Reaction to the Report became politicised by the actions of the Prime Minister, Mr Howard, in quickly rejecting most of its principal recommendations, including those for a national apology and compensation. Mr Howard refused to go beyond issuing a limited statement of personal regret. Much of the press coverage of the Report centred on Howard’s refusal to offer a national apology. This tended to overshadow the importance of the act itself and what it symbolised for the future of black/white relations. At least two profound issues were at stake. Firstly, from an Aboriginal perspective, an apology represents part of the healing process. ‘At present,’ an Aboriginal health adviser explains, ‘there are large numbers of Aboriginal people who are either yet to confront or acknowledge their past, or who have undergone this painful process but do not have access to a healing process which is capable of understanding and addressing their specific needs.’343 An apology is an important starting point for these people. The experience of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission has shown that acknowledgment of the suffering of black people ‘lifts a burden from their shoulders.’344 Secondly, there are the broader needs of the nation. The ability to deal with the legacies of the past requires an acknowledgement of its impact. American psychiatrist Aaron Lazare has highlighted the wider significance of apologies for historic wrongs. ‘It’s the absence of an apology which lets the issue smoulder and stops people from ever trusting each other again … It is only by remembering, and honestly addressing something, that anyone can really forgive.’345
Government attempts to justify their refusal to issue an apology reveal, at best, a disturbing lack of understanding about the history of the policy of removal. At worst, these attempts represent a blatant attempt to rewrite the history of this policy. In a media interview on 16 December 1997, the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Senator John Herron, attempted to draw a distinction between governments which had apologised to victims of wartime atrocities and the Australian Government’s response to the stolen generations. The former group, he said, were victims of the ‘deliberate killing of people. That was an attempt to exterminate them.’ The removal of Aboriginal children was very different—and by implication—did not warrant an apology. ‘This was taking children away—the churches were doing it because they believed it was in the best interests of the children.’ This distinction is artificial. It completely overlooks the role of government in establishing forced removal as official policy and the racial ideas of extermination upon which it was originally founded.
Very different sentiments on apologising for the historic wrongs of racial policies gathered pace internationally during 1997. In the United States President Bill Clinton spoke of the need for Americans to apologise for slavery. ‘Surely every American knows,’ Mr Clinton explained to a recent television audience, ‘that slavery was wrong and that we paid a terrible price for it and that we had to keep repairing that … and just to say that it’s wrong and that we’re sorry about it is not a bad thing. That doesn’t weaken us.’346 Most recently, the Canadian Government apologised to its indigenous people for the forced removal of children and their institutionalisation in residential schools.
Undoubtedly, the establishment of the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission is the most far-reaching example of a country confronting its past racial policies. Its Deputy Chairman recently explained that ‘part of the truth in our reconciliation commission is for the nation to say we’re sorry for what we did to you even when people aren’t directly involved in it.’347
Why has the Australian Government been unwilling to acknowledge the stolen generations as part of the reconciliation process? In many ways this is the most tragic part of the entire issue. Having inflicted such suffering on large sections of the Aboriginal community, the nation, as a whole, is not willing to respond appropriately. Howard’s refusal to offer an apology was based on advice he received indicating such a gesture could open a ‘Pandora’s box’ of litigation.348 However, fear of possible compensation payouts did not prevent state parliaments, including Western Australia, from apologising for the impact of this policy. In fact, the Federal Government’s rejection of the Commission’s findings is bound up in a larger agenda, partly politically motivated. The government sought to represent contemporary majority opinion about Aborigines as undeserving of so called special rights, thereby showing favour with its newly won electoral following. In addition, the Federal Government also wished its response to the HREOC Report to serve an even larger goal: to refocus reconciliation away from consideration of past injustices suffered by Aboriginal people to a more narrow provision of practical measures of material assistance. These responses represent a shift to the right in Australian politics, which has been accompanied by an apparent resurgence of mainstream conservative thinking about race and race relations in Australia. This needs some explanation.
Racial attitudes in any society are notoriously difficult to analyse and explain. As has been demonstrated throughout this book, ideas among whites about race are often tied up with their fears about threats to racial purity and the cultural and economic domination of whites. The history of race relations in Australia has been dominated by such fears for much of the twentieth century. However, positive signs of change occurred in States such as Western Australia from the mid 1960s and symbolised the shift away from authoritarian control over Aborigines lives. The resounding vote in favour of the 1967 Referendum on Aborigines in which over ninety percent supported the proposals to change the Constitution to give the Commonwealth power, concurrently with the States, to make laws for Aboriginal people and that they be counted as citizens in the census, is usually taken as indication that most Australians had made a decisive break with the worst features of its racist past. Australians were thought to have embraced a more sympathetic, compassionate and accepting attitude towards Aborigines. Yet, with the benefit of hindsight, it is not entirely clear that a majority of Australians ever had in mind in the late 1960s that significant new rights would or should be given to Aborigines as a result of the change to the Constitution.
