Aborigines were given right to move across most of the lease but there were no provisions for the respect of sacred sites or the training or employment of Aboriginal people. Gough Whitlam presented a bark petition to Parliament which asked for the area known as Gove to be given the name of Nhulumbuy. The National Tribal Council was established in Brisbane.
The Gibb Committee was set up to investigate conditions on pastoral properties in the Northern Territory. In Milirrpum v. Nabalco Pty. The Office of Aboriginal Affairs conducted an inter-departmental study on the Nabalco issue. Prime Minister William McMahon rejected the advice. Neville Bonner became the first Aboriginal Australian to sit in the Commonwealth Parliament when he was chosen by the Queensland Liberal Party to fill a casual Senate vacancy.
In his first speech he raised issues of identity, self-determination and intellectual property rights:. The first Aboriginal Legal Service was established in Redfern, Sydney by a group of Aboriginal community leaders, lawyers and academics. Following the passing of the Victorian Aboriginal Lands Act the presentation of title deeds to residents of Lake Tyers and Framlingham offered the first recognition of land rights in Victoria.
The Aborigines Act Qld provided for restrictions upon Aboriginal people living on reserves - Aboriginal cultural customs were banned, reading matter censored, relationships controlled, work devalued and movements recorded, and the Torres Strait Islanders Act Qld reiterated Queensland Government policy of assimilation. On 25 January, the McMahon Government announced a new policy - Aborigines should have a choice about the degree to which they identify with the wider society and should be encouraged to manage their own affairs.
Freehold land rights were rejected, however, in favour of fifty-year general purpose leases to Aboriginal communities for social and economic purposes. The Government announced an intention to allow the Yirrkala people to receive a small royalty from the bauxite mining on their country, allow a weak form of Aboriginal leasehold over some reserve areas in the Northern Territory and to acquire some pastoral lease land in the Northern Territory, such as at Daguragu Wattie Creek for Aboriginal development.
McMahon stressed that this would not constitute recognition of traditional ownership or land rights. Mining companies could continue to mine unimpeded on Aboriginal reserves.
William McMahon, C. He also promised the introduction of a civil rights bill, overruling state laws that discriminated against Aborigines, a fully elected Legislative Assembly in the Northern Territory with a non-discrimination charter and free legal representation for Aborigines to test their rights in court.
In the Whitlam Government created the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, ushering in a period of significant Commonwealth expenditure and programming in Indigenous affairs, and in initiated a Commission into Aboriginal Land Rights.
All applications for mining and exploration on Commonwealth Aboriginal reserves were frozen and the Northern Territory Welfare Branch was abolished and responsibilities taken over by the new DAA. The Woodward Land Rights Commission was established with Justice Woodward being appointed to hold a Commission of Inquiry into appropriate ways to recognise Aboriginal land rights in the Northern Territory.
Australian Government Digest , 1 July September The National Aboriginal Consultative Committee NACC was established with the objective of ensuring that Aboriginal views were taken into account in policy formation and implementation.
The report was accepted in principle by all political parties. The Aboriginal Land Fund Act established Land Fund Commission to administer the Aboriginal land fund by which Aboriginal corporations or land trusts could acquire interests in land which would enable members of the corporation to occupy the land. Source: Senate, Debates , 19 September , pp. The Racial Discrimination Act conferred rights to equality before the law and bound the Commonwealth and the states to the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination.
He stressed through references to ceremony, the importance of the event. The Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry, led by Justice Fox, examined the effects of mining on Aboriginal people and recommended the Ranger Uranium mine go ahead subject to strict environmental safeguards and that Kakadu land be granted to Aboriginal people, declared a national park and leased back.
Source: Australia. The Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act provided for the establishment of Indigenous councils and for incorporation of Aboriginal associations. Under the scheme, members of participating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities or organisations can forgo social security payments for a wages grant paid to the community.
It comprised representatives elected to state branches, from which a ten-member national executive was elected. Conflict arose between the Commonwealth and the Queensland Government over Aurukun and Mornington Island Aboriginal reserves after the Queensland Government decided to take control of both reserves.
