The Federal Government's submission to the Senate Inquiry into the Stolen Generation has aroused moral fury. Particular anger has been directed at the claim that the phrase "stolen generation" is inappropriate given that no more than 10 percent of Aboriginal children were separated from their parents.
A number of prominent Aborigines immediately made a dash for the Holocaust. Peter Yu said that the Howard Government had gone "beyond the white blindfold view of history to the David Irving school of denialism", and his sentiments were echoed by other luminaries such as Charles Perkins, Mick Dodson and Senator Aden Ridgeway.
To some extent, the Government has itself to blame for this overwrought reaction. Having successfully established "stolen generations" (the plural is the favoured form) as the phrase for the whole gamut of separations -- from totally unjustified forced removals to cases where children were sent to boarding schools with full parental approval -- the Aboriginal movement is most unlikely to relinquish such a powerfully emotive weapon.
The figure of 10 percent comes from the Australian Bureau of Statistics 1994 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Survey. But it was naïve to expect that anything that might be portrayed as an attempt to diminish the significance of what occurred would not be seen as highly provocative. The statement "there was never a "generation" of stolen children" could have been left out of the submission. It adds nothing to the Government's otherwise legitimate arguments.
The government is also partly at fault by previously being too reticent in demonstrating the shoddiness of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's (HREOC) inquiry into the issue. The HREOC report, Bringing Them Home, by Sir Ronald Wilson and Mick Dodson, was released in May 1997, and it is one of the most tendentious official documents to appear in recent years.
The report's failings were legion. Supposedly for "ease of reference" it referred to all separations as "forcible removal". This definitional misrepresentation was aided by the patronising tactic of treating Aborigines of the post-World War Two era as though they lacked free will, and assuming that parents who sent their children off to distant schools were usually acting under "duress" or "undue influence".
No attempt was made to obtain evidence from the missionaries or government officials who were involved in the separations, even when the individuals concerned sought to present their accounts of what actually occurred. One example comes to light in the book The Stolen Children, which presents a number of life stories from Bringing Them Home. It contains the following erratum slip:
"The publisher has been contacted by a party that denies certain allegations made in the Report of the National Inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. This party states the Inquiry process did not allow it to respond to the allegations in the Report". The "Inquiry process" fell down in many other ways. Embarrassing matters which might have detracted from the overall picture of wickedness that HREOC was determined to present were brushed aside. There was no discussion of the extent to which mixed-race children were rejected by at least some Aboriginal communities even until the 1960s -- a rejection that in some cases led to attempted or successful infanticide.
The inquiry claimed that the policies of removing Aboriginal children to assimilate them constituted "genocide" under the United Nations Genocide Convention. Bringing Them Home ignored the fact that the major proponent of the convention, Raphael Lemkin, specifically stated it should not be directed against policies which attempted to assimilate a group into the larger society. Nor was there any mention that assimilation policies directed at indigenous or tribal people were strongly promoted by international bodies at least until the 1960s, with the real opprobrium directed at anti-assimilationist countries like South Africa.
Worse, realising that the question of motives was crucial to the charge of genocide, Bringing Them Home stated that the people who drafted the genocide convention intended it to apply even when those carrying out the offending policies believed they were acting in the best interests of the children concerned. As its authority for this fallacious claim, the report refers to a single obscure document. But this document provides no support for the "genocide" charge, and indeed, there is a great discrepancy between what it actually states and what Bringing Them Home pretends it states.
But perhaps the real problem lies with the willingness of many journalists who pride themselves on their scepticism on other matters to suspend critical judgement when it comes to Aboriginal and human rights issues. Their lack of professional rigour has allowed many favoured organisations and individuals to become more and more careless intellectually.
For instance, it is reasonable to expect that when the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination attacks Australia -- as it has over the past couple of weeks -- journalists would present us with a list of the Committee's members and their backgrounds. Is, say, the Pakistani delegate Agha Shahi someone to pass judgement on Australia, given his strong support for his country's nuclear weapons program and passionate opposition to signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty?
The Howard government does not deny that Aborigines suffered a great many wrongs in the past, and that some of the effects continue into the present. The real "denialism" comes from those Aboriginal leaders and their white supporters who think that any attempt to portray accurately the complexities of our history detracts from the moral legitimacy of their cause.
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