Even if the 1967 Referendum did mark a high point in positive race relations, there is some evidence that attitudes steadily slid backwards thereafter. Throughout the 1980s, opinion poll data tended to show declining levels of support for Aboriginal issues among the Australian population. This data became evidence for a ‘backlash’ hypothesis. The public at large, it was argued, had rejected Aboriginal causes. This is a particularly difficult point to prove because there is only one poll question which has been asked in the 1960s and the 1980s—‘whether we are doing enough to house and educate Aborigines’. Limited as this question might be, responses show that over this period the proportion answering ‘spend more’ declined from 77 percent to 41 percent. A similar question—‘Whether governments are spending the right amount of money on Aborigines’—was asked four times from 1974 to 1986. The ‘too much’ answer rose from 15 percent (1974) to 42 percent (1984), although it fell back to 21 percent in 1986.349
In 1984 the Department of Aboriginal Affairs commissioned Australian National Opinion Poll (ANOP) to conduct a poll on land rights, the results of which are supposed to have convinced the Hawke government to abandon its promise of national land rights. Half the sample were described by ANOP as ‘soft racists’, opposed to land rights. However closer analysis showed a marked division within this group, with approximately 30 percent supporting the need for Aborigines to be compensated by giving them land rights because of the way they have been treated. In the early 1990s, these figures were interpreted by Groot and Rowse as evidence of the growing complexity of public opinion on Aboriginal issues. They suggested a three-tiered structure of public opinion. One group was defined as openly hostile to any notion of Aboriginal rights while those who supported rights were divided into two blocks of opinion. One block, which inherited its views from the assimilation era, showed commitment to notions of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ but in a way which
precluded recognition of any ‘special’ rights. The second group, representing more recent attitudes ‘is organised around such notions as respect for Aboriginal culture [and] a sense of the need to restore both resources and dignity to Aborigines damaged by non-Aboriginal actions.’350
While supporters in this second block have undoubtedly grown in recent years, there is evidence that public opinion at large shows declining support for Aboriginal causes. This, at least, is the finding of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. In 1994 it concluded that a plateau had been reached in public support for reconciliation. From 48 percent of people saying they were in favour of reconciliation in November 1991, the percentage climbed to 53 percent in February 1993 and 55 percent in September 1993. However, by March 1994 it had slipped back to 52 percent. According to Patrick Dodson, Chairman of the Council, ‘this fall was linked to the increased political debate on the native title decision and land claims.’351
The points to draw from the available figures on contemporary public opinion towards Aborigines are, basically, twofold. There has been a steady climb in compassionate recognition of Aboriginal rights but the number of people holding such views does not yet appear to have reached a majority. Most people still hold hostile views on Aboriginal rights, although the degree of hostility varies. The number in this group is likely to rise in a period marked by assertive claims by Aborigines for those rights. The structure of this broadly unsympathetic group continues to be founded on the following principal components, identified in the 1994 Task Force on Aboriginal Social Justice: negative stereotyping, a denial of past injustices, a ‘we’ versus ‘they’ attitude and resentment over supposed privileged ‘handouts’.352 The Task Force was compelled to acknowledge the existence of deeply entrenched racist attitudes in the Western Australian community; attitudes that regard ‘Aboriginal people of less value than others—and consequently requiring a lesser level of service from the community.’353 The Task Force also held a number of community workshops for white and Aboriginal participants at which racism was regularly raised. Reports from these workshops show how the interaction between community ignorance of history and the perpetuation of negative stereotypes impedes recognition of Aboriginal rights.
