Alan Jones says Australia needs another stolen generation to “protect” children in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families from the drug abuse problems of their parents.
The talkback radio host made the comment while complaining about players in the National Rugby League Indigenous all-stars game on Saturday performing a traditional dance and observing a minute’s silence for members of the stolen generations.
Saturday was the eighth anniversary of the Australian government’s apology to members of the stolen generations, a policy from 1910 to the mid-1970s under which more than 10,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were removed from their families and placed in homes for the express purpose of assimilating them into non-Indigenous society.
Jones, on his 2GB radio show on Monday, agreed with a talkback caller who asked “When are they going to believe that half the stolen generation were taken for their own protection?”
“Correct, to look after them,” Jones said.
“And we need stolen generations – there are a whole heap of kids going through the courts now, or their families, mums going through 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.
“Those children for their own benefit should be taken away.”
Marngrook Footy Show presenter and Yolgnu woman Leila Gurruwiwi said Jones should be “banned for life” from talking about Indigenous people. Arrente woman and national Indigenous organiser for the National Tertiary Education Union, Celeste Liddle, said he was a “disgrace”.
Greens senator Rachel Siewert called on Jones to apologise for the comments, saying, “this issue is alive and burning, even if we have apologised for it in the past.”
“I have news for him, a huge number of children, including Aboriginal kids, are being taken from families around Australia as we speak,” Siewert said.
“It is grossly inappropriate for Mr Jones to capitalise on the pain and suffering of Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander peoples past and present who have had [children] subject to removal decades ago and are having them removed now. Such removals have caused generations of hurt and damage, we can’t repeat it.”
According to a Productivity Commission report released last year, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are nine times more likely to be placed in out-of-home care than non-Indigenous children.
In 2013-14, nearly 15,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were in out-of-home care. On Thursday, members of advocacy group Grandmothers Against Removal, many of whom are members of the stolen generations themselves, marked the anniversary of the apology by marching on Canberra with a banner reading “Sorry means you don’t do it again.”
Writing in Guardian Australia last week, Indigenous academic Larissa Behrendt said that more Indigenous kids were being removed now than during the time of the stolen generation, and that the number of kids in out-of-home care should be included in the Close the Gap scorecard.
Indigenous X founder Luke Pearson agreed, saying: “nobody is arguing that child welfare is not the most important issue. What is often missing from this discussion is a critical examination of what is actually happening to prevent removal, particularly around resource allocation for family support and early interventions.”
Jones is not the first conservative commentator to deny the stolen generations. In 2008 six conservative MPs boycotted the formal apology to members of the stolen generations, including former MP