On Tuesday, the Western Australia state government announced a new reparations program for the “Stolen Generations,” Indigenous children who were forcibly removed from their families under racist policies that began in the early 1900s and lasted into the 1970s. The action follows decades of activism by First Nations peoples.
Under the new program, Aboriginal people removed from their families in Western Australia before July 1972 will each be eligible for a payment of A$85,000 (US$55,000).
In 1997, Australia’s then Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission released the “Bringing Them Home” report, which focused on the policies and practices that had created the Stolen Generations. The commission found that the aim of the policies had been to “eliminate Indigenous cultures as distinct entities” and “could properly be labelled ‘genocidal.’” The report recommended the government provide compensation to people affected by forcible removal.
During the Stolen Generations era, Western Australia had the highest rate of child removals in Australia. Despite this and the recommendations made to the government, Western Australia is the second to last state to offer reparations to survivors. Queensland is now the only state yet to provide compensation.
Human Rights Watch published a report in March that found that modern child protection practices were still contributing to the ongoing and disproportionate removals of Aboriginal children from their families. Currently, in Western Australia, Aboriginal children are more than 20 times more likely to be living in state care than non-Indigenous children. Human Rights Watch linked government failures to address the Stolen Generations’ legacy of harms to the high rate of removals, with many families facing current child removals being Stolen Generations descendants.
One grandmother whose grandsons had recently been taken into care, told Human Rights Watch that her family had endured six generations of child removals. She said that while no amount of money could “make up” for what her family had experienced, compensation meant she could provide housing stability for her family.
The reparations program is a crucial and long overdue step to providing justice for those who had their rights gravely violated. But rather than treating reparations as an end in itself, the Western Australian government should use them as a springboard to address the continuing harms caused to the Stolen Generations and their descendants, especially the ongoing removal of Aboriginal children by the child protection authorities. The government can do this by increasing early support for families, and following through on implementing the roadmap it developed to end the overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in care.
