The apology one year on: an extended discussion
Updated
A year after the apology to the Stolen Generations, some indigenous groups say the Australian government has wasted the opportunity to change peoples' lives.
A progress report on closing the life expectancy gap between Indigenous and White Australians is set to be released later this month.
Presenter: Sen Lam
Speakers: Fred Chaney, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the Fraser government from 1978 to 1980, former deputy chair of the Native Title Tribunal and a director at Reconciliation Australia; Debra Hocking, chairperson of the Stolen Generations Alliance
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HOCKING : Well, I think growing up over a series of decades that I have and witnessed around the country, around the nation, the diversity of Stolen Generations. We look at the different areas and the different histories and it's been very hard for this group of people to actually even survive. And now what we see is the government is saying well, "we do have a Stolen Generations and we are sorry for what we did", and I think it is really important that Australia does recognise that and actually tell the truth of what did happen in this country.
LAM: And on a personal level, you yourself were taken away at the tender age of 18 months?
HOCKING: Yeah that's right and I was kept from my family for 20 years and it took me 20 years to find them and reunite with them, and sadly when I found my Mum, two weeks after she died. So we didn't really have the chance to reunite, if you like. But mine is like many other stories around the country, very sad, very tragic, and now we can openly talk about this and openly grieve.
LAM: Well, we'll talk about moving forward a little bit later on. But did it help you, that the prime minister said sorry?
HOCKING: Look, absolutely. I think for many of us around the country, it was a day of recognition, it was a day of honesty and it was a day of compassion and I looked and I sat in parliament when the words were uttered and I just looked around at our elders and saw the tears, and for me it was something that we had wanted for so long and been denied of, so it was a great day.
LAM: And Fred Chaney, we heard in that package earlier on an 80 year-old crying for her lost mum. It's a sadness that touches all of Australia to this day?
CHANEY: Of course, I mean it is one of the saddest things in our history, there are many good things in it, but this is one of the worst things in it. I mean I'm a non-Aboriginal Australian. I was a lawyer and I saw some of these policies first hand and was able to resist a couple of attempts to remove children. But thank god that time has passed, thank god we have had the apology. I'm spending this next weekend with my 92 year-old mother. That means a great deal to me and I grieve for the Aboriginal people who were deprived of that special human privilege.
LAM: Indeed, I'm not a parent myself, and I can only imagine what it's like to have my child taken away from me.
Well, let's hear what Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, had to say about moving forward.
RUDD: I said before the election, the nation needed a kind of war cabinet on parts of indigenous policy, because the challenges are too great and the consequences too great to just allow it all to become a political football as it has been so often in the past. I therefore propose a Joint Policy Commission to be led by the Leader of the Opposition and myself, and with a mandate to develop and implement, to begin with, an effective housing strategy for remote communities over the next five years. It will be consistent with the government's policy framework, a new partnership for closing the gap. If this Commission operates well, I'll then propose that it work on the further task of constitutional recognition of the first Australians.
LAM: Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd a year ago.
Fred Chaney of Reconciliation Australia, the prime minister talked about a partnership for closing the gap. Twelve months on, where are we on that?
CHANEY: Well, I think we've seen a high level of activity among governments in the Council of Australian Governments, that is when all the states and federal governments get together. We've seen new commitments in education, in health and employment and I think perhaps just as importantly we've seen a real lift in the private sector's engagement in these areas. But I think the real difficulty that remains and it would remain for any government is turning those good intentions and those large dollars into effective action on the ground. I think that there have been many attempts to make changes, which have fallen way short of what we would hope would be achieved and I think that I personally would give the government some pretty good marks for first, the apology, second, working with Aboriginal people to develop a national voice, third, having additional funds and working with the states in those key areas that I have mentioned.
My great current concern would be the actual ability to work with very disadvantaged people in very diverse circumstances in ways that really will change their lives and close the gap.
LAM: Debra Hocking, do you agree with that, do you agree that the government has tried its best? Do you think the Federal Government has met the raised expectations which resulted from Sorry Day?
