rticular the elevated proportion of Aboriginal children being held in the cells by police. "
Of 1,753 juveniles aged from 10 to 17 years held in police custody in the survey period, 704 - about 40 per cent - were Indigenous children and young people. Similarly, some 36 per cent of youth in juvenile correctional institutions in June 1996 were Indigenous, with a rate of incarceration of 540 per 100,000, compared to 25 per 100,000 for non-Indigenous youth.
These scandalous figures again highlight the systematic, ingrained racism of Australian society and its institutions. And as the WA Aboriginal Legal Service submission to the Stolen Generations inquiry points out, "The detention of Aboriginal youth is a form of child removal. "
The separation from their families and communities of Indigenous children and youth detained in correctional institutions is even worse when you consider that the detention centres are often hundreds or even thousands of kilometres away from the communities, especially in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory, where the rates of removal are particularly high compared with the national average.
So it's very strange that he was prepared to give a personal apology (albeit a very grudging, mean-spirited one) at the 1997 Reconciliation Convention, but utterly refuses to countenance an apology by the Federal Parliament, on behalf of the nation. And since he followed up his stilted, two-sentence "expression of regret "with an angry, lectern-pounding tirade defending his government's policy on native title, it's hard to believe in his sincerity. No wonder a quarter of the audience turned their backs on him in disgust.
It might appear that Howard just doesn't get it. A majority of people (according to the polls), most newspapers, churches, a host of eminently respectable public figures, and even some State Liberal governments can recognise that an acknowledgement of and apology for past crimes against the Aboriginal people is not a matter of people today admitting individual or collective guilt - a word which, as the inquiry President Sir Ronald Wilson has pointed out, is never mentioned in Bringing them home .
But Howard isn't really that dumb. His refusal to consider either an official apology or compensation arises out of his determination to pursue a course that involves not only continuing racist oppression, but stripping away some of the gains, small as they are, that Indigenous people have made in recent years.
Howard's 10-point plan in response to the High Court's Wik judgement takes away from Indigenous people and gives to the miners and pastoralists, and all the millionaires who stand to make windfall profits from the effective upgrading of pastoral leases to freehold ownership. So Howard's response (or lack of it) to the Stolen Generations report is entirely consistent. He doesn't want to acknowledge the past because he plans to continue it in other ways.
A sincere acknowledgment and expression of regret for the wrongs done to Australia's Indigenous people has nothing to do with guilt. But it does imply that you take responsibility for trying to redress the wrongs by fighting for, or at least supporting, greater rights and a better deal for Aborigines today.
The reason Howard is so obsessed with guilt is that, unlike most of us, he actually does have reason to feel some.
But of course, Howard doesn't want to be seen as the racist he is, nor does he want the Australian economy damaged by international perceptions of Australia as a racist country. Hence his condemnation of what he calls "the black armband view "of Australian history. Howard prefers what the historian Henry Reynolds refers to as the "white blindfold view". (And the whitewashing continues. Following the release of Bringing them home , government departments have been instructed not to refer to "stolen" children, but to use the more sanitised term "separated" instead.)
There is no rigid barrier between the past and the present - or between the present and future for that matter. There is a continuity in history - Things that happen in one year or decade shape what comes after, as the victims of the assimilation policy know only too well.
"I have six children. My kids have been through what I went through ... The psychological effects that it had on me as a young child also affected me as a mother with my children. I've put my children in Bomaderry Children's Home when they were little. History repeating itself. "p> The social and economic position of Aborigines today is a direct result of what has happened to them in the past. And on a personal level, the effects ripple through the generations in a vicious cycle of despair and alienation.
In fact, as the report clearly s...
