Australia to apologize to Aborigines

From the Associated Press:

CANBERRA, Australia - Australia will issue its first formal apology to its indigenous people next month, the government announced Wednesday, a milestone that could ease tensions with a minority whose mixed-blood children were once taken away on the premise that their race was doomed.

The Feb. 13 apology to the so-called "stolen generations" of Aborigines will be the first item of business for the new Parliament, Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin said. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, whose Labor Party won November elections, had promised to push for an apology, an issue that has divided Australians for a decade,

"The apology will be made on behalf of the Australian government and does not attribute guilt to the current generation of Australian people," Macklin said in a statement.

Rudd has refused demands from some Aboriginal leaders to pay compensation for the suffering of broken families. Activist Michael Mansell, who is legal director of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Center, has urged the government to set up an $882 million compensation fund.

Macklin did not mention compensation Wednesday. But she said she sought broad input on the wording of the apology, which she hoped would signal the beginning of a new relationship between Australia and its original inhabitants, who number about 450,000 among a population of 21 million. Aborigines are the poorest ethnic group in Australia and are most likely to be jailed, unemployed and illiterate....read more here

COMMENT:
Note that while the current Prime Minister does not wish to "attribute guilt" to the "current generation of Australian people", focusing instead on "mistakes of the past" (policies are deliberate, they are not "mistakes"), the article itself notes the following about the present:

1. "Aborigines are the poorest ethnic group in Australia and are most likely to be jailed, unemployed and illiterate"--in the present;
2. "the 17-year life expectancy gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians"--in the present;
3. "From 1910 until the 1970s, around 100,000 mostly mixed-blood Aboriginal children were taken from their parents under state and federal laws based on a premise that Aborigines were a doomed race and saving the children was a humane alternative".

It is likely that even with this superificial apology the attempt is to evade any obligation to make compensation for what, by international legal standards, where pre-meditated and planned policies of genocide.

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Goodbye and Good Riddance John Howard!

It is rare that we get to post such happy news on this blog: today, November 24, 2007, saw the defeat of the ruling Liberal Party in Australia and its infamous Prime Minister, John Howard. Howard had won four consecutive elections, and used his mandate for villainous ends as possibly the world's most extreme right wing political leader. From immediate support to the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, to atrocious abuses and hostility shown toward refugees, repeatedly condemned by UN agencies for his government's treatment of refugees and Aboriginals, to his anti-worker laws, Howard was a blight on the international political landscape and his humiliating defeat has not come too soon. One hopes that Australia will at least begin to alter its neo-colonial course.

Under Howard we have seen the effective re-colonization of the Northern Territory, the imposition of extreme surveillance and domination over Aboriginals who, were they to today form an independent nation-state of their own would most likely constitute the poorest country on earth. Under Howard Aboriginal misery swelled to unbelievable proportions, with staggering rates of unemployment, poor housing, and a life span that is on average 20 years less than that of white Australians. In the face of a history of abducting Aboriginal children, in what is clearly defined as genocide by the UN, Howard refused to so much as apologize, something that right wingers elsewhere have had little problem doing (with compensation added) as in the case of Howard's political friend, Stephen Harper, the Conservative Prime Minister of Canada. In response to the special misery suffered by Aboriginal Australians, Howard only worried about doing anything that could be perceived as "special treatment"...special treatment for the traditional owners of the land who remain ostracized and vilified as outsiders in their own homeland.

The new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd of the Labour Party, promised among other things to withdraw Australian combat troops from Iraq, to sign the Kyoto Protocol, and to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We hope that these will be done quickly.

Goodbye John Howard, and goodbye to another angry, old, white racist.

For a special collection of YouTube videos dealing with the politics of the Australian nation-state and Aboriginals, click on the image below: