Patrick Dodson (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Reconciliation) Share this | Hansard source

Thirteen years ago I had just returned to Australia from South Africa. I had left this country disgusted and angry at the political obfuscation, fabrication and outright denial around the removal of Aboriginal children from their mothers and families, and the refusal to acknowledge, apologise and compensate for what governments had done under political cover to hide the genocide that had been perpetrated—taking Aboriginal children away, breaking their links to culture and community and forcing an assimilation scheme upon them. Should anyone care to challenge my use of the word 'genocide', let me point to article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

The convention was unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948 and ratified by Australia the next year. Article II of the convention prescribes acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Among those acts prescribed were 'deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part' and 'forcibly transferring children of the group to another group'. As uncomfortable as the definition might be, that is the definition of the United Nations, and Australia ratified that convention in 1949, almost 70 years ago. The Human Rights Commission Bringing them home report was quite explicit. The forcible removal of children from Aboriginal Australians to other groups for the purposes of raising them separately from and ignorant of their culture and people was properly labelled genocidal in the breaching of binding international law.

I have very vivid memories of the late Sir Ronald Wilson and my brother Mick Dodson, his co-commissioner, launching the Bringing them home report at the reconciliation convention in Melbourne in May 1997. It was a moment of national truth-telling that the Howard government could not handle. Its reaction was to deny that these awful things had ever happened to Aboriginal people in this country and, if they had happened, somehow or other it was for the good of the children involved. There was no need to apologise about what happened and certainly no need to compensate them for this sanctioned activity.

One of those children was an old friend of mine, Mr Frank Byrne, who was taken from his family in 1943. I was reminded of the wretchedness he experienced throughout his whole life when only last week I penned a forward to his memoir to be published later this year. Frank was just six years old when the authorities dumped him at Moola Bulla Station in the Kimberley, which was run by the Western Australian government. In his early teens he was told his mother had died, but that was a blatant, dreadful lie. He spent the rest of his life trying to find out what had happened to her only to learn in later years that she had not died until 1962. Frank's grief was overwhelming. This wrench from his mother haunted him until his death in 2017, and his writing about this sense of loss will move many people to tears. An injury prevented Frank from coming to Canberra to hear Kevin Rudd's Apology to the Stolen Generations 13 years ago, but he said he was able to witness it from his home in Alice Springs. In his memoir, which I have been proud to promote, he writes: 'I thought this man is genuine. He had guts to come out and say this wonderful thing.'

I was able to be here in Canberra when Prime Minister Rudd made the apology. I sat in the other place with Mrs Vincenti, whom I had met during the Aboriginal deaths in custody inquiry in Western Australia. Mrs Vincenti had been taken as a young girl to the notorious Roelands Mission near Bunbury in Western Australia. Tragically, her son had been shot at Canning Vale prison while he was in custody. The apology was the first time we'd heard of the idea of closing the gap and life expectancy and of measures to bring equality between First Australian nations and the wider population. This was also a time when we were told that a new chapter in our relationship was to be written, starting with a blank page, but the only new ink on this blank page in these last 13 years has been the pleas of the First Nations peoples in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Today, we heard the Prime Minister and Minister Wyatt say that there's a new deal that involves buy-in from the Commonwealth, the states and the territories and from the peak Aboriginal organisations, a COAG agreement that has not formulated implementation plans yet. So we'll be waiting until August until we learn if anything is, in fact, going to be done and is going to improve the situation.

What we do know, and there's empirical evidence to back this up, is just how damaging those policies were of forcibly removing and damaging those thousands of stolen generation peoples. They continue to suffer to this day. A study by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare has found they have experienced a range of adverse health, cultural and socioeconomic outcomes at a rate higher—higher!—than Indigenous populations that were not removed. For example, members of the stolen generations are more than three times likely to be incarcerated than other Indigenous peoples.

The disadvantage and trauma doesn't end with the stolen generations themselves. Their families, too, have poor health and poor social outcomes. The same Institute of Health and Welfare report, for example, found that their descendants are 1½ times as likely to have been arrested in the past five years than those of First Nations peoples whose families were not removed. No wonder that Mrs Vincenti's son was in jail when he was killed; he was almost fated to have been incarcerated.

By the way, this year marks the 30th anniversary of the delivery of the report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, and Indigenous people are still being locked up at scandalous rates and Aboriginal children are being removed from their families in shocking numbers. Twenty-four years after the Bringing them home report,First Nations children are nearly 10 times more likely to be living in out-of-home care in Australia and more than 20,000 First Nations children are in out-of-home care. That's about 37 per cent of the total number of children in out-of-home care, yet First Nations children represent only six per cent of the child population in Australia. As shocking as these figures are, they are getting worse. It is urgently incumbent upon all of us to make the services available to help families, not just to remove kids. I acknowledge that the new Closing the Gap targets recognise this crisis in the criminal justice and child protection areas, but those targets will continue to be unachievable without adequate investment by all governments, including the Commonwealth.

I am gripped by a real sense of despair on occasions like this. We wait and we wait and nothing gets done. We get promises and promises and promises; nothing gets done. What will it take for this country to confront the awful realities of its history and fix these continuing fundamental wrongs? Well, let me tell you what a good start might be, apart from setting some new targets. To the other side I say: open your hearts and embrace in full the plea of the Uluru Statement from the Heart for voice, treaty and truth. We can only be enriched, not diminished, if we do. This is the gap that has to be diminished.