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Meera Atkinson Finally, the Federal Government will issue an apology to Australia's Indigenous peoples. But while the issue of an apology is focused on Australia’s Stolen Generations it carries the weight of a much longer history of trauma.
Australia is not alone in grappling with heavy heritage — other colonised nations, such as the US, Canada and New Zealand, have faced the matter of public apology to their indigenous population, as well as the sticky issue of reparations. The Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families was released in 1997, a year after John Howard's Liberal government took office. A formal apology to those affected by past policies was one of the Report's key recommendations. Yet Howard’s steadfast refusal to issue a formal apology has meant it has taken another decade for this recommendation to be realised. Like Australia, the US has dragged its feet. Though the government officially apologised in 1988 to Japanese Americans detained during WWII, and to Native Hawaiians in 1993 for the unlawful overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, it has yet to pass an “apology bill” put to Congress. The Bill proposes the US Government apologises for “official depredations and ill-conceived policies” regarding native peoples. Nicole Watson, senior research fellow at Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, Sydney University of Technology, says that while an apology to the members of the stolen generations and their families is a very important step, a more comprehensive apology is needed to aid national healing. “I think an apology is owing for dispossession and the failure of successive Australian governments to reach a just settlement,” she says. One of the criticisms Nicole has of the way the Rudd government has approached the apology hinges on the politically tricky business of compensation. “I think it was reprehensible that Kevin Rudd and the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, Jenny Macklin, ruled out compensation without any attempt to discuss the issue with Indigenous representatives,” says Nicole. Australia’s treatment of its Indigenous people has repeatedly come under attack from the United Nations and other human rights organisations. Canada and New Zealand, meanwhile, are often held up as examples we should follow. Both countries beat us to a formal apology to Canadian Native Americans and Maoris respectively, and both have backed up the apology with compensation schemes. Nicole says the Bringing Them Home report identified compensation needs and strategies a decade ago and the Australian government has no excuse for disregarding these recommendations. “This is not new territory,” she says. “They’ve had ten years in opposition to work this out. They could have developed policies on this. Genuine leaders lead the country in terms of human rights.” Vince Ross, national chairperson of the Uniting Aboriginal Islander Christian Congress, believes compensation is important but doesn’t think giving a large amount of money to anyone is going to solve anything. “Aboriginal people need to be invited to the table so we are participants rather than just recipients,” he says. “Compensation is a small part of the restoration that needs to take place for us, as Indigenous people, to grow and move forward. It’s getting a balance between infrastructure and compensation to individuals.” Nicole says that, post-apology, we need to see from the Government “flesh on the bones of its Indigenous policies”. In other words less politicking and more action. Nicole says the Labor Government has a lot to prove both at home and abroad, starting with just how serious it is about nation building.
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