Ron Brunton is an anthropologist at the Institute of Public Affairs on the Sunshine Coast.
The Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission should apologise to all Australians for its controversial ‘stolen children’ report.
It will be a long time before we see an end to the shockwaves caused by last May’s release of “Bringing them Home”, the report of the stolen generations inquiry.
Many Australians are deeply distressed about the often callous way in which the church and state officials dealt with the Aboriginal children and their families and feel the Howard Government’s response to the report has been inadequate.
The forcible removal of innocent children from caring parents is clearly indefensible. Other Australians need to accept that at various times, in many parts of the country, Aboriginal parents had a well grounded fear that authorities might take their children with little excuse and that this is an important reason behind the continuing legacy of Aboriginal bitterness.
But while a nation which lays claim to being decent cannot ignore the wrongs of the past, it does need to be given a history that is balanced and trustworthy.
The only proper way of responding to injustice is by offering the truth and in the long run we do no favours to the victims of the past be misrepresenting their experiences or omitting embarrassing evidence. We only make it easier for other people to dismiss what has happened.
Unfortunately,, this obvious point seems to have escaped the Human Rights and Equal opportunities Commission, the federal body which conducted the “stolen generations” inquiry.
In Melbourne today, the Institute of Public Affairs is launching my booklet, “Betraying the Victims”, which critically examines a number of issues covered by the “stolen generations” report.
The report’s most outrageous finding is that the policies of removing Aboriginal children to assimilate them into the broader Australian society constituted “genocide” under the United Nations Genocide Convention because they were designed to destroy Aboriginal “cultural units”.
“Bringing them Home” did admit this issue had been considered by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which had concluded the policies were adopted “not for the purpose of exterminating a people but for their preservation”. However, it said the “stolen generations” inquiry had conducted “much wider research”, which showed the royal commission was wrong.
But this supposed research is so faulty that it raises questions about the authors of “Bringing them Home”.
For instance, the question of the motives is crucial to the charge of “genocide”. “Bringing them Home” argues that people who drafted the genocide convention saw it as applying even if the offending policies were believed to be in the best interests of the children concerned.
As its authority for this argument, the report refers to an article in a rather obscure American legal journal. But this article provides no support for the “genocide” claim. In fact, there is great discrepancy between what the article states and what “Bringing them Home” pretends it states.
The “stolen generations’ report simply ignores a great deal of information that might undermine its frivolous claims. For example, the major proponent of the UN Genocide Convention. Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, specifically stated that it should not be directed against policies which attempted to assimilate a group into a larger society.
Indeed, the assimilation of indigenous and tribal people was strongly promoted by international bodies at least until the 1960s.
And when Australia’s assimilation policy was first being formulated, one common strand in the views of all Aboriginal spokespeople in the south was the desire for incorporation into white society.
The strongest evidence that the “genocide” claim is bogus is that nowhere in the report is there any suggestion that the people responsible for the child removal policies and practices should be brought to trial.
But the UN Genocide Convention is emphatic on the matter - anyone with complicity in genocide must be punished.
“Bringing them Home’s” treatment of other issues also is very defective. Its definition of “stolen children” is extremely confused.
It seems to be suggesting that Aboriginal children in remote areas who were required to attend school under compulsory education laws applying to all Australian children were “forcibly removed”.
But, in other places, it attacks the existence of separate laws for indigenous children. In other words, Australia is denounced both for discrimination against Aboriginal children and for non-discrimination against them.
There are few grounds for confidence that the accounts offered by “Bringing them Home” were truly representative of either the “stolen generations” as a whole or of the evidence presented to the inquiry.
There is no evidence that the inquiry attempted to distinguish possibly false or exaggerated claims that witnesses made about their experiences from genuine claims.
And essential summary data about witnesses, such as the official reason for removal, has not been provided.
Furthermore, the report wrongly denies the great similarities between the removal of Aboriginal children and government interference in the lives of children from poor and supposedly dysfunctional non-Aboriginal families.
Whether John Howard should apologise to the “stolen generations” for the actions of previous governments for which he personally had no responsibility, one thing is certain: as the organisation that is responsible for such an unworthy report, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission should apologise to all Australians: Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal.