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"Inspiring, encouraging, envisioning, emotionally demanding, great celebration, the beginning of the people's movement towards real reconciliation." These were some of the words used to describe this historic convention.
We welcomed the openness and generosity of spirit and the practical outcomes achieved.
The success of the convention was due in no small measure to the outstanding, visionary leadership, and the graciousness with which the Aboriginal leaders led us along the road towards the renewal of the nation through reconciliation.
As leaders of the Uniting Church, we recommit ourselves to the process of reconciliation. In Jesus Christ, God has reconciled the whole world to himself and has given his followers this ministry of reconciliation (Col 1:20, 2 Cor 5:18). In recommitting ourselves to reconciliation, we believe there are two major issues which the nation must address in the immediate future.
The Assembly Standing Committee in September 1996 issued an apology to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for the Church's involvement in this shameful part of the national history, and its failure to challenge the racism inherent in the practice. In issuing the apology the Standing Committee deliberately noted that the church's motives were those of Christian love as understood at the time, and acknowledged the faithful self-sacrificing service of many staff members and others who assisted the church's ministry in this area.
Because the practice of removing children from their families was carried out as government policy, healing of the hurt will begin only when the government which implemented the policies apologises on behalf of the nation. We hope the Government will move quickly to implement the recommendations contained in the report. We are very disappointed that the Government rejected major recommendations of the report before it was even tabled.
The policy aimed to wipe out the distinct identity of indigenous people, and so is correctly described as a policy of genocide.
We believe the starting point for working through the implications of the Wik decision is for native title claimants and pastoral leaseholders to negotiate local land use agreements based on co-existence.
In any case we are totally opposed to the diminution or extinguishment of rights of native title holders in order to expand the rights of pastoral leaseholders.
The 10-point plan leaves no possibility of negotiating co-existence. It proposes to provide virtual freehold title to pastoralists and to minimise Aboriginal rights. It declares the rights of pastoralists to be more important than those of indigenous people. That is discrimination.
Because Aboriginal identity is so closely bound up with relationship with the land, to wipe out more native title rights at this time is to continue the policies of destroying a people. Aboriginal people will not give up the struggle for land until they consider that a fair resolution has been achieved. The 10-point plan does not provide such a resolution.
We are therefore requesting the Government to return to the negotiating table with Aboriginal people and draft a new plan based on co-existence.
Meanwhile we will raise the above concerns with all members of the Federal Parliament in the next few days.
Signed by: Jill Tabart, President of the Assembly
Djiniyini Gondarra, National Chairperson of the Uniting Aboriginal and Islander Christian Congress (UAICC)
Gregor Henderson, Assembly General Secretary
Shayne Blackman, National Administrator, UAICC
John Brown, National Covenant Co-ordinator
Bill Hollingsworth, Chairperson of the UAICC Council of Elders
Brian Smith, Secretary of Frontier Services
Robert Stringer, Secretary for Social Justice
The Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, spiritual head of the world-wide Anglican Communion, was in the congregation as Hume recalled that in 1982 Pope John-Paul had come to Canterbury as a pilgrim, "to plead for unity, not to cajole anyone into it''.
Echoing the Pope's 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint, Hume said: "It is not the primacy as such that is open to debate, but the manner of its exercise. That is important. It does not threaten, and indeed should not.''
Cardinal Hume and Archbishop Carey were in Canterbury for three-day celebrations to mark the 1400th anniversary of St Augustine s arrival near Canterbury on his mission to evangelise the English.
Martin Kalungu-Banda, the national chairperson of CCJP, said the Land Lobby Group would work tirelessly to have the Land Act amended. He said the group had already started disseminating information on the Land Act in all dioceses "to help people make informed judgements on whether this is a good piece of legislation".
He added that the government would also be a target of the group's lobbying efforts. The Land Act gives Zambia s president authority over all the land in the country, according to Africa Information Afrique, a news service based in Harare, Zimbabwe. Until the passing of the act, chiefs controlled most of the land, which is farmed by peasants. Opponents of the act have claimed that it will make it easier for foreign investors to take control of the land and displace peasants from land they have occupied for decades.
In a pastoral letter to Uniting Church congregations, Dr Pitman urged all protagonists to seek a solution grounded in principles of responsible claims, good stewardship of the land and the right to a secure livelihood.
"Negotiations should be founded on established situations where pastoralists and indigenous people do coexist in harmony. Extreme voices on both sides of the argument must not be allowed to sabotage the possibility of a properly negotiated outcome."
