The Perils of Pauline and Australia's Stolen Children... 5th August 1997 Back to Asia Pacific Management News Menu | Asia Business News Portal | Asia Business News Feeds | Asia Pacific Management Forum Join the APMF email list Monthly updates on new content

The burgeoning support for the Queensland MP, Pauline Hanson, in Australian opinion polls, Australia's mostly outrageous treatment of its native Aborigine population and Prime Minister John Howard's political style of leading from the rear, have all begun to attract increasing attention in the Asian and international media in recent days. In a typical editorial, the Indonesian Observer newspaper said in May that Australia's relations with South-East Asia were in danger of being damaged by independent MP Pauline Hanson's racist policies. The English-language paper called on the Prime Minister, John Howard, to act "before Hanson's racist theories adversely affect Australia's relations with countries in this region". In the editorial entitled Hanson Will Haunt Australia, the Observer said Indonesians should take a closer look at Hanson, who had angered many Asians with her views denigrating Asians and Aborigines. "It makes us sad to realise . . . there are still people in Australia nurtured on the discarded racist theories held that some people are superior to others," it says. "She holds dangerous views", the editorial continued. "These views have been blamed for a rising number of racial attacks on Asians in that country. We would like to call on the large majority of understanding Australians to do something about this before fears rise in Asia that Australia remains a racist country despite its promotion of multiculturalism that followed the dismantling of the policy of accepting only European immigrants. This was only about 25 years ago." Australia's treatment of its native aboriginal population, probably among the worst in the world, has also come under increasing international scrutiny. Most recent are the disclosures of the stolen children. As many as 100,000 Aboriginal children were taken from their families by white authorities up to 1970. Why? What were the consequences? Australia is bound by international law to pay compensation for the "genocidal" removal of as many as 100,000 Aboriginal children from their parents between 1910 and 1970, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission inquiry into the "stolen children" has found. The 689-page report released in May concludes that the policies of forced removal constituted a "crime against humanity" which amounted to genocide. The Human Rights Commission report, titled Bringing Them Home, estimates that between 10 per cent and 30 per cent of indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families between 1910 and 1970. Many children experienced contempt and denigration of their Aboriginality and many were told that their families had rejected them or were dead. "Subsequent generations continue to suffer the effects of parents and grandparents having been forcibly removed, institutionalized, denied contact with their Aboriginality and in some cases traumatized and abused," the report said. The commission documented a chilling history of children taken away not because they were being neglected by parents but just because they were Aboriginal. The report said that, under the UN convention on genocide, ratified by Australia in 1949, genocide could be committed by the forcible transfer of children. ". . . the predominant aim of indigenous child removals was the absorption or assimilation of the children into the wider, non-indigenous community so that their unique cultural values and ethnic identities would disappear, giving way to models of Western culture", it said. "Removal of children with this objective in mind is genocidal because it aims to destroy the 'cultural unit' which the convention is concerned to preserve." Not unsurprisingly, the commission found that the stolen children breached the rights of Aborigines as Australians and human beings. Submitted by Dr. Usha C. V. Haley, Academic Advisor to the Asia Pacific Management Forum

© Asia Pacific Management Forum 1997
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