HOCKING: Look, I think is some ways yes, but we also have to be mindful about some of the expectations from the Aboriginal people themselves. Now, we had this promise of we're going to say sorry, and to that to a lot of Stolen Generations around the country represented a bit more than just the word and there were expectations of perhaps compensation, reparation and so on. Now that hasn't happened and that has led to some frustration amongst the Aboriginal people. On the other hand, let me say, that for the first time in history, the government is listening to the Stolen Generations. So I think that you can weigh one up against the other. But in my conversations that I have had around the country, there is an optimism that we can yes, the government needs to do a lot more, absolutely, but we are moving in the right direction.
CHANEY: Could I say that just today, the government announced two things that I think will be welcomed by the Stolen Generation. A healing centre is to be developed and that's a work in progress, but the people involved are people of very high quality in the indigenous community and I think there is another initiative to isn't there that was announced. But I do think we have to say on this program that there is some unfinished business which is the expression we use in this field. The Commission, the inquiry into the Stolen Generations did recommend compensation. The hope was that Australia would be like Canada and to have a fund and an administrative process to deal with the damage done to people and to provide some compensation. As yet, while there has been some action at the state level, the Tasmanian Government which is Debra comes from did start a fund with an administrative rather than a litigious approach. There is a sort of fund in Western Australia which is related and it relates to all children who were institutionalised, whether they were Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal. But I think for the Stolen Generations, there remains a very important piece of unfinished business in the outstanding recommendations of the Bringing Them Home report.
LAM: Indeed, we'll move to the Canadian model a little bit later. Your listening to Radio Australia, our guests this morning are Debra Hocking, chair of the Stolen Generations Alliance and Fred Chaney, a director with Reconciliation Australia.
And of course one of the most controversial aspects of the previous Howard government's indigenous policy was the so-called intervention and the national emergency measures to protect Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory from physical and sexual abuse. Nearly two years on, what can we say about the intervention? What has been its successes and failures, if I can start with you first Debra?
HOCKING: Well, successes I can't really thing of many to be honest with you. Failures, I can think of quite a few. I think at the onset of this intervention, it was a military, almost a military operation that these people were sent in to look at issues of child sexual abuse and the like, and to my understanding, no-one to this day has been arrested yet. So I don't know what the expectation was to try and stamp out child sexual abuse, but that hasn't worked. The quarantining of welfare payments. Look, it's made very difficult for people, because they are given vouchers they can only redeem 500 kilometres away and they don't have any money to get there.
LAM: And yet at that time, there were sections of the Aboriginal communities right across the Northern Territory, sections of the communities welcoming the government intervention?
HOCKING: Oh look sure, please I must say that there are some areas that perhaps has helped some of these 73 communities, but I think on the whole if we look at the report of the 12 monthly report. I think I don't agree with a lot of the things that the government said that were going to happen have happened. I speak to a lot of people up in the Northern Territory and there are still much disheartenment about what the intervention actually was meant to do.
LAM: Fred Chaney.
CHANEY: Could I add to that. I mean it's difficult in a relatively short radio interview to do justice to the question you've asked. But back in 2001 or 2002 I think, Jackie Huggins, then co-chair of Reconciliation Australia and I actually had a press conference here in Canberra and we asked for an urgent national response to issues of violence in indigenous communities. And so I have to say that in our view there were elements or some areas of Australia where there was a need for some serious intervention.
What actually happened had its really bad bits and its good bits. The bad bits were, I think the overriding of the Racial Discrimination Act, some of the issues relating to land, the lack of consultation and engagement with people in how the thing was conducted. But can I just say that positives which are positives because these are things Aboriginal people have been asking for for a long time. One was additional medical services, another was an increased police presence, that's something that consistently remote communities have asked for, more housing is something they have consistently asked for and more real jobs, more full time employment. So those elements of the intervention were making up for some of the deficits of the past. And so it's even the army, and I have a slightly different take on it from Debra, because the army has actually worked very productively with the Aborigine communities, because not as an occupying force, but as a civil works program. And I think most of the Aboriginal people I have met are pretty happy to work with the army and in fact I think they find them more practical than many of the public servants they deal with.