"It is essential that in the quest for justice in relation to indigenous people, we do not perpetrate an injustice on farmers and graziers. They too have a deep affinity with the land. Their pain and frustration in regard to this matter has not been adequately recognised or acknowledged. I have a great deal of sympathy for those on the land, but am steadfast in my conviction that we must not visit any further injustice on our indigenous people."
"We need to help heal the divisions in our society in a way that minimises litigation and enables people to get on with their lives," said Dr Pitman.
"You must control and manage enterprises to make churches self-reliant and in the same way fight poverty amongst your flock," the Ugandan leader said in a statement read at the enthronement ceremony on 28 May of Jonah Lwanga as Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church in Uganda and Metropolitan of Kampala.
The enthronement, attended by hundreds of Orthodox believers, took place at St Nicholas Cathedral, Namungoona, a suburb north-west of Kampala.
In the speech read on his behalf by Prime Minister Kintu Musoke, President Museveni said: "You should use the funds you get from donors abroad as supplementary, but not depend entirely on handouts.
"Even donor churches will develop donor fatigue if churches failed to start their own self-sustaining projects."
The president appealed to donors to also facilitate the self-reliance of churches instead of giving them aid.
Archbishop Lwanga, who succeeds Theodorus Nankyama who died last year, was enthroned by Petros VII, Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and All Africa, who arrived in Uganda on 24 May.
One of the team members, Charles R. Ausherman, a minister of the Reformed Church in America and founder-president of the Institute for Development Training, told ENI the embargo was "immoral" because it used a political weapon against the most vulnerable sectors of the population.
The United Nations Security Council imposed sanctions on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990 and has said it will not consider lifting them until Iraq fully complies with UN monitors charged with overseeing the dismantling of Iraq s weapons programmes. However, in a limited "oil-for-food" deal which came into force last December, Iraq can sell some oil to raise money for humanitarian goods.
Ausherman was one of nine professionals from the United States, Switzerland and India specialising in obstetrics, paediatrics, public health and nursing who held a workshop in Baghdad from 13-16 May.
The team, which went to Iraq under the auspices of Venture Middle East, an evangelical agency that has been sending medical supplies to Iraq, was led by James Jennings, a Southern Baptist who heads Conscience International, an agency based in Atlanta, Georgia. A Middle East specialist who speaks Arabic, Jennings visited Iraq three times last year.
Ausherman, who formerly directed a planned parenthood programme for Church World Service, the relief agency of the US National Council of Churches, told ENI that a "superior health system" in Iraq formerly approached levels of the developed world, but now was "worse than many developing countries I've been to".
He said he had worked in 48 countries, but during the visit to Iraq — his first — he found health care there worse than in much of Africa.
He stressed that the group was not taking a political position on the Iraqi government."We go in with our eyes open," he said.
"But as a person of faith, it is hard for me to comprehend punishing the most vulnerable, the children and mothers, this way," he added.
While in Baghdad, the group had been able to obtain a report on health conditions in Iraq from the Iraqi Ministry of Health that the World Health Organization had prepared but refused to release, Ausherman said. He said its figures showed infant mortality at 92.7 per 1000, but even that was probably an undercount.
He said the delegation visited a number of hospitals and found the buildings were good, but had not been maintained in recent years and were extremely short of medicine. Many of the beds were empty because the hospitals were so short of supplies they could not do anything for people in need of treatment. "So children are just dying at home," he said.
PAULINE Hanson has said that Aboriginal children of the stolen generation are better off for being taken from their parents. Sir Ronald Wilson says the claim is ludicrous.
Sir Ron is president of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and author of a major report on the stolen generation. He is a former president of the Uniting Church's national Assembly.
Ms Hanson said: "Many of the children taken away are only alive today because they were taken. "They have probably lived considerably better and healthier lives as a result."
Sir Ron says: "The fact that the media gives so much coverage to this nonsense is very sad. What she says is not true." He says it is an understatement to say her claim that the stolen generation is better off makes him angry.
"That wasn't the experience of virtually all the 535 indigenous people who appeared personally before us," he says. "Nor was it the case with the other 1,000 or so stories to which we had access.
"The truth is that, even those who had the benefit of being brought up in a good home, either a foster home or an adoptive home, headed into trouble in adolescence.
"They had lost their mother. They had lost their language. They had lost their culture. They had lost their connection with land and with the traditional interest in land that the Commonwealth Law recognises.
"Perhaps the worst thing of all that this cumulative loss resulted in, was a loss of identity."
Ron says the shortest submission the inquiry received sums it up. "It was from a young man who had been adopted by a friend of ours. The adoptive father was chief justice in one of the states and became the governor of that state.
