Mark Bishop (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President, for the opportunity to make a contribution to this debate concerning the national apology to the stolen generation. This has indeed been a remarkable and lively topic of discussion for many, many years—more than we all care to remember—and it is appropriate, it is entirely proper, that there is now resolution of this most horrific of issues. It is time to move it forward. The symbolism that this resolution represents is very, very important, as many people in a range of forums have repeatedly suggested. But more important now are outcomes which are critical to a permanent resolution deriving from the harm that has occurred to so many Australians over the last 40, 50 or more years.

More than 20 years ago, I attended some conferences in New York City and attended upon some senior officials of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union in that city. In those days it had some 250,000 or 300,000 members. It was a significant union on the east coast of the United States. I met for some time with a senior representative of that union in New York City. He was a man of African-American extraction. After we exchanged the customary pleasantries and had our discussion on the business at hand on a range of then topical issues, somehow or other the conversation shifted to issues germane to the treatment of Indigenous people in Australia in the seventies and eighties. The discussion meandered on for some time. This man was in his 50s and was a veteran of the civil rights movement and the battles in the United States in the fifties and sixties before he went on to another part of the liberal movement in the United States. At the end of the discussion he looked at me with the most steely blue eyes and said: ‘I meet a lot of Australians. A lot of Australians come and meet with me. And the common factor that you all bring to the discussions is the way you treat Aboriginal people in your own country.’ He said: ‘I don’t know why you all raise this issue with me, but you do so, and we have the discussions. And you must be the 20th or 30th person over the years who has raised these sorts of issues in my country, the United States.’ He said to me at the end: ‘Young man’—and I was very young in those days—‘I tire of these conversations with you from the other end of the world. Why don’t you just go home and fix those problems, because the fact that you have raised them here suggests to me that you are responsible and you need to attend to those problems in your own home.’ I have always remembered that conversation, and as I was thinking of the comments I should make today I was reminded of those ones.

In addition to those comments, I bring two other perspectives to this debate. Firstly, again, many years ago, I had exposure to hundreds of files in Perth held by the government relating to what was then the department of Aboriginal affairs, or the Department of Native Welfare, and those files went right back to the 1920s and 1930s. They had been assiduously maintained in a warehouse that, back in 1982 or 1983, was located in West Perth. I had exposure to those files for many weeks on end, doing some work. In those files, properly maintained in detail, were hundreds and hundreds of letters written from the 1920s through until the 1960s by mothers and fathers of children who had gone missing, who had been removed or who had been stolen, imploring the bureaucrats in the department to give them advice as to why their child was taken, where the child was now, what the name of the child was, what had happened to the child. There were hundreds and hundreds of these letters, mostly written in a beautiful script and pouring out the emotions of these parents who—over some 40, 50 or 60 years—had lost their children. It was the most heartfelt correspondence. There was other correspondence from policemen, priests, pastors, local chambers of commerce and business people who were writing on behalf of other Indigenous people who were, presumably, illiterate asking for details as to where their children might be and how they might be located. And on each file there was a simple comment—government policy: advise sender we do not have to respond; we do not have any advice. I remember being exposed to those letters as a 25-year-old and thinking how horrible it must have been.

The second perspective I bring is something that occurred in more recent years, when I had exposure to a lot of younger white children who had been through the court system in Perth. They came from what, by any description, would be called dysfunctional families, whether their mother or father was the subject of alcohol abuse, physical abuse, drug addiction, unemployment—a whole range of issues. Often the courts have to make a decision that the young boy or girl is to be removed from their parents and put into some form of foster home or welfare institution. My observation was that no matter how bad the child’s upbringing might have been—no matter how dysfunctional the family and no matter how manipulative, dishonest or improper the practices of abuse, either of a physical or mental nature, were—almost without exception those young boys and girls resisted to the end being removed from their mother or father. These were children from the age of about five or six, when they would develop the ability to reason, to the age of 13 or 14, when they developed a sense of right and wrong. No matter how bad their home might be, no matter how often they were not fed, washed, sent to school, provided with love or affection—no matter how bad it was—they did not wish to be removed from their mother and father.

It still goes on and it must have been absolutely horrific for those thousands and thousands of young Indigenous people and their parents to be forcibly separated. In that context, a number of people have made the observation today that past actions should not be judged by contemporary standards. That is a very, very interesting comment because, to me, it seems to confuse absolute concepts of right and wrong and a relativist approach to issues.

Always and without exception it is wrong to steal or to engage in murder, rape, theft and like offences. It does not matter whether it was in the days of Hammurabi giving the laws to the Assyrians or Solon’s Athens, always and without exception those offences are wrong and there is no justification for engaging in them. They might be lawful acts and they might be carried out pursuant to decisions of government policy but they are always and without exception wrong. It is entirely proper to judge those absolute acts by today’s standards because they were absolutely wrong then and they are absolutely wrong now. This debate now moves to practicalities and to resolving the absolute poverty— (Time expired)