767 Read and weep.
I wrote the other day: "Frankly, I find it hard to hold back" (blog 765) … in fact, I just can’t let this issue rest. Indeed, I can't get the SBS show First Contact off my mind. Why am I outraged? I am uncomfortable living in a country where the sentiments expressed by David Oldfield are now being adapted by more and more people.
I have a strong sense of justice and charity. I believe it is ever so important to acknowledge subjects like equality of all humans under the sun and their right to wellbeing. This right has been taken away from Aborigines when their country was invaded and through their treatment ever since.
Admittedly this is a problem all over the world, where indigenous peoples are being sidelined ... but here in Australia the element of denial & delusion, in conjunction with injustice and indifference toward the original people is growing.
This bothers me no end. I don't often go to demonstrations, but I will join this one:
So, I consider a disgrace these ratbags Keith Windschuttle, author of this section in the University of Tasmania Law Review article:
"Not only is the charge of genocide unwarranted, but so is the term ‘Stolen Generations’. Aboriginal children were never removed from their families in order to put an end to Aboriginality or, indeed, to serve any improper government policy or program. The small numbers of Aboriginal child removals in the twentieth century were almost all based on traditional grounds of child welfare."
… and David Oldfield, who said in the SBS program:
“Frankly it (Aboriginal Australia) should have died out like the stone age,” Oldfield says early on. “Aboriginality is just unnecessary. It’s not really in the best interests of Aboriginal people. It’s not good for Aborigines to remain Aborigines. You just naturally let it die out.”
While Oldfield states (very smugly, I must say) that there is no legal ground to assume a position that acknowledges harm done to Aborigines - since, at the time, the actions by the government were legal - they adopt an utterly amoral position, one devoid of any ethical considerations, when they so conveniently cite the law and then denounce - and pounce on - Aboriginality.
Their stance on Aborigines is this: Since at the time the actions by the authorities of removing Aboriginal children from their families were legal, there is absolutely no reason to investigate the impact this process had on the children & families involved, and furthermore, they are fully within their rights to make their claim, "Not only is the charge of genocide unwarranted, but so is the term ‘Stolen Generations’."
And exactly that is the policy of the Pauline Hanson One Nation party, a bunch of unprincipled rednecks, lacking any compassion or sympathy for their fellow human beings (the un-white kind). Shame on them; what a disgusting lot of scumbags.
(If I find still stronger terms to rebut them I’ll let you know in a future blog!)
The policies of One Nation are expressed by Pauline Hanson in her 1996 maiden speech to Parliament (she has now changed her tune, in as much as in her very similar 2016 speech she replaced “Aboriginals” with “Muslims”):
“I am fed up to the back teeth with the inequalities that are being promoted by the government and paid for by the taxpayer under the assumption that Aboriginals are the most disadvantaged people in Australia.”
The truth is that Aboriginals are disadvantaged - to see this clearly and most shockingly, it may be necessary to watch the SBS show - but that fact has been acknowledged in the University of Tasmania Law Review article:
“The Australian practice of Indigenous child removal involved both systematic racial discrimination and genocide as defined by international law. Yet it continued to be practised as official policy long after being clearly prohibited by treaties to which Australia had voluntarily subscribed.
“The Commission noted further that, although child removal may have been legally authorised, it was discriminatory and genocidal nonetheless.
“The Inquiry has found that the removal of Indigenous children by compulsion, duress or undue influence was usually authorised by law, but that those laws violated fundamental common law rights which Indigenous Australians should have enjoyed equally with all other Australians.”
Read and weep.