Both communities protested and asked for help from the Commonwealth Government. In response the Queensland Government revoked the two reserves resulting in neither Queensland nor the new Commonwealth legislation being applicable. Eventually state and federal ministers agreed local authorities would be created for the former reserves and the land leased to the newly created councils for fifty years.
The agreement provided for payments to be made by the Commonwealth to the NLC by way of royalties for mining on Aboriginal land. At Noonkanbah Station, in Western Australia, purchased by the Aboriginal Land Fund Commission in , the Yangngara community demonstrated against a road through a sacred site.
In the meantime CRA Ltd planned to explore for oil on Yangngara land near an identified but not listed sacred site. The community petitioned the WA Parliament to stop the exploration. A prominent group of Australians including H. The National Aboriginal Conference put forward a treaty proposal and the Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser subsequently agreed to discuss the treaty proposal.
The National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Amendment Act obliged the Jabiru town development authority in the Northern Territory to consult with the chairman of the local Aboriginal land council before establishing Jabiru.
The ADC was governed by a board of Aboriginal people appointed by the government and had the task of administering a range of development-oriented programs. The reduction in the Aboriginal population, and a growing consciousness of the general mistreatment of Aboriginal people, combined with the need for more effective regulation of labour in pastoral areas to bring about changes in policy. The House of Commo ns Select Committee on Aborigines, which had reported in , had recommended that there should be missionaries for Aboriginal people, protectors for their defence and special codes of law to protect them.
Protectors were appointed, mostly by executive order, in New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia at about this time; they were supposed to protect Aborigines from abuses and to provide the remnant populations around towns with some rations, blankets and medicine.
The right to marry was limited, as were other civil rights. For full-blood Aborigines there was some de facto tolerance or allowance of a continuing traditional way of life, although the missions which were sometimes entrusted with the running of reserves and the care of their populations were often unsympathetic and sometimes overtly hostile to traditional ways.
Legislation applying the policy of protection was adopted in Victoria in , Western Australia in , Queensland in , New South Wales in , South Australia and the Northern Territory in Special laws prohibited the consumption of alcohol, restricted the movement of Aborigines and regulated their employment. Continuing difficulties, and criticisms of the treatment of Aboriginal people especially in central and northern Australia, led in to demands by the States and by voluntary bodies for increased Commonwealth involvement in Aboriginal affairs.
The policy of assimilation means that all Aborigines and part-Aborigines are expected to attain the same manner of living as other Australians and to live as members of a single Australian community, enjoying the same rights and privileges, accepting the same customs and influenced by the same beliefs as other Australians. Steps were taken to achieve this result. Expenditure on health, housing, education and training programs began to be increased in the Northern Territory and in the States.
The decline in the Aboriginal population in the north and centre was halted and reversed in the s, and in southern and eastern Australia the Aboriginal population was increasing rapidly.
Access to social security benefits for Aborigines came in , Aborigines became entitled to vote at federal elections in , [27] and the wardship system in the Northern Territory was dismantled in From this time the Board substantially increased the already established practice of removing Aboriginal children with fair skin, referred to at the time as 'half-caste' or 'part Aboriginal', from their families.
Children were placed in institutions where they could be 'trained' to take their place in white society. We do not currently have any resources linked to this entry, but resources may exist. Nevertheless, the Committee is of the view that if it is recognised that sovereignty did inhere in the Aboriginal people in a way not comprehended by those who applied the terra nullius doctrine at the time of occupation and settlement, then certain consequences flow which are proper to be dealt with in a compact between the descendants of those Aboriginal peoples and other Australians.
The Committee advised that its 'preferred method of legal implementation of a compact' between the Aboriginal population and the Commonwealth would be a referendum to amend the Constitution.
The Senate Committee's report did not immediately lead to any new treaty initiatives and the Aboriginal Treaty Committee, finding a lack of political will to implement a treaty, ceased its activities in February Progress towards a 'treaty' may have reached an impasse in , but with the ALP winning office that year, 'self-determination' returned to the Commonwealth Government's vocabulary and 'self-sufficiency' was dropped.