LAM: Well the practicality aside, I think some sections of the Aboriginal communities also found it reassuring to have the army there. Do you agree with that Debra?
HOCKING: Look I do and I totally agree with what Fred said. Yeah, I mean I may have been a little bit harsh to say the military went in. But I was actually in Canada with the Aboriginal Healing Foundation over there at the time when the intervention was announced and I was asked, I was speaking at the University of Calgary and one of the questions from the floor was "is Australia at war with its Aboriginal people?" and that was a genuine question. I knew nothing of the intervention at that stage and it was a very difficult question to answer and I needed to answer with an informed way and I could not do that. So I guess that was to a lot of people, that was the first impression. It was almost like a war thing. But as Fred said, and rightly so, that some people do feel in the Territory where they feel protection and they feel safe, and indeed they need to feel safe.
LAM: Indeed, that was last year, let's move forward now and now you mentioned the Healing Foundation and what has been done in Canada. Tell us a bit about that, Debra?
HOCKING: Yes, yes. Look the Aboriginal Healing Foundation was set up I think about ten years ago and it's run by purely Aboriginal people, people from all walks of life, skills, legal skills, health skills, all things like that. And look, I think I remember as I was taken through this foundation of the wonderful efforts that these people had made and been supported in, even the research repository was just something that I had never seen before. And this research was done, it was talking about transgenerational affects of removal. It was talking about other impacts, like drug and alcohol abuse, sexual abuse. It talked about all these things and it went to places where Australia hasn't even gone yet. So I think that in that sense in itself, we have a long way to go.
LAM: Fred Chaney, are there lessons there from the Canadian model that Australia may learn?
CHANEY: Well, I think so. I mean I agree with Debra that I think the compensation arrangements there are superior and in line with what was recommended for Australia by the Royal Commission. I also agree and I don't pretend to understand it just let me say, but I know from hearing so many Aboriginal people talk about it that there are these incredibly important elements of healing and I strongly support their efforts to have that dealt with. But in terms of how white fellas see this, if I can use that expression, which is sometimes the way we talk when we're talking about these matters. The non-Aboriginal community, there's been some fantastic research done in Western Australia and a very strong support of Aboriginal people, Professor Fiona Stanley, from the Institute of Child Health Research, and I think she strongly supports what Debra is saying that there are very powerful intergenerational impacts from these things that they do, they show up in very, very negative social ways, in a whole lot of cases, and I think the case has been well made out by our researchers that what Debra is saying is absolutely correct.
LAM: Indeed, on that point, I understand that Reconciliation Australia has also released the results of a survey on race relations. How do you feel about the findings Fred Chaney? Are you heartened by them?
CHANEY: It's a bit like talking about the intervention in that there are some really beaut things in it, things that are much better than they would have been a few years ago. For example, the great majority of Australians really want to understand and know something of indigenous culture. There are many shared characteristics. The really big negative I think in the survey shows a low level of trust between the two groups and I think that's a real impediment to progress. So we're in the business of trying to build relationships that will establish a strong trust between and across the divide, a divide which I have always detested and I think should not exist and I'm happy to talk at this time about some of the ways we're trying to do that.
LAM: Indeed, well we're running out of time. If I can just give you the last word, Debra Hocking. How do you feel about the future?
HOCKING: Look, I think once again, I think the whole issue that sorry has been said and it basically stopped the nation. I think my vision for ahead is lots of hard work, lots of perhaps going a little bit backwards to go forward, but I think I'm optimistic that with the new programs now that the government is starting to roll out, with extra funding that they are putting in, and another announcement coming today was more people, more staff going to be included in our link up programs and for your listeners they may not know what that is. They're services are set up to actually reunite people that were taken away, with their families again. So there is the promise that there will be more counsellors put into these services, which are well needed.
LAM: Well, I think that's the key word, the promise. Debra Hocking, we'll have to leave it there. Thank you very much for joining us Debra and Fred.
HOCKING: Thank you.
CHANEY: Thanks very much.
