Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian parliament has this week taken a bold and decisive step—a historic step—that is quite unprecedented at this level of Australian government, although, it should be said, not unprecedented at another level of Australian government. This week, we have engineered a measure of resolution to an issue which has troubled and divided us as Australians for more than 10 years. We have used the authority, the gravitas, of parliament as a tool to achieve an important public policy objective, not through the enactment of legislation but through the symbolism of a solemn bipartisan resolution to end a divisive chapter in the history of our relations with Indigenous Australia.

I am very proud to be here today to participate in this process. I am proud that my party, the Liberal Party, albeit belatedly, has joined in to endorse this endeavour. I am proud because this step is significant far beyond the walls of this and the other chamber. Very often the things we do here reach the consciousness of Australians generally as a dull and distant impression, if they reach them at all. The things we have done today in this place will undoubtedly be felt by huge numbers of Australians in the most immediate and direct way.

This week we have said sorry for the actions over several decades of churches, institutions, police officers, court officials, doctors, individuals and, by implication, governments in participating in the involuntary removal of children from their families on the basis of their race. However well meaning those actions were, they led to enormous grief and heartache. Those actions did great damage to the confidence and self-esteem of those children. That damage resonates today, decades after the practice of forced removal has ended.

It has been pointed out that many removals of Indigenous children were undertaken for the best of motives and that, objectively speaking, the material, educational and health outcomes of those who were separated were improved by virtue of their removal to other circumstances. In a physical sense, this will often have been true—not always, of course. But that observation overlooks a very important consequence of forced removal. I had the privilege of participating in the ‘forgotten Australians’ inquiry, which was the Senate inquiry into children in institutional care—one of what Senator Murray refers to as the trifecta of reports on child welfare. That particular inquiry, the third in the series, reported in August 2004. It gave those involved an insight into how damage to children has a ripple effect that is felt throughout society, very often creating damaged and dysfunctional adults.

While that inquiry took evidence from hundreds of people who had been separated from their families—often, it has to be said, very dysfunctional families—I tried to identify the element of this separation that was most distressing, most harmful to their development as balanced human beings. Surprisingly, the answer was not mistreatment or abuse at the hands of the institutions or foster families to which they were consigned—although many people gave evidence of mistreatment in those circumstances—but the fact of separation from people that these children believed loved them and wanted them and missed them. The separation from family—where the children were old enough to remember their families—was the single most corrosive factor undermining that child’s sense of well-being and which no amount of care and material comfort could offset.

If that was true of the general population of separated children, it was at least as true of separated Indigenous children. For so many children, that knowledge of their real family kept from them by a cruel authority was a constant, gnawing pain; a rot to the soul which would leave a deep, indelible mark on every child, no matter how decent their treatment in their later homes.

I was recently reading a collection of short stories told by Indigenous people about their experiences growing up apart from their families in homes and institutions where they were made to feel that their Aboriginality was a cause for humiliation and shame. Some of the stories pulsed with anger. Others were overlaid with a great sadness and a sense of loss. One particular story caught my eye because, while the author spoke bluntly about the damage done to him and his family by their forced separation, he also spoke positively about the need to look forward towards a better future. He wrote:

The past cannot be changed but some of the wounds can be healed.

I can think of no better way to express what we all feel here today and what we, as a community, are aiming to achieve through this apology.

The decade since the release of the Bringing them home report has shown that wounds this deep cannot heal on their own. The previous federal government worked to improve the lot of Indigenous Australians in a range of practical ways, particularly through major funding and support for health, education and social welfare programs. But, of course, there was something missing in that approach. By not apologising for past wrongs we have been unable to draw a line between then and now; between what was done in the past and what we plan to do in the future. And so it has been in some ways hard for our community—black and white—to heal.

For me, this motion today is about drawing that line. It says to the children of the Cootamundra Girls’ Home, St Mary’s Hostel, Retta Dickson House, the Parramatta Girls’ Home, the Kinchela Boys’ Home, Bedford Park and dozens of other homes and missions that we regret the way they were treated, we acknowledge it to have been wrong, and we intend to ensure that it does not happen again to future generations. In doing so, we face up to an unpalatable truth about Australia’s history. The nature of this truth has been much disputed: exactly how many children were taken, for how long and where to is sometimes ambiguous. It is certainly not becoming any clearer as time goes on. Some people say that because of this uncertainty we should not be issuing an apology today. To be perfectly frank, that is just a cop-out. We know without doubt that some people in some past times experienced pain, suffering and loss of identity as a result of the policies and actions of successive Australian governments, and for that we should rightly be sorry.

It is important for us today to be positive about the future and to acknowledge that, despite the pain and disadvantage and dispossession which these policies engendered, many people, both through their own endeavours and, I hope, as a result of today’s actions, will be able to move forward in a positive way and offset—at least partly—the nature of the experience that they have suffered.

One such person, who appears to have had some level of resolution, is a man called John Williams Mosley, a man taken from the Palm Valley area of the Northern Territory when he was eight months old, separated from his mother at that very tender age. Some years later he was able to meet his mother in these circumstances:

I spoke to my mother for the first time when I was 27 years old. The time was 11.37 pm on Friday 15 September 1978. I had just arrived at Tennant Creek from Sydney, where I had lived and worked for the previous 27 years.

He describes how he came to a house in Tennant Creek:

My eyes followed the path in front of me to where I saw the silhouette of a woman, standing in the half light of the open door. Her hands were clasped together in front of her body and she stood perfectly still. Even in the darkness I could see tears rolling down her chubby cheeks. She held out her arms to embrace me, and I walked into them. We held each other for the longest time. I was home.

I hope that by today’s actions we help more dispossessed, separated people in this country to come home. That would be the earnest hope, I am sure, of everybody in this place today.