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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2010-07-21 Daily Xml
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STOLEN GENERATIONS REPARATIONS TRIBUNAL BILL

Introduction and First Reading

The Hon. T.A. JENNINGS (17:48): Obtained leave and introduced a bill for an act to establish the Stolen Generations Reparations Tribunal and to define its functions and powers; and for other purposes. Read a first time.

Second Reading

The Hon. T.A. JENNINGS (17:49): I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

I move this bill today on the stolen generations to establish a stolen generations reparations tribunal. I do so because, as many of us would know, this country has a very black history and a very dark history when it comes to our treatment of Aboriginal people. I do so because we need to move forward and take steps towards reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in this country. I note that a stolen generations reparations tribunal is some way overdue in coming, much as the apology was a long way overdue, although when it did come it provided a great deal of hope and cohesion in our nation. Such a move as a stolen generations reparations tribunal would provide similar hope and similar reconciliation in this country.

I have been touched, as many in this chamber would have been touched, by the stories in the 'Bringing them home' report. The report, which came to the federal parliament over a decade ago, exposed stories that had long gone untold and hidden. We have a very long way to go in providing adequate response to these historical violations. Aboriginal children have been forcibly separated from their families and communities since the first days of European occupation. Often the only basis for removal was the fact that they were Aboriginal. Regardless of the facts about their family situations, simply by being Aboriginal children they were deemed to have been neglected and their parents incompetent.

Violent battles were fought over the rights to land, food and water in this country, and Aboriginal children were taken and exploited for their labour, often at no cost to the kidnapper, of course. There were frightening and sometimes violent raids on Aboriginal camps to search for and seize children. Survivors report being hidden by family members, being made to look extra black so as to not be a popular candidate for becoming an adopted child and taken in by another family, and seeing violence committed against the children's families.

One woman's story, presented in relation to the 'Bringing them home' report, was presented as confidential evidence from 1997 and it provides some idea of the devastation of these acts. The story goes:

I grew up Oodnadatta area with my grandmother and she would see the missionary coming. She would run away with me. She would keep running away and the police would come sometimes and shoot the dogs and that, and my grandmother would run in the creek and hide me away till about really dark and come back home. I might have been 10 or 11. We see one missionary coming, one of my auntie roll me up like a swag sort of thing, you know, and hid me away. But I must have moved and he got me out and said to me, 'I'll give you a lolly and we'll go for a ride, go to Oodnadatta'. They put me on a train and my grandmother was following the train. She was running behind the train singing out for me. Then I was singing out, 'I'll be back'. I thought I was going for a holiday or something.

This was confidential evidence case 382 of a South Australian woman who was removed from her grandmother's care in the 1960s. She was never informed of the reason for her removal. The Aboriginal chief protector in South Australia made a submission to the commissioner of public works on 27 August 1932, demonstrating the differing opinions in South Australia at the time. I quote as follows:

The general opinion of station people is that it is a mistake to take these children out of the bush. They say the Aboriginal mothers are fond of their children and, in their own way, look after them and provide for them and that when they grow up they are more easily absorbed and employed than those who would have been taken out of their natural environment and removed to the towns. The mission representatives say that, if the girls are left in the bush they only become the prey of the white men and become mothers at an early sage. My experience has been that removing them to towns and to institutions does not overcome this trouble, it only accentuates and increases it.

Many of the reasons behind the removal were based on the idea that, within European Australian society, a better life could be provided for Aboriginal children. Whilst Aboriginal parents were grateful for training and education to allow their children to live more easily in a changed and changing world, it was not necessary to forcibly remove these children to achieve this. These are the words of Matthew Kropinyeri as told to the royal commission in 1913:

In regard to the taking of our children in hand by the state to learn trades, etc., our people would gladly embrace the opportunity of betterment, but to be subjected to complete alienation from our children is, to say the least, an unequalled act of injustice. No parent worthy of the name would either yield to or urge such a measure.

Another further devastating story to highlight the lasting emotional and social impact and damage that these policies have caused over the years is another one of the many personal stories told in connection with the 'Bringing them home' report:

1936 it was. I would have been five. We went visiting Ernabella the day police came. Our great uncle Sid was leasing Ernabella from the government at the time, so we went there. We had been playing altogether, just a happy community, and the air was filled with screams because police came and mothers tried to hide their children and blacken their children's faces and tried to hide them in caves. We three—Essie, Brenda and me—together with our three cousins, the six of us, were put on my old truck and taken to Oodnadatta, which was hundreds of miles away and we got their in the darkness.

My mother had to come with us. She had already lost her eldest daughter down the children's hospital because she had infantile paralysis—polio—and now there was the prospect of her losing her other three children, all the children she had. I remember that she came in the truck with us, curled up in the foetal position. Who can understand that—the trauma of knowing that you're going to lose all your children? We talk about it from the point of view of our trauma, but our mother, to understand what she went through, I don't think anyone can understand that.

It was 1936 and we went to the United Aborigines Mission in Oodnadatta. We got there in the dark and then we didn't see our mother again. She just kind of disappeared into the darkness. I've since found out in the intervening years there was a place they called the natives' camp and obviously my mother would have been whisked to the natives' camp. There was no time given to us to say goodbye to our mothers.

From there we had to learn to eat new food, have our heads shaved. So one day not long after we got there my cousin and I…we tried to run back to Ernabella. We came across the train. We'd never seen a train before and it frightened the hell out of us with the steam shooting out. So we ran back to the mission because that was the only place of safety that we knew. She was four and I was five.

