Lidia Thorpe (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] I rise to contribute on the anniversary of the apology to the stolen generation mob, and members out there are listening today. My mother was also co-commissioner with Sir Ronald Wilson at that time and is still affected by the hundreds and hundreds of stories that she sat through at the time of that inquiry. The impacts continue, and the stealing of children continues today in 2021.

I remind everybody that a lot has been said about systemic racism in the lead up to 26 January and after 26 January, particularly in my home state of Victoria. Senator Wong briefly touched on the fact that this is a system of colonisation and that this is systematic racism that continues in our society today. We heard Senator Dodson talk about there being over 20,000 Aboriginal children in out-of-home care today in 2021. Saying 'sorry' means you don't do it again, yet the numbers increase and the destruction and desecration of our families, our communities and the parents of those children continues in 2021.

Few people understand what systemic racism is. It was systemic racism and white supremacy that made the colonisers steal our children, ripping them as babies from their mothers. AO Neville, the white supremacist that was one of the architects of the White Australia policy, was very clear that the point of this evil policy was to end our people—eradicate First Peoples from these lands and our culture with them. He said:

Are we going to have one million blacks in the Commonwealth or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there were any Aborigines in Australia?

Systemic racism, or institutional racism, is the idea that white superiority—the false idea that white is right—is captured in the everyday thinking of people and how our society operates. Australia is a place that is racist to its very foundations, but funnily enough there are no racists at all to be found in this country. The same people who recoil at being called racist are the same ones who do not care enough or, at least, are happy to accept that our people die almost 10 years before anyone else—and that's okay because that's just how things are, right? Racism in this country operates and bears down across all of society and is deeply embedded in our laws, and everyone just seems to act as if this is fine and normal. That's what systemic racism is. It's the racism that is built into the systems we work and live in. This type of racism is so insidious because it's designed to be invisible.

Racism is baked into the system, from the White Australia policy and the race powers in the Constitution to the fact that our people could not all vote in the country until 1965, despite having bled and died for you in both world wars. Systemic racism is evident in the fact that we were constitutionally barred from being officially counted in the census until '67. This parliament was happy for us to not even count on our own country. That's systemic racism. It's the rusted-on racism that is inescapable. We have been living with it since the colonisers came to build their prison on our lands and waters. They raped our women and children. They poisoned our waterholes and forced us to eat their toxic food. The colonisers chained us, beat us, imprisoned us and tried to eradicate us from our own country for their own profits. They also stole our children. They took our babies. I got a message just this morning about another baby that's been taken away at the hospital bed before its mother could even begin breastfeeding. Then these colonisers, these foreigners, told us that they were doing this for our own good, and they still do. The vile racist AO Neville said that:

… they have to be protected against themselves whether they like it or not. They cannot remain as they are. The sore spot requires the application of the surgeon's knife for the good of the patient, and probably against the patient's will.

What we actually needed protection from was colonisation.

The colonising governments of this country stole our children. Let's sit with that for a moment. The governments of this country stole our children, as an act of genocide. Ten per cent of our children who were born before the seventies were stolen by the governments of this country. Those children were enslaved, raped, abused, set to work and kept separate from their families, their cultures and their country. So many of them are still looking for their families. So many more died not knowing who they came from or where their ancestral homes were.

The government of this country ratified the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article 2 of that convention states that genocide:

… means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

Killing members of the group;

Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

And we know what Gina Rinehart's father said about that, that we just needed to poison the waterways to make us all sterile—

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

They are the definitions of genocide. If the governments of this country did to other people in other countries what they did to us, they would be rightly condemned as war criminals. But when our people are under fire from the government of this country, that's accepted as just 'this is how things are here'. And that is the systemic racism that is killing us.

The survivors of the stolen gen have been pushed to experience the worst outcomes of almost anyone in this country—and we heard Senator Dodson talk about those statistics—not to mention the trauma and ill health people have to live with every single day. As a black woman, there is one emotion I'm not allowed to feel or show in public, and that is anger, or else I'm an 'angry black woman', an uppity black who should just shut her mouth and stay happy with the rations I get. I'm not allowed to be angry, despite having plenty of reasons to be. Our people have been pushed to experience the worst social, health, education and employment outcomes of anyone in this country. Our sacred places have been destroyed by both sides of the chamber, our sites have been poisoned and our totems have been killed and continue to be killed today. Our people are the most imprisoned people on earth. Having a constitutionally enshrined voice won't fix that. We have a war on our hands, between white Australia and black Australia, and the only thing that will rectify that is a peace treaty to bring peace and to give us seats in parliament, not a voice to parliament. My heart, my soul and my condolences to all those who've been affected by the genocidal act of stealing our children from our families, our communities and our country. We will continue to rebuild as this nation's First People.