Page 5748 - Week 13 - Thursday, 18 November 2010
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I introduced the motion and it was successful. I am pleased that members in this place did support the call for a national inquiry, a federal inquiry, into the forcible removal of babies from their mothers for adoption or to be put into institutional care, and also then, after that inquiry, to look at an apology here from this Assembly. And of course, we would hope that would go hand in hand with a national apology.
After it was passed in this house, Senator Rachel Siewert, a Greens senator, took this issue up in the federal parliament. Again I am pleased to say that Senator Siewert’s motion for a federal inquiry was supported and that will be going ahead. That really will be the start of many people being able to tell their stories.
We heard from many, many people and groups around the country who said that they felt an inquiry needed to be held so that people, other Australians, understood the terrible trauma that they went through; so that people understood that many of these babies were taken from their mothers against their will. Those mothers wanted those babies to know that they had not been unwanted babies; that the policies and the practices at the time did not allow them to keep those babies and raise those children.
I am very pleased to see that there will be a national inquiry. One of the issues I raised was that, when many of these practices were going on, of course we did not have self-government here in the territory. It was put forward that maybe these practices did not happen here in the territory. But we have had some feedback from women around the country that it did go on here, and certainly there were young, unwed women who when they found themselves pregnant were shipped across the border to unwed women’s homes to give birth to those children and then have those babies removed.
So I am very pleased to say that that issue has progressed. There will be a national inquiry, and I am pleased that thousands and thousands of women will be able to participate and to tell their stories, and those babies who now of course have grown into adults will also be able to be part of that process.
I thought it was important to raise this issue in the adjournment debate this afternoon and I know that there will be thousands of women around the country, and the groups that advocate on their behalf, who will see this as a great step forward.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
The Assembly adjourned at 6.04 pm until Tuesday, 7 December 2010, at 10 am.
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