There’s one big hitch with Labor leader Bill Shorten’s promise this week to give $75,000 to victims of the “Stolen Generations”. Who will he give this cash, when our courts can’t find them?
Shorten is not alone in promoting the myth that up to 100,000 children were stolen from their parents by racist officials just because they were Aboriginal.
He now wants to compensate Aborigines “stolen” in federal territories — most in the Northern Territory, but also some in the ACT and Jervis Bay.
But here’s the problem.
Two decades ago, human rights lawyers ran a test case for compensation for Aborigines allegedly stolen in the NT.
They’d signed up about 550 “victims” and chose two as the first claimants — Lorna Cubillo and Peter Gunner. I assume they were the strongest cases.
But in 2000 the Federal Court found Gunner had not been stolen but sent by his mother to school in Alice Springs.
It found Cubillo was also not stolen. Welfare officials had found her, aged only eight, at a bush ration camp. Her father had long gone, her mother was dead and her grandmother lived many miles away, so she was taken to Darwin for care and schooling.
Importantly, the court also ruled it could not find proof of an NT policy to steal children just for being Aboriginal: “That evidence does not support a finding that there was any policy of removal of part-Aboriginal children such as that alleged.”
Moreover, three witness who’d also claimed in court to have been stolen seemed, after questioning, not to have been.
One had actually been sent to an Alice Springs hostel by his stockman dad, who paid a pound a week for his board while he got an education.
Another had been sent to school by his mother; the third was dropped off by his grandfather.
I suspect Labor knows it will struggle to find truly “stolen” children.
Indeed, Labor frontbencher Pat Dodson this week made clear the $75,000 handouts would go to “survivors” with few questions asked.
“There wouldn’t be a whole onerous process,” he said.
“We’d design a program where that could be empathetic to their situation rather than the one that bureaucrats would want to, you know, have a box to tick on every matter.”
That’s how bad history creates bad bureaucracy — and a crippling victim culture.
1/ Labor leader Bill Shorten has promised to give $75,000 to victims of the ‘Stolen Generations’. Picture: AAP
2/ Labor frontbencher Pat Dodson said the handouts would go to ‘survivors’ with few questions asked.
Emmanuel Macron, President of France. (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