Then we had to learn to sleep in a house. We'd only ever slept in our wiltjas and always had the stars there and the embers of the fire and the closeness of the family. And all of a sudden we had high beds and that was very frightening. You just thought you were going to fall out and to be separated.

There was a corridor and our cousins were in another room. We'd never been separated before. And the awful part was we had to get back into that train later on with one little grey blanket and go down to Colebrook…a matter of weeks after. From that time until 1968 I didn't see [my mother]. Thirty-two years it was. [I stayed at Colebrook] till 1946 [when] I was fourteen or fifteen. We were trained to go into people's homes and clean and look after other people's children. I went to a doctor and his wife. They were beautiful people. I stayed with them a couple of years.


[Sitting suspended from 18:01 to 19:48]


The Hon. T.A. JENNINGS: As members may be aware, I was in the middle of addressing this bill to establish a stolen generations tribunal, and I was sharing with the parliament the stories that come from the 'Bringing them home' report and from those presentations that were made at that time. I was in the middle of a story which I will take up here:

I guess the most traumatic thing for me is that, though I don't like missionaries been criticised—the only criticism that I have is that you forbad us to speak our own language and we had no communication with our family. We just seemed to be getting further and further away from our people, we went to Oodnadatta first, then to Quorn next, then when there was a drought there we went to Adelaide and went out to Eden Hills and that's where we stayed till we went out to work and did whatever we had to do. I realised later how much I had missed of my culture...I realised later how much I had missed of my culture and how much I'd been devastated.

Up until this point of time I can't communicate with my family, can't hold a conversation. I can't go to my uncle and ask him anything because we don't have that language. I guess the government didn't mean it as something bad but our mothers weren't treated as people having feelings. Naturally a mother's got a heart for her children and for them to be taken away, no-one can ever know the heartache.

She was still grieving when I met her in 1968. When me and my little family stood there—my husband and me and my two little children—and all my family was there, there wasn't a word we could say to each other. All the years that you wanted to ask this and ask that, there was no way we could ever regain that. It was like somebody came and stabbed me with a knife. I couldn't communicate with my family because I had no way of communicating with them any longer. Once that language was taken away, we lost a part of that very soul. It meant our culture was gone, our family was gone, everything that was dear to us was gone.

This bill focuses on communal reparation. It includes measures such as funding for healing centres, community education projects, community genealogy projects and funding for access to counselling services, health services and language and culture training. The bill establishes a stolen generations reparations tribunal which is constituted according to the following principles:

acknowledging that forcible removal policies were racist and caused emotional, physical and cultural harm to the stolen generations;

asserting that Aboriginal children should not, as a matter of general policy, be separated from their families;

recognising the distinct identity of the stolen generations and that they should have a say in shaping reparation; and

ensuring that Aboriginal persons affected by removal policies should be given information to facilitate their access to the tribunal and other options for redress.

The key elements of the stolen generations reparation tribunal are:

reparations should be guided by the van Boven principles and should be material, in kind and non-material, and include but not be confined to monetary compensation;

the provisions of ex gratia payments as a minimum lump sum payment to all Aboriginal people forcibly removed from their families as a recognition of the fact of removal;

acknowledging the intergenerational harm of the forcible removal policies, that reparation should be extended to include not only the individual removed but also their family members, communities and descendants of those removed; and

claimants will only have to demonstrate the act of removal occurred under certain legislation or was carried out, directed or condoned by an Australian government.

The van Boven principles are a set of principles developed by Theo van Boven in 1996 for the United Nations on the Right to Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. The van Boven principles recognise the right of remedy for victims of gross violations of human rights. The 'Bringing them home' report cites the van Boven principles and concludes that reparation for the stolen generations should be guided by these principles. The tribunal's functions include:

deciding on appropriate reparation;

deciding on an appropriate amount of any ex gratia payment;

providing a forum and process for truth and reconciliation by which Aboriginal people affected by forcible removal policies may tell their story, have their experience acknowledged and be offered an apology by the tribunal or by others;

consider proposed legislation to report on whether it should be contrary to the principles of this act; and

inquire into prejudicial policies and practices by government or a church organisation brought to the tribunal's attention.

This bill also establishes the eligibility criteria for those entitled to reparations and ex gratia payments. As a nation and a state, we owe the Aboriginal population recognition of a history of gross violations of human rights. They deserve reparations in acknowledgement of the suffering that they have endured for decades.

Whilst no compensation, no apology and no amount of money can ever fully compensate these people for the violations committed, the healing effects of acknowledgement and compensation can. Entire generations suffered loss, grief and trauma. They can never be adequately compensated. Individuals lost their Aboriginal identity, their parents, their culture, their language, and communities lost leaders. They lost their history and, as I have said, they lost their language and their culture. They often ceased to exist as an independent community.

I will conclude by drawing the parliament's attention to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which compels us to grant reparation in article 8:

Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

This is not the only international treaty binding us to act here. Article 2(3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), article 39 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, article 19 of the Declaration on the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearances, the Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power and article 6 of the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination all provide a right to compensation for the violation of human rights.

This bill and the establishment of a reparations tribunal has a dual function. It will redress past harm and create measures of reparation that offer enduring social, cultural and economic benefits to those affected. This is only fair. We as a society have inflicted enduring social, cultural and economic harm upon these individuals and upon their society. I commend this bill to the house.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. B.V. Finnigan.

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