There was much concern about the portrayal of Aboriginal people in the media which both reflects the current negative perceptions in the community, and reinforces and perpetuates them. Many workshop participants suggested the need to re-educate the Australian public about Aboriginal people. Community knowledge about Aboriginal people and culture and history was felt to be lacking, as is their understanding of contemporary Aboriginality, the relative recency of paternalistic practices such as the widespread removal of Aboriginal children from their families and the consequences this had for contemporary Aboriginal families, and their culture as a whole.354
The climate of public opinion worsened in the lead-up to, and immediately after, the 1996 election. Evidence of a backlash against Aboriginal rights was now clear cut. A significant component of Australia’s so-called race debate at this time became focused on allegations raised by Pauline Hanson, a Liberal turned independent candidate for the Federal seat of Oxley, that Aborigines were given too many special privileges unavailable to whites. As Race Discrimination Commissioner Zita Antonios has written, this ‘new wave of racism has been bubbling under the surface for some time but has erupted in the past year [1995] quite publicly. It manifests itself in the view that policies, legislation, and even funding for Indigenous Australians and people of non-English speaking background have gone too far.’355
Thus, on the eve of the establishment of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission inquiry into the stolen generations, public opinion towards the rights of Aborigines was a mixture of long-standing ignorance and stereotypical attitudes which had gradually been hardening in opposition to Aboriginal rights. This climate represented less a ‘backlash’ than a continuity of thinking about Aborigines as undeserving of ‘special’ privileges. What are perceived to be special privileges represent in real terms, however, basic human and sovereignty rights. As the Age newspaper recently commented: ‘Each of the milestones that has marked the reconciliation process since the 1967 referendum—the Mabo and Wik judgements, the creation of ATSIC and the land councils—has been greeted with fear and resentment by significant sections of the non-indigenous community.’356 This reaction is, of course, indicative of more deep-seated prejudice towards Aborigines. It is often overlooked how the deep antipathy to Aborigines as a people and culture perpetuates itself with each new generation. Experience of overt racism remains a common feature in the lives of many Aboriginal youth growing up in Western Australia. The West Australian recently reported the experience of one talented young Aboriginal footballer, Steven Garlett:
Out of school and out of work, Garlett does not go out much any more because racism in the wider community gets him into too many fights … But racism is infiltrating the game at the most junior levels. Garlett said that he had been called names for years but the worst incident of all was when he was spat on last year … [Garlett’s coach] said many young Aboriginal players, who were often shy and reserved, bottled up years of abuse, then exploded. Others simply dropped out of the game that could give them self-esteem, pride in their team and club, a place in their community and, perhaps the ultimate, the chance to play at national level.357
Within the broader climate of racial antipathy, the issue of an apology to the stolen generations was inevitably going to arouse significant public opinion. However, one crucial fact emerged from the opinion poll data on this issue: a larger number of Coalition supporters were unsympathetic towards an apology and, by implication, compensation. A Newspoll, taken on 3 June 1997, which asked ‘Should the Government apologise for the “stolen children”?’ showed that 50 percent of respondents favoured the issuing of an apology and 40 percent opposed it; 43 percent of those opposed were Coalition supporters and 37 percent ALP supporters. Interestingly, this poll showed that support for an apology dropped with age, with 55 percent of the eighteen to thirty-four year old age group in favour of an apology and 42 percent of those fifty years old and over. Western Australians registered the highest number of people opposed to an apology (51 percent) followed by Queensland (46 percent). (The Northern Territory was not included in the poll.) In other words, those States with the highest proportion of Aborigines in their populations were the least sympathetic.358
The Bulletin published the results of a Morgan Poll in the first week of June 1997. The poll had asked a more pointed question, requiring a ‘Yes/No’ response to the following statement: ‘No formal apology to Aborigines [is needed] as present generations are not accountable for misdeeds of past generations.’ Fifty-seven percent of respondents agreed with this statement, of which a massive 71 percent were Coalition voters, leading the magazine to conclude the obvious: ‘John Howard’s veto of a national stolen generation apology has received firm public support.’359 The significant difference in the results of the two polls may well be explained by the manner in which the second question was asked: ‘accountable for misdeeds of past generations’ taps into a long-held attitude of many Australians towards Aborigines that a clear separation exists between past and present. It is an attitude born of a reluctance to confront the racism experienced by Aborigines. The Prime Minister has been one of the most forceful exponents of this view. ‘Australians of this generation,’ he told the National Reconciliation Convention, ‘should not be required to accept guilt and blame for past actions and policies over which they had no control.’360 The implications of such a view are, of course, to limit the degree of responsibility people are prepared to accept for the wrongs of the past, even though, in this instance it represents the very recent past, with on-going effects.
The letter pages of major newspapers give some flavour to the findings of the opinion polls by revealing some of the reasoning behind opposition to the HREOC Report. For some of these let
ter writers, there was never anything wrong with assimilation in the first place. As far as the following letter writer to the West Australian is concerned, the original ideals of assimilation have never been questioned. ‘I am amazed’, the writer noted,
that there is no reference to the reasons why these children were taken from their families. Was it not to give them better opportunities in the white man’s world—better health care, better education and better employment opportunities? If this had not been done and accepted by them, would not the children have tried to return to their families and would not these families have tried to assist them to do so? I know of no such cases.361
The rhetoric behind assimilation—that it was in the best interests of the children—continued to hold sway among sections of the public. Aboriginal children, many letter writers argued, were not only given ‘opportunities’, they were positively ‘saved’ by assimilation. As one correspondent wrote to the Bulletin, the ‘sad fact is that the “stolen generation”, whatever emotional scars are nourished, were the saved generation. That so many survived and are living well attests to the good intent of the program.’362 This, too, was the theme of an angry correspondent to the West Australian. ‘The stolen children is another slander which distorts the effort to save some of the mixed-race Aborigines from the benighted and abysmal conditions which seemed a never-ending cycle of failure by the Aboriginal culture to adapt to modern society.’363 Claims that Aboriginal children somehow benefited from the policy of removal were made by prominent Liberal Party backbencher, Mr Wilson Tuckey. ‘In any materialistic sense, most Aboriginal children who were removed to mission schools or adopted by white parents have benefited substantially and many were no worse off socially than those white children who went to boarding school.’364 How such wild claims could be made by such a prominent politician is worrying enough, but the purpose such comments serve in deprecating the claims of justice for these people, is particularly unfortunate.
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