Culture

The Modern-Day Stolen Generations Alan Jones Reckons We “Need” Are Already Happening

"Sorry isn't good enough. They're still doing it."

by Alex McKinnon  15 February 2016

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Another day, another outrage involving constantly deflating whoopee cushion Alan Jones. The broadcaster is again attracting furious condemnation after declaring on radio that “we need Stolen Generations,” and that Aboriginal children “should be taken away” from their families “for their own benefit”.

“There are a whole heap of kids going before the courts now, or their families, mums going before the courts, and dads who are on top of the world with drugs or alcohol, and suddenly they go back into an environment where children are brought up in those circumstances,” Jones said on 2GB this morning while in conversation with a caller.

Unsurprisingly, the response from politicians, online commenters and anyone with a working gag reflex has been pretty forthright in denouncing Jones. But as numerous media outlets have highlighted in the days since the latest Closing the Gap report was released on Wednesday, it’s not as though Jones is arguing for some horrific, long-dead policy to be brought back to life. In the years since Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations, governments are taking Aboriginal kids from their families at levels unseen even in the worst days of the original policy.

As Larissa Behrendt notes for Guardian Australia, the number of Aboriginal kids in out-of-home care has skyrocketed from 9,070 in June 2007 to 15,455 in June 2015. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids make up only 3.5 percent of Australian children, yet they comprise nearly 35 percent of children in out-of-home care, and fewer of those removed kids are being placed within their own extended families or cultural groups than in 2007.

The effect on some of those removed children and their families has been devastating. Writing for IndigenousX, Luke Pearson says:

“I was taken away by Native Welfare when I was 13 and was placed with many different institutions and carers. I ended up in the Fremantle Women’s prison, with no legal representation. No one knew where I was, I was cut off from my family. It’s affected me so much, it’s made it hard for me to connect with family and communicate with people. And now I see so many of our young Aboriginal children being taken away by welfare again.

“This happened to my granddaughter. She was taken from my care, abducted from the school in Perth and flown to Queensland. I fought very hard to get her back and I won. Now my granddaughter has so much pain from what she has been through.”

It’s not as though governments aren’t aware of what’s going on — it’s their policies at work, after all. In 2012, then-Northern Territory Co-ordinator General for Remote Services Olga Havnen submitted a report to the NT government noting that the 2007 Intervention, perpetrated under the guise of protecting Aboriginal children from sexual abuse, was “based on both poor information and flawed assumptions,” and had led to “an alarming increase in the removal of children from their families”. The day after filing her report, Havnen was sacked by the territory government and her position was abolished. Havnen subsequently went public with the report’s findings, accusing the NT government of diverting critical funding intended for remote communities into lavish projects like wave pools in major centres.

In response to this new wave of forced removals, groups like Grandmothers Against Removals have formed to hold governments and bureaucracies to account. On Thursday, GMAR members marched on federal Parliament and told stories of their children and grandchildren being forcibly taken from them, often by caseworkers accompanied by a heavy police presence. Others told of children being abruptly taken while at school with little or no notification given to parents, causing immense trauma in an already volatile situation.

Thanks to the efforts of GMAR and others, there have been signs of real progress. In October last year, the NSW Department of Family and Community Services reached an agreement with a western NSW chapter of the group that will see the government consult more with local elders on children’s welfare, and work harder to keep Aboriginal kids on country. A month earlier, a NSW Parliamentary inquiry began exploring whether survivors of some of the country’s most notorious “children’s homes”, like Kinchela Boys’ Home and Cootamundra Aboriginal Girls’ Training Home, could be entitled to reparations.

But responses from various state and territory governments are often wildly inconsistent, and these modest measures won’t be enough on their own to repair the immense damage already done. That his views are nauseating is indisputable, but Alan Jones has inadvertently shone a light on an ongoing policy disaster in some of Australia’s most marginalised and profiled communities. It may be more valuable to take the anger currently aimed at Jones and his dreams of a new Stolen Generation, and direct it towards the governments making that sick dream a reality.

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Sign a petition calling on federal Parliament to stop forced removals of Aboriginal children here.

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Feature image via GreenLeftTV.