Page 5111 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 27 October 2010
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(b) support initiatives that assist young parents and their children.
There are many parts of our history to be remembered and there are many that can never be forgotten. What I am raising today is a very difficult issue that involves an enormous amount of pain and trauma for many thousands of Australians. It is the issue of past forcible removal of babies from their unwed mothers for adoption or to be placed into institutional care. More than mistakes or errors, not just misguided lapses of judgement, what was done to women and babies under these past policies and practices was so fundamentally offensive to common decency and to our inherent rights as human beings that we have a responsibility to understand what happened and to do our best to ease that suffering.
What must be made clear is that the most appropriate first step is a thorough national inquiry into what happened to all those mothers who had their babies taken away without their consent. I understand that the minister will be moving amendments to recognise some other work that is being done—in particular, research being carried out by the Australian Institute of Family Studies. As a community, we need to understand the full extent of what happened, why it happened and how best to respond and ameliorate the harms caused.
This will involve an apology from the government and the parliament, both at a national and at a state and territory level. However, we must first understand the full extent of what happened and make sure the community understands why it is that we should be apologising and exactly what we are apologising for.
The ACT is in a different position from the states. We did not have self-government at that time and so we do not have the same type of continuity of governmental responsibility as is the case in the states. That said, the evidence suggests that what happened to women in Tasmania, New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia—in fact, right across Australia—was the product of a commonwealth government policy that was implemented by the states. Given that this is the case, while we do not know the numbers involved, we must expect that it did happen here and that even if the effect was to send single young women to institutions in New South Wales to have their babies, and have their babies taken, this is just as bad as if the removal occurred within our borders.
The fact that we are unsure of the extent of the problem and the commonwealth government’s role in taking children from young single mothers here in the ACT only further strengthens the need for a commonwealth inquiry so that we can find out what really happened here in the ACT to the ACT residents that we now represent.
On the issue of the need for an apology, there are two significant points to be made. On 17 June 1997, this Assembly passed a motion apologising to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the ACT for the hurt and distress inflicted upon any people as a result of the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. This motion was then re-affirmed on 14 February 2008 following the national apology that was done in that year. In this case it is also appropriate that the ACT government and this parliament act, even though neither existed at the time.
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