"When we met, his wife and our wife would talk about our adopted children. We hadn't adopted an indigenous child but they had adopted two Aboriginal boys.
"One of them came before us at the age of 22. I was particularly interested, as you can imagine, because I knew of his background.
"He was a wreck. He had been rejected by white society in adolescence when he tried to start socialising at school dances and the like.
"White society didn't want him. He had moved in privileged white circles and didn't know any other life. He was hooked on drugs. He had been in prison.
"He came before us and said simply: `I love mum and dad (meaning his adoptive parents). But I don't know who I am.' That summed it all up.
"Government policy had robbed him of his own connection with his own culture. He was rejected by both sides. He had no sense of belonging, no security."
Sir Ron says many other people have spoken of this sense of loss. "Lois O'Donohue has spoken of it several times. She says that she has been fortunate in her achievements and attainments but that she lost her mother, her language, her culture and her connection with land — and that nothing can fill that void."
Sir Ron says Pauline Hanson's claims are even less true in the case of those who were institutionalised.
"What education they got was directed at equipping them for menial work. Boys were sent out to do station work at 12 and 13. They were supposed to be paid, but anything they eared was put in trust for them — supposedly. They never got it. They got their keep in return for their work.
"The girls were sent out for domestic service. They would often come back pregnant."
Sir Ron says the inquiry heard many moving stories. "These stories are engraved on my heart," he says.
"To say the children were taken because they were neglected — it's rubbish!
"It was policy to extinguish their connection with their culture in the well meaning belief that they would have a better life and that it would remove a problem for Australia if they were assimilated into western society. "That was the policy. That's why so many of these children were taken.
"Many of them may have been deemed to be neglected, if one applied western standards of neglect. "That's still happening today. Separation is still going on today because welfare people are still applying those standards.
"Our recommendations, if they are accepted, will open up the way for Aboriginal communities, if they are willing, to take the responsibility for looking after their own children who are neglected. We endorse the principle of self-determination." Sir Ron says the worst thing the stolen generation endured was abuse and the fear of sexual abuse.
"We had a graphic picture of a home in NSW, a government institution, where the children were in dormitories, 20 to 30 children in a dormitory," he says.
"We heard how they would lie in bed at night, rigid in terror, when they heard the footsteps of one of the staff approaching the dorm. "Each child would be rigid with fear, wondering if tonight was going to be their night, the night they would be taken away and abused.
"I can picture those children rigid with terror, how they stopped breathing with fear, that tonight they would be taken.
"We heard stories of both boys and girls being abused. "We heard many stories of boys being abused.
"That's the answer to Pauline Hanson from the mouths of those children who were taken and who are now adults. These stories were told with tears running down their faces. You couldn't doubt their authenticity."
The inquiry has called for governments, churches and the Australian public to apologise for the pained caused to the stolen children.
Sir Ron has spoken publicly about one home, Sister Kate's in Western Australia. He was a moderator of the Presbyterian Church with the right — which he did not exercise — to sit on its board.
"We were proud of Sister Kate's," he says. "It was the nearest we could bring it to the family situation. We would engage cottage parents to be responsible for the five or six youngsters in the house.
"Obviously, some of those cottage parents were bad-eggs and took advantage of the children. It's quite understandable that the children were too scared to go to the superintendent and bottled this up. It's only now that it's coming out.
"Rob Riley, before he committed suicide last year, said he was raped in Sister Kate's."
Sir Ron believes the churches thought they were doing the right thing.
"The churches took children from the government. They thought that by taking them they were surrounding them with love and care that they wouldn't get in government institutions.
"The churches have asserted their ignorance of what was going on. They have said that they have believed that they were doing the right thing. Now in hindsight, they deeply regret their involvement and apologise to the Aboriginal people.
"In some cases, mission land has been returned to the people. "I was a church leader at that time. I have to take responsibility for the gross violation of rights and express my deep regret and sorrow."
Sir Ron argues strongly that a public apology is needed. He says that, during the inquiry, when the question of compensation was raised, countless people, particularly the older people, said: "Look, I'm not worried about money. Money can't bring back what I've lost."
He adds: "One lovely old lady in her 70s went on to say: ' But I would love to see my country before I die.' We've recommended that some money should be available so people like that can be taken back to see their country before they die.
"Others have said: 'We don't want money. But we would love to know why they did it and that they're sorry.'
"Our report tries to tell them why we did it.
"We've recommended that every parliament in this country should make an official apology and that they should do it in words that are in consultation with ATSIC, so that it's not just the western formality of an apology, but that it's what Aboriginal people themselves, would like to hear.
"And we would like a national Sorry Day."
