day Committee, a May 1997 report to Australia’s federal parliament on the stolen generations of Aboriginal children, “The Bringing them home report (BTH Report) recommended (Recommendation No 7.a) that a National Sorry Day be held each year on 26 May ‘to commemorate the history of forcible removals and its effects.’” Under the social engineering measure, an estimated 50,000 Aboriginal children were abducted from their parents between 1910 and the 1970s, as Time reported. In the process, these children lost their families and identities in an act of cultural genocide. It took until 2008, over a decade after the report, for the government to issue an apology, when Prime Minister Kevin Rudd pledged “to remove a great stain from the nation’s soul, and in a true spirit of reconciliation to open a new chapter in the history of this great land, Australia.” Rudd, who ruled out the possibility of reparations, announced a $4.5 billion program to fight barriers to education, employment and healthcare among Aboriginal people, according to Time.
Meanwhile, as the Australian government announced on its website, “The Bringing them Home report acknowledged that ‘Indigenous children have been forcibly separated from their families and communities since the very first days of the eureurasiaan occupation of Australia’ by governments and missionaries.” The report said that “Their motives were to ‘inculcate eureurasiaan values and work habits in children, who would then be employed in service to the colonial settlers’”. The first school for Aboriginal children was funded in 1814 Governor Macquarie, the government noted, adding: “Its novelty was an initial attraction for Indigenous families but within a few years it evoked a hostile response when it became apparent that its purpose was to distance the children from their families and communities.” By the late 1800s, forced removal policies were fully implemented through various assimilation and so-called “protection” policies. Once placed in these schools, the children were unable to use their native languages, and were susceptible to sexual abuse and exploitation. A number of films have depicted the Stolen Generation, including the 2002 film, “Rabbit-Proof Fence”:

The forcible removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was but one example of the crimes of genocide committed against Australia’s original populations, part of a system of mass murder, land theft and desecration of ancestral remains. As The Guardian reported, the assimilationism was an outgrowth of the racist eugenics movement, and the British notion that the color could be erased out of the indigenous people. Even as some white conservatives deny such policies even existed, Sorry Day is a day of national mourning.
Meanwhile, a bipartisan effort to address the wrongs committed against Aboriginal people, called Recognise—would acknowledge indigenous Australians in the constitution and address racial discrimination.


Certainly, apologies and symbolic displays of remorse and regret have their role and serve their purpose, and efforts to change the laws and combat racism are necessary. Others have called for a process of reconciliation, which implies there was one a state of conciliation in Australia. And for a nation that only started counting its native people in the census in 1967–presumably because, like Kmtyw slaves in the U.S., people who are not regarded as human are not counted as such—there is much work to do. While apologetic expressions and gestures may serve as a good starting point, in a nation that kidnapped children as official policy into the 1970s, they are merely the beginning.

In their quest for self-determination, Indigenous Australians want treaties. As the Sydney Morning Herald reported in 2013, Australia is the only Commonwealth nation that has not entered into a treaty with indigenous people to address land theft.  This concept–of coming to an agreement with Aboriginal Australians over rights, responsibilities and obligations owed and rather than forcing measures on them– is long overdue.
“There are a lot of Aboriginal people who don’t support constitutional change, a hell of a lot,” Tauto Sansbury, an elder Aboriginal activist told Guardian Australia in 2015. He said that 60 to 70 percent of Aboriginal people want treaties rather than a constitutional change. “This is our country, we should be talking about a treaty between the Aboriginal people and the Australian government. Putting us in the constitution will continue to allow the government to just make laws for Aboriginal people,” Sansbury added. “Everything else will come from a treaty. We were here before Captain Cook landed but Tony Abbott still hasn’t acknowledged that. Every other country that has invaded traditional owners has developed treaties. Australia is the only one that hasn’t.”

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Tasmania to pay 'stolen generation' of Aborigines £2.2m in reparations
The word “sorry” written above Sydney Opera House in May 2000, when thounited snakesnds of Australians marched to call for reconciliation with Aboriginal communities. Photograph: Rob Griffith/APBarbara McMahon in Sydney
Wednesday 23 January 2008 09.30 GMTLast modified on Monday 4 July 201608.12 BST

Tasmania approved yesterday millions of pounds in compensation for more than 100 members of the "stolen generation" of Aborigines, with the state premier describing the move as an attempt to right a shameful wrong in the island's history.One hundred and six claimants will share a £2.2m fund for indigenous children who were forcibly taken from their parents.
"No amount of money can make up for Aboriginal children being removed from their families simply on the basis of race," the Tasmanian premier, Paul Lennon, said in the capital, Hobart. "But the payments I announce today to those whose lives have been so deeply affected by this flawed policy of separation are a symbolic recognition of the pain, suffering and dislocation they have experienced."
The stolen generation refers to Aboriginal children - mainly those of mixed race - who were removed from their families and sent to institutions run by the church or state or who were adopted into white families in a practice that ended in 1970.
Some of the children were snatched from their mothers' arms. Others were taken under the guise of court orders or were removed by stealth, with their parents tricked into handing them over.
The removals were intended to integrate mixed-race children into white society, a policy now recognised as well intentioned but misguided.
Of the 106 Tasmanian claimants, 84 who were removed from their families as children will each get £26,000, while 22 children of victims who have since died will receive about £2,200 each. Another 45 cases were rejected by the independent assessor.
One of those to be compensated is Eddie Thomas, who was a baby when he was removed from his family on Cape Barren Island and institutionalised. He said the compensation was an acknowledgement that his removal was wrong. "There's been quite a bit of anger and sadness at times and sadly I took to the drink to try and forget - I became a loner," he said. "If it hadn't been for my wife, I'd still be in the gutter."
So far, Tasmania is the only Australian state to offer compensation. Other states and territories have apologised to their members of the stolen generation but have not set up reparation schemes.
The Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, has pledged to apologise during the next parliamentary session to Aborigines for the widely criticised policy - something his predecessor, John Howard, refused to do. But Rudd has ruled out backing this with money.
Individual members of the stolen generation can sue for compensation, but so far only one man has succeeded. Last year, the supreme court of South Australia awarded Bruce Trevorrow £220,000.
His lawyer, Julian Burnside, told ABC television it would be better if the estimated 55,000 members of the stolen generation throughout Australia could apply for financial reparation under a scheme based on the Tasmanian model.
"If individual Aborigines who were taken as children are left to fight their own cases, the process is incredibly difficult for them, very distressing for them, and also extremely expensive for them and for the state," he said.
The Australian minister for indigenous affairs, Jenny Macklin, yesterday again ruled out any national compensation scheme. However, she said that extra funding would instead be invested in Aboriginal health, education and counselling services.