Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

In the very first instance I want to disassociate myself from the remarks of the member for Tangney and note that the parliament as a whole did something yesterday which reflected well on each and every member of the House who supported the motion of the Prime Minister. There can be no doubt whatsoever that the formal acceptance by the parliament of the need to apologise to the stolen generations is something which marks off an end point in what has been a difficult, at times contentious, but ultimately futile debate that we have had in this country about the necessity of an apology. So I rise to support the motion moved by the Prime Minister.

I offer to the people of the Eora or Euro nation an expression that I understand conveys the meaning of sorry: ngang doo ool—I am sorry. I offer it unreservedly as a member of parliament, a member of the Labor Party, as someone who has grown over the years to understand the depth of Aboriginal experience and the sorrow that people have felt not only as a consequence of the state-sanctioned actions of institutions in the past that saw people removed from their families but more generally for the history of our engagement with Aboriginal people which has carried so much heartbreak, so much cultural dislocation and is a burden that we all bear.

It is a truly significant moment when we as a nation finally put on record the simple act of recognition of a past wrong. It is a time when we lift ourselves up as a country, as a nation, and lay another part of a foundation for moving forward with Indigenous Australians, whose forbearance I acknowledge, whose lack of animosity, whose lack of rancour, whose generosity of spirit has characterised this debate and characterised the participation of all those communities that visited the parliament yesterday. But this apology still comes late. For many Australians, but particularly for members of the stolen generation, the disturbing history has been a kind of a cloud that has hung over our heads. The apology is a symbolic statement, but it lifts the cloud. It provides space and opportunity for a more genuine and a more connected relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. It promotes a steady footing to take on the important task of redressing disadvantage, of closing the gap that the Prime Minister spoke about in the parliament yesterday.

There was an expression used in the past: ‘white Australia has a black history’. I certainly feel that our engagement with this history is absolutely critical, not only in better understanding what has happened and trying to fathom some of the reasons for that but also, with that better understanding, working out clearly how we can concretely move to deal with those practical issues of disadvantage that Indigenous people still face across a range of factors.

I learnt most of what I know about the history of Aboriginal people from songs—from song makers in the desert, with their clap sticks—when I first visited the Western Desert and was privileged to sit with elders, hear their songs and receive the translation of their songs. Song makers of the modern era are Archie Roach and the Warumpi Band. There are the paintings of Harry Wedge and many other painters too numerous to mention here. This is the way in which that knowledge and that history have been transmitted to us Australians. There is a fantastic repository of music, art and writing by Aboriginal people that we can now draw on and that will infuse us with a better understanding of the sorts of journeys that we need to take in the future.

I did not learn much about it at school, although I am very pleased to say that that situation has changed. There is a much greater addressing of Indigenous history than previously and an acknowledgement of that history. The way in which schools and young Australians respond to this apology I think will tell us that these young Australians do very clearly understand that we are at the dawn of a new age. We do not in any way take away from the work, the efforts and the activities of those who have passed by before, but for young Australians surely an apology of this kind offers them every prospect for working much more closely and much better with one another and also with Indigenous people to address those difficult matters that lie ahead.

The import of the motion, as the House knows, stems from the recommendations of the inquiry by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission conducted by Sir Ronald Wilson into the issue of the forced removal by authorities of tens of thousands of Aboriginal children from their families and their subsequent placement in institutions such as orphanages, often run by the church, and also their adoption. The Bringing them home report, which followed, contained a number of first-person accounts from members of the stolen generations.

No-one could read those deeply moving and personal reflections and not be in some way moved or affected. Indeed, I think it is difficult even for us in this House, where we talk for a living, it sometimes seems, to find words to adequately respond to that situation. Those of us who have families—and most of us here do, I think—are able to gain some insight into and have some empathy for what people went through. They found themselves often taken without notice. They may have ended up as domestic help in a farm or in a region of which they had no knowledge whatsoever, where they had no family and no connections of any kind. Often they were prevented from speaking to their families and from receiving food parcels.

I have to say that I took some exception to the comments in the speech by the Leader of the Opposition, even though we welcome the apology, when he referred to current situations of sexual abuse that people in Indigenous communities face. Let us be very clear about this. When young girls were taken from their families and were part of the stolen generations, they too were subject to terrible sexual abuse, often at the hands of people in the churches. Those churches have apologised for that. They have focused on that. They have reflected on that. They deeply grieve about that happening. But that was the historical reality, and no amount of trying to strike some middle ground between the concerns of the backbench and a wider community can obscure that fact for the Leader of the Opposition.

Even when the removal was voluntary—and sometimes it was: a mother in some instances might have felt that she was in a difficult situation, and she was concerned for the wellbeing of her kids—the child was then faced with suddenly going into a completely unknown environment. There is an account by Anne which says:

... a dreadful feeling of emptiness like lightning striking from inside, crippled me with fear. Then for the first time I realised the reality of the situation, I was leaving our dear mother, my brothers and sisters … behind … I was leaving the only home I have ever known.

In this case there was a kind of consultation, but in many cases there was not. There was no preparation for this shock, this abrupt dislocation, and the ongoing psychological and emotional trauma that people felt was real. For that, we surely should be saying sorry.

There is another aspect to the situation and conditions that the stolen generations faced which I do not think has had enough emphasis in the accounts and recollections of that time. It has certainly been raised by members of the stolen generations themselves. It is to do with the way in which their lives were completely taken apart in terms of family connection. Because many members of families were literally dispersed to different institutions, sometimes ultimately to different states, they were not aware at all of the movements, the whereabouts or the life histories of their own relatives.

I read an account from one person who did not know until 1995 what his brothers and sisters had done or where they had ended up. That is when he finally learned the whereabouts of his brothers and sisters and what had happened to them. 1995 is not recent history; it is yesterday. These effects were being felt yesterday, are being felt today and will continue to be felt into the future.

For the record, we do know that children were taken at any age, and often they were very young. We do know that the policy of the time was to absorb them into white society. We do know that people were graded by the colour of their skin. The terms of reference proposed by former Labor Attorney-General Michael Lavarch followed a sustained campaign to examine this situation. Those things were known at the time and, as a consequence, the commission heard some 500 accounts and had access to another thousand or so written testimonies. After the inquiry had considered those tales, it made the recommendations, including, importantly, recommendation 3:

That, for the purposes of responding to the effects of forcible removals … reparation be made in recognition of the history of gross violations of human rights…

That recommendation included and identified acknowledgement and apology, measures of restitution, rehabilitation and compensation. On this occasion, the government has moved to address the first of these identified matters and it has made its position on issues of compensation clear. But it is my fervent hope that, in the future, the government, the opposition and the community will begin to consider how the remainder of these issues can be best approached and dealt with. The formal apology was step 1; the Rudd Labor government has moved and made that formal apology.

It needs to be noted that the Howard government’s response to the report at the time was swift. The then Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, Senator Herron, wrote to Father Frank Brennan and said:

Such an apology could—

and I note that he said ‘could’—

imply that present generations are in some way responsible and accountable for the actions of earlier generations, actions that were sanctioned by the laws of the time and that were believed to be in the best interests of the children concerned.

There have been strong echoes of this argument recently from the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, but I have heard others speak to this argument as well.

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