On Jan. 7, the Australian government rejected Aboriginal demands for compensation for kidnapping and forcing their children to live with white families.
Instead, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will provide a mere apology to Aborigines. The former government of John Howard
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According to Australia’s minister of Indigenous Affairs, Jenny Macklin, the demand for a compensation fund with an apology was ruled out.
“What we will be doing is putting the funding into health and education services, and providing additional support for services needed for counseling, to enable people to find their relatives,” she said. “So we won’t be creating a compensation fund” (AFP, Jan. 7, 2008).
Aboriginal leaders are demanding a compensation fund of $870 million to give to some 13,000 Aborigines taken from their parents as children from the 1930s up to the 70s.
The government kidnapped Aboriginal children and forcibly placed them with white families in order to mandate assimilation. This outrageous and extremely racist state policy was meant to wipe out Aboriginal culture. Some of the kidnapped children never got the chance to see their families again.
Australia’s Aboriginal population consists of around 470,000 people out of the country’s 21 million. Since the British conquest of Australia, the Aborigines—the land’s native inhabitants—were marginalized, oppressed and driven away. They were viewed by the colonial state as an “inferior” and “savage” nation.
The marginalization and oppression of Indigenous people in capitalist Australia is not the only case in the world. Indigenous people of the United States share a similar history and struggle. Millions of Native people were killed and forced to assimilate by their oppressors.
Currently, the Aborigines are the most oppressed and impoverished people in Australia. They face institutional racism where basic social services are being denied. Aborigines suffer from higher rates of poverty and significantly shorter life expectancy than the rest of the country’s inhabitants.
The Aborigines deserve the compensation they are requesting and much more. But the bourgeois state will resist granting reparations at all costs.