Sir Ron said that he has had a great deal of support from many people, including church people during the controversies over the report — and especially since the government leaked its main contents last month before its official launch.
"I hate to say it, but I've never felt better," he says. "I'm carried on wings of prayer. It's been a wonderful response and it has moved me enormously.
"I'm so grateful for all the messages of support and prayers I've received, not only from the churches, but from community organisations and my own staff."
BY MARGARET VAN HEEKEREN, Market-Place
Hopes for a non-racially-biased outcome to the Prime Minister's ten point Wik plan rest on the Senate, according to a leading Church spokesman.
Fr Frank Brennan, who is monitoring the 'Wik'* debate with the National Council of Churches in Australia (NCCA), said church leaders are sympathetic to calls from pastoralists who want certainty but "you don't buy additional title or false certainty by wiping out the rights of one group".
The National Council of Churches has identified what it sees as four flaws in the plan, all of which, it considers, diminish the rights of Aborigines.
Brennan said the NCCA will continue to make strong statements calling for alterations as legislation is drawn up.
It is expected to go to the Senate by October.
He said while independent and minority party Senators would be unlikely to vote in any way that had an adverse outcome on Aborigines, Kim Beazley and his Labor Senators hold the key, but as yet haven't indicated which way Labor will vote.
"Aborigines who fear Labor has gone to water are awaiting evidence to the contrary," Fr Brennan said.
He said it's now uncertain whether Labor will argue for the rights of Aborigines to retain access to a national Native Title Tribunal.
It was also doubtful Labor would support calls for Aborigines to be given a chance to negotiate with mining companies over major developments.
The overriding concern was that the 10 point plan should not discriminate against Aboriginal people.
"If Howard were to deliver the 'buckets of extinguishment of native title' he would have to roll back the Racial Discrimination Act to allow Parliament to legislate in a racial discriminatory way," Frank Brennan claims.
Mr Brennan said Churches hoped, instead, the Act will be used as sieve to refine the 10-point plan.
"What the Government is doing is winding back Native Title to the time of Mabo.
It seems that we as a country don't have the will to maintain the extra concessions granted by Native Title.
"In a letter to the Prime Minister the NCCA's David Gill warned "it would be a tragedy for the nation if Aborigines were to be worse off, having won the Wik case".
The four problem areas identified by the NCCA in it's letter to the Prime Minister include:
(see Guide to Wik: http://www.atsic.gov.au/native/wik.htm)
As would be expected the Tax Department is meticulous in its guide-lines on which religious goods are exempt and which aren't.
Items mainly used for church services such as pews and sanctuary oil make the 'in' list of exemptions.
On the 'out' list, candles, candelabras, wine and incense, not used in church services — but they are exempt if it can be proved they are predominantly used in services.
While hymn sheets are exempt, paper for printing and photocopying isn't — so is it the ink that's exempt? Items of religious devotion, such as holy pictures, chalices, tabernacles, holy cards, and prayer beads are always exempt but beware if you're buying a religious medallion on a chain.
If the medallion comes on the chain and is not removable, it's exempt. However, removable chains attract the 32% tax.
If you go for the cheaper option and get the non-removable chain, make sure the medallion depicts a divinity or recognised saint, or it won't be exempt.
(I wonder where that leaves followers of the former St Christopher, who despite his demotion, is still a popular icon for travellers?) In its wisdom the Department has decreed that religious calendars indicating the Holy Days and Fast Days are exempt, but calendars that merely show scriptural texts are not exempt.
Finally, in case you were wondering if the taxman had forgotten anything he hasn't.
The Bible (and the Koran) are exempt, and to prove his generosity, both are exempt "regardless of who buys them or for what purpose".
The Uniting Church in Australia, which through its former denominations received into its institutions children separated from their families by government agents, has sent a letter to all Members of the House of Representatives and Senators.
Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal church leaders say there are two major issues the nation and parliament must address.
"The first is the need for a compassionate and positive national response to the report Bringing Them Home," the leaders, who all attended the Australian Reconciliation Convention, said.
"The policy and practice of separating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families has caused unspeakable pain and trauma to many individuals and families over the last century.......It has been perceived as so inhumane that it has been one of the two major causes of alienation of the whole Aboriginal community from the rest of Australia. Only a response that hears and feels this pain and offence at the profound level of the spirit can bring healing to those who were taken away, their families and the whole community."
The church has already made two apologies over the past three years and is attempting to help families re-unite, as well as negotiating other ways of compensating.
The leaders say the second major issue is native title to land. In their letter they say Mr Howard's "10-point plan" is unworkable and the Government must "abandon this plan and go back to the negotiating table with Aboriginal people."