This Government Similarly, in the ALP's , and platforms, support is pledged to 'the policy of self-determination' and in its April paper entitled Achievements in Aboriginal Affairs to , the Government cited the establishment of incorporated Aboriginal controlled organisations as a measure of success of the policy of 'self-determination'. The Hawke Government's concept of self-determination, however, did not differ greatly from the previous Government's concept of 'self-management' and did not carry any of the connotations carried by the term 'self-determination' as used in International Law.
While changes in Departmental policy represent a notable advance and a significant break with the past, it is still unclear whether they embody a real commitment to Aboriginal self-determination as distinct from a policy of multiculturalism that could equally apply to other racial or ethnic groups.
Self-determination, which would enable Aboriginal people to control their destiny and adapt their laws, culture and traditions, is essential to their continuation as a viable and identifiable race.
Multiculturalism which acknowledges differences between different communities is not enough. Many indigenous activists, disappointed among other things by the Government's retreat in March from their pursuit of a system of national land rights, sought to link the domestic use and international meaning of the term.
For example, Paul Coe, the then Chair of the National Aboriginal and Islander Legal Service Secretariat, argued in a United Nations Week Speech, October , that international law recognises the Aboriginal people's statehood and that the Commonwealth of Australia must recognise 'the right to self-determination of the nation of the Aboriginal people'.
Despite oppression and attempts at indoctrination in colonialists' schools, our inherent belief that the members of our communities collectively have the right to rule, that an individual's responsibility and right is to protect himself by guarding this collective right, remains. Professor Erica Irene A. Daes, Chair of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations, made it clear that she believed there was a general Aboriginal aspiration for self-determination and that by this they meant having control over their land, their laws and all aspects of their lives.
Consequentially she recommended that:. While the exact powers and functions of such self-governments should be the subject of negotiations between the parties, the minimum goal should be powers sufficient for the protection of the group's collective right to existence and for the preservation of their identities. To this end, a secure financial basis must be created for the self-governments, preferably through the establishment of rights to land and resources, taxation powers and, when and if these are insufficient, the granting of lump sums for their free use.
The term 'self-determination', however, ended up being the main stumbling block to bi-partisan support for a resolution which church leaders had proposed parliamentarians pass as their first act in the new Federal Parliament House. The resolution in its final form read:. Although this resolution had already been modified to accommodate Opposition concerns e.
The Social activist Father Frank Brennan suggested:. At best, the proposed amendment was ambiguous suggesting that the entitlement to self-determination was universal but exercisable discretely by separate groups. At worst, it was ruthlessly assimilationist suggesting that self-determination could be exercised only collectively by all Australians The amendment was not accepted and the Opposition did not support the resolution.
The Government continued to use the term but avoided using it in international fora 33 and domestically always appeared to try to link it with 'self-management'. Thus the preamble to the Bill which established the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission ATSIC , a body which was to combine the representative and consultative functions of the earlier NACC and NAC, with the budget and program responsibilities of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, declared the new body's objectives to be 'self-determination and self-management for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples within the Australian nation The Government's attempt to appear supportive of 'self-determination' while containing it within the parameters of 'self-management', led the House of Representative Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs to note in that 'at times Aboriginal people and governments have talked past each other because they have used terminology loosely'.
The Late s and the Concept of a 'Compact'. In the late s, while the debate over self-determination gathered pace, the prospect of a treaty, a prospect which had receded from the political scene in , returned-sometimes under the alternate name of 'compact'. In September the then Prime Minister, Mr Hawke, who had been heavily lobbied by people such as the Aboriginal poet Kevin Gilbert and Mr Justice Michael Kirby, raised the possibility of a 'compact' between the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people.
Mr Howard, the then Leader of the Opposition, rejected the idea claiming: 'There is no way the Australian people will ever accept that in some way we are two nations within one-nor should they'. On 12 June , however, Mr Hawke effectively committed his government to concluding a compact by We, the indigenous owners and occupiers of Australia, call on the Australian Government and people to recognise our rights:.
To self-determination and self-management, including the freedom to pursue our own economic, social, religious and cultural development;. To compensation for the loss of use of our lands, there having been no extinction of original title;.
