Justice means compensation
@box text intro = The Howard government's response to the final report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families is further evidence, if any was needed, that this government is thoroughly racist.
Submitted to the attorney-general on April 5, Bringing them Home estimates that more than 100,000 indigenous children were stolen from their families under laws that were not formally abolished in all states until the early 1970s. The report concludes that the removal of the children was a crime against humanity which amounted to genocide and recommends that governments, churches and police forces apologise; that a national "sorry" day be declared; and that financial compensation be paid to the individuals and communities affected by this holocaust.
According to the report, international law requires that an indigenous person who has been forcibly taken away as a child be entitled to a lump sum payment from the national compensation fund. These payments should not displace common law rights to seek damages through the courts.
It is the issue of compensation that is at the heart of the government's condemnation of the report even before it is tabled in parliament.
In its submission to the inquiry last year, the government ruled out compensation as "socially divisive". What it really means is that proper compensation would cost it a lot of money — money that the corporate powers it serves want for themselves. That the government had no trouble finding millions of dollars to compensate gun owners, or funding a $1 billion slush fund, supposedly to celebrate the centenary of federation, exposes the racism underlining its response to the inquiry.
An alternative to compensation, says the Australian in an editorial on May 21, might be for "state and federal governments to provide seed funds for a charitable trust to provide scholarships for Aboriginal children — and invite all Australians to contribute".
Passing off the responsibility for past and present racist policies onto "all Australians" obfuscates the fact that the genocidal and assimilationist policies of Australian governments served the economic needs of the capitalist colonisers.
Rounding up Aboriginal families cleared land for settlement, farming or mining. Confining them to reserves and missions created a captive cheap labour force. Aboriginal children, if taken and trained young, could be used by the wealthy as domestics, nannies, labourers and stock-hands.
Justice demands that the compensation be paid and that it be paid by those big pastoralists, mining companies and developers who have profited from Aboriginal dispossession and exploitation to the tune of billions since colonisation began.
The effects of family separation and the cruelty inflicted on the stolen children are still evident in Aboriginal communities. Combined with grossly inadequate funding for Aboriginal housing, health care, education, job creation and welfare services today, the consequences for Aboriginal people are shorter life expectancy, chronic health problems and high rates of imprisonment, too often resulting in death.
Even if the stolen children and their families receive proper financial compensation, even to begin to right the wrongs of centuries of racial oppression and the persistent discrimination against Aboriginal people in all spheres of society will take a lot more than that. Only when Aboriginal people have land rights, control over their affairs and preferential treatment in access to social services, education and jobs will they be truly compensated.