Many people are dismayed by the Howard government's attacks on United Nations human rights committees. But why should we take any notice of criticisms of our record coming from supposed "experts" from oppressive regimes such as Pakistan, China or Cuba? After all, even our own human rights "experts" seem unable to tell the truth about Australia.
Since the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission released Bringing Them Home in 1997, it has become increasingly clear that this report on the removal of part-Aboriginal children from their families is a most unreliable document. Instead of a rigorous and honest account of the injustices that Aborigines certainly suffered, HREOC set out to make the worst possible case against Australia.
And when the failings of Bringing Them Home are brought to its attention, HREOC ignores them, obviously confident that its friends in the media and the opposition parties will ensure that it suffers no harm as a result.
Two recent events have illustrated the effrontery of the people associated with HREOC. In its submission to the Senate Inquiry into the "stolen generations" the Howard government pointed out that Bringing Them Home had grossly misrepresented a 1970s study in Bourke NSW to suggest that as many as one in three Aboriginal children had been forcibly removed from their families.
The Bourke survey actually found that around one in sixteen children had been separated from their parents, and this also included children who had been hospitalised for long periods. Only less than one in thirty cases could conceivably be presented as falling within the "stolen generations" definition, and even these involved children who had been declared neglected because their parents were chronic alcoholics.
Nevertheless, when it prepared its own submission to the Senate in response to the government's criticisms, HREOC simply repeated the one in three figure, making no acknowledgement that this had now been shown to be bogus.
Even more brazen is the response of Bringing Them Home co-author and former HREOC president Sir Ronald Wilson to Justice O'Loughlin's Federal Court judgement in the Cubillo and Gunner "stolen generations" case in the Northern Territory. Sir Ronald claimed that the judgement "stands as an independent and informed confirmation of the history revealed in Bringing Them Home".
This is laughable. In fact, Justice O'Loughlin's findings demonstrate just how dubious a history Bringing Them Home presented. Unfortunately, few media commentators appear to have read the whole judgement, relying instead on a brief twelve paragraph summary.
In contrast to wild claims in Bringing Them Home of "wholesale removals" from the 1940s onwards, and the statement that by the 1950s, "most, if not all of the mixed descent children" in the Northern Territory had been placed in institutions, Justice O'Loughlin examined the actual figures. He concluded that the number of part-Aboriginal children in the Territory at any given date "far exceeded the ability of the Commonwealth to implement a policy of indiscriminate removal".
One of the reasons officials in the Territory removed part-Aboriginal children from their communities was the belief that they were not accepted by "full-bloods". This was strongly rejected by Bringing Them Home, which stated that all part-Aboriginal children "were recognised as 'children of the group', that is as Indigenous children" and "Aboriginal society regards any child of Aboriginal descent as Aboriginal".
Justice O'Loughlin came to a different conclusion. Even one of Peter Gunner's own part-Aboriginal witnesses conceded that he believed that "his life, as a small child had been at risk". The judge found that there was evidence of a wide range of situations in different communities -- "warmth and loving care for the children on the one hand: evidence of death and rejection on the other".
The Federal Court decision also demonstrates that Sir Ronald Wilson and HREOC were credulous and irresponsible in not raising any questions about the stories told by witnesses to their inquiry and refusing to ask for corroboration.
Justice O'Loughlin identified a number of situations where Cubillo or Gunner were either deliberately misleading the court or "very unreliable" witnesses. He also noted his concern that they were engaged, even if not intentionally, in "exercises of reconstruction, based, not on what they knew at the time, but on what they have convinced themselves must have happened or what others may have told them".
It appears that even Cubillo and Gunner's lawyers did not think much of the evidentiary value of Bringing Them Home, for as Justice O'Loughlin himself noted, they made no reference to it during the trial.
Clearly, it is only through the courts that we can get an honest account of the "stolen generations" issue. Our academics are no better than HREOC, and those who privately admit that the history presented in Bringing Them Home is highly suspect are unwilling to condemn the report in public.
Indeed, some academics go further, and actively suppress anything that might cast doubt on the received wisdom about the "stolen generations". Last week I spoke with a Ph.D. student from a southern university who had been doing part-time tutoring to support his studies. After he told a class that what had happened to the Aborigines was not the same as what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust, some students complained about his "insensitivity" on Aboriginal issues, and he was taken off the course.
And on the day the Cubillo judgement was announced, a friend who is studying a Human Services unit at QUT Carseldine asked if I would be willing to address his class to present an alternative to what he thought were very one-sided accounts of the "stolen generations". But his lecturer sent him a memo stating that this would not be countenanced. My views, it appears, are "racist in the extreme".
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