To protection of and control of access to our sacred sites, sacred objects, artefacts, designs, knowledge and works of art;. To the return of the remains of our ancestors for burial in accordance with our traditions;. To respect for and promotion of our Aboriginal identity, including the cultural, linguistic, religious and historical aspects, and including the right to be educated in our own languages and in our own culture and history;.
A national elected Aboriginal and Islander organisation to oversee Aboriginal and Islander affairs;. A police and justice system which recognises our customary laws and frees us from discrimination and any activity which may threaten our identity or security, interfere sic with our freedom of expression or association, or otherwise prevent sic our full enjoyment and exercise of universally-recognised human rights and fundamental freedoms.
Firstly, that there shall be a treaty negotiated between the Aboriginal people and the Government on behalf of all the people of Australia. Secondly, that many Aboriginal people should decide what it is you want to see in that treaty. The third step is that I have agreed that we should provide you with assistance to establish those consultation processes.
In particular, that there should be a committee of seven of your traditional owners who will have the responsibility for organising those consultations with a view to organising an Australia-wide convention, which will represent the culmination of your own negotiations. Fourthly, that when you have conducted these processes of consultations that we as a Government should then be prepared to receive and to consider the results of your thinking and your consultation. And fifthly, we agree that these processes should start before the end of this year, and that we would expect and hope and work for the conclusion of such a treaty before the end of the life of this Parliament.
There ensued much debate over how the process should go forward. Shirley McPherson, chair of the Aboriginal Development Commission, called for a treaty to be embodied in the Constitution. One contributor, the NCAO chair Geoff Clark, saw land rights as being crucial to the treaty issue, considered the working out of a consultation process a prerequisite to treaty negotiations and believed that there should be international monitoring-'A UN umpire if you like'.
The fifth option and the one favoured by Mr Mansell would recognise Aboriginal people as a separate nation:. Aboriginal people ought not to sell ourselves short by perceiving ourselves in terms of a unit of Australian society-an ethnic group or a minority-who are just getting a hard time.
We are in fact a nation of people and we ought to stand up and acknowledge it. If this is the case, then any agreement reached between Aborigines and Australia takes on a different status. And, it is not a status capable of being unilaterally enforced or not enforced by a white government as has been the case in New Zealand and the United States.
It means it comes under the purview of international law. At meetings in late and early the Prime Minister and the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs met with representatives of the NCAO to discuss how the compact consultations might be organised. The consultations, however, failed to get off the ground; the reasons included the lack of a representative Aboriginal organisation, the failure of the Government to allocate NCAO the funds budgeted for the consultations, the opposition of the Coalition parties and the preoccupation of the Minister with setting up the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.
Talk of a treaty, however, persisted. On 2 December a full page advertisement signed by prominent Australians, including Dr Coombs, appeared in the metropolitan press. The signatories called for political and financial support:. Only if popular support is strong and lasting in the months ahead will the Government keep its promise and the Aborigines win the recognition for which they have fought for years.
Mr Hawke himself revived the 'treaty' possibility in February during a visit to New Zealand for the th anniversary of the signing of the Waitangi treaty. He pledged his government would accelerate its efforts to make a treaty with Australia's Aboriginal population:.
The simple position is that we will proceed with the concept of a treaty within Australia. I believe that the total Australian community, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, is going to be well-served by the achievement of that treaty.
It's not something that's imposed, it's something that emerges from, as far as possible, a coalescence of the wishes and aspirations of the Aboriginal people and a recognition by the non-Aboriginal community of the appropriateness of such an outcome.
Warwick Smith, then Opposition Spokesperson on Aboriginal Affairs, argued, however, that it is impossible for a nation to have a treaty with itself:. A treaty will create hostility within the Australian community where it currently does not exist and will not advance the material well-being of the Aboriginal people. At the end of the s a new term, widely used in North America, enjoyed a brief period of use in Australia. Models ranged from the creation of an Aboriginal State with the powers of other Australian States it could be made up either of the various Aboriginal lands around Australia and have its parliament located in some central place such as Alice Springs or of one or two large continuous territories in Central and Northern Australia , to the recognition of traditional law, to constitutional guarantees of land rights, site protection and service delivery.
In November a five member Legislation Review Committee established by the Queensland Government produced a discussion paper Towards Self-Government and reported that:. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities consulted by the committee had no doubt about the survival of their rights. The committee was often asked why the Queensland and commonwealth parliaments, and the Australian High Court, must be the ultimate adjudicators of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders rights.
The question is important because it highlights a fundamental issue relevant to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander self-government. Whatever the legal situation, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people do not regard any powers to govern which they exercise as being 'derivative', or originating from any mainstream government. The committee proposed legislation which would recognise the pre-existing rights of indigenous people to self-government and which would enable Aboriginal and Islander communities to opt, by referendum, to progressively assume responsibility for a wide range of service till many have all the powers of existing local authorities, many of the powers of state administrations and some of the powers of the federal government.
Although the Pitcairn descendants on Norfolk Island had their claims to special rights dismissed by the High Court of Australia in , Parliament recognised the 'special relationship of the [Pitcairn] descendants with Norfolk Island and their desire to preserve their traditions and culture'. We cannot avoid the question of Norfolk Island being part of Australia; yet at the same time we cannot be seen to be preventing the people who have lived there for so long from continuing to live in the way they have for so long.
We are determined to ensure that they are allowed to exercise a real sense of self-government. If the small Norfolk Island community of about permanent residents could exercise the right to elect a government with many of the powers of both federal and state governments education, health, taxation, immigration, law-and-order and social welfare so too, the argument went, could numerous Aboriginal communities.
The word 'Reconciliation' had been introduced into the debate in when 14 heads of Australian Christian Churches issued a statement entitled 'Towards Reconciliation in Australian Society'. That statement focused on the history of Aboriginal-European contact and conflict, the place of Aborigines in Australian society and the need for committed acts of reconciliation. Although the Church leaders failed to get Commonwealth parliamentarians to pass a motion in the first session in the new Parliament House embracing 'reconciliation', the term lived on.
In August Father Frank Brennan and Professor James Crawford delivered a joint paper to the Australian Legal Convention in Sydney, calling for a 'charter of recognition' backed up by an independent commission rather than a treaty. The Aboriginal Recognition Commission would be modelled on the Australian Law Reform Commission in that it would be chaired by a prominent Australian, invite submissions, hold public hearings and publish interim reports.
It would hold a series of twelve annual meetings before 1 January , the anniversary of the first centenary of Federation.
The long-term aim of the Commission would be to present a draft Charter for Aboriginal Recognition to Commonwealth and State governments at a conference of Prime Minister and Premiers in , allowing 18 months for debate leading up to a referendum to approve the wording. By the Government appeared prepared to embrace the concept, not necessarily as a first choice for the way forward, but as the only choice left.
The failure to achieve bi-partisan support for either a 'treaty', a 'compact' or a resolution backing the right of indigenous people to self-determination, and an ambivalence in the general community about what if anything should be included in a treaty, 51 had led the Government to see some merit in a change of rhetorical tack.
In January Robert Tickner, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, issued a discussion paper entitled Aboriginal Reconciliation which proposed the establishment by legislation of a Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation to facilitate a process of reconciliation between Australia's indigenous and wider communities.
The Government's initiative was supported by the Opposition and seemed to be endorsed in the report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
The process of reconciliation was to be formally concluded by 1 January The council was to consult widely to determine whether the process would be advanced by a formal 'document of reconciliation' and, if so, make recommendations on the nature of such a document. Expectations of the process of reconciliation varied enormously among advocates of Aboriginal rights.
A former head of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and later chair of the Arrernte Council of Central Australia, Charles Perkins, was reported as calling the process a big lie and a sell out. On the 10th December the then Prime Minister, Mr Keating, in his so-called 'Redfern Speech', publicly linked progress down the path to reconciliation with Australian society coming to terms with the past:.
And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians. It begins, I think, with that act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.
We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask-how would I feel if this were done to me?
As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us. The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation sought to further stimulate public discussion with the publication in of eight 'key issue' papers. It is important to fully understand the recency of the official exclusion and control of indigenous Australians. Many now in their twenties went to separate schools, were not counted in a census until , and had their lives directed by managers or welfare officials; many now in their thirties were also kidnapped from their families and their links with their families were destroyed for many years; and those now in their fifties lived under harsh regimes-they were adults but had less rights than non-indigenous children of the time.
Paper no. The non-statutory options included area-specific protocols between various bodies, new inter-governmental agreements, and a 'treaty'. Statutory options included legislative recognition of indigenous rights in areas from self-government to customary law and a statutory Bill of Rights. Constitutional options included the insertion of a preamble acknowledging prior indigenous ownership of the land, constitutional recognition of a Bill of Rights, of specific indigenous rights and bodies, and or of federal, state and territory government obligations to indigenous people, the creation of reserved seats in Parliament, and replacing s.
Most, but not all. In the s some Torres Strait Islanders, led by Eddie Mabo, pursued their common law rights through the courts. On 3 June , after 10 years of litigation, the High Court decided that the common law recognises that native title may survive the acquisition of sovereignty by a colonising power.
The Court found that native title did not arise out of a grant from a government but was a pre-existing customary ownership of land which has survived since pre-colonial times. Indeed, the court implied that native title continued to exist elsewhere in Australia, wherever it has not been extinguished by governments and provided that the local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups had maintained a relationship with their traditional country based on customary law.
The judgement offered the recently established process of reconciliation a challenge and an opportunity, and the Government's response ended up coming in three phases. The first phase of the Government's response was the Native Title Act , creating an opportunity for at least some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups to receive formal, legal recognition of their customary ownership of their country.
The second phase of the Government's response to the decision followed indigenous people lobbying for establishment of a land fund to help satisfy the land need of the dispossessed indigenous people, who, because of dispossession, would rarely be able to demonstrate the continuous connections to land required under Native Title legislative guidelines. This led initially to expansion of the land acquisition programs within ATSIC to include the sub-component of native title, and then to the Federal Government establishing a new land fund and Indigenous Land Corporation to manage monies drawn down each year from the fund.
The third phase in the Government's response was to be a Social Justice Package. The social justice package presents Australia with what is likely to be the last chance this decade to put a policy framework in place to effectively address the human rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as a necessary commitment to the reconciliation process leading to the centenary of Federation in In addition to this joint report, each body prepared its own report.
While all took a 'rights-based' approach to social justice and canvassed possibilities for ensuring greater indigenous political representation, each highlighted different issues. The Social Justice Commissioner's report called for the creation of an indigenous parliament.
The Reconciliation Council's report urged considering dedicated indigenous seats in parliament. Five other Reconciliation Council recommendations concerned 'displaced persons', with the Commission recommending that the Commonwealth, State and Territory governments:.
In the early s policy makers became increasingly aware that public ignorance concerning the removal of Aboriginal children was hindering both the provision of help to the victims of such removals and the reconciliation process in general.
Helping to raise awareness of the problem had been several developments, including the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation's submission to the Social Justice Package inquiry, a campaign by the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care and the NSW organisation Link-up, the revelation in the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody that nearly half of those who so died had been separated in childhood from their natural families, and a large 'Going Home Conference' in Darwin.
The Inquiry estimated that between and the number of indigenous children forcibly separated ranged from about one in ten children to one in three, depending on time and place, and that most indigenous families have been affected, in one or more generations, by the forced removal of one or more children. Many were told they were unwanted, rejected or that their parents were dead.
Almost one in ten boys and just over one in ten girls allege they were sexually abused in children's institutions-and more allege such abuse in foster placements. Extensive physical punishments were common. Education in the institutions was directed at preparing the children only for menial work.
The Inquiry's report documents the effects not only on the children at the time more than half of whom were removed during infancy but also on those children later in life, on their children, on the families from which they were taken and on the foster carers when reunion is sought.
The Inquiry concluded that the forcible removal of indigenous children was an act of genocide contrary to the Convention on Genocide, ratified by Australia in This Convention included within its definition of genocide 'forcibly transferring children of [a] group to another group' with the intention of destroying the group regardless of the extent to which that intention was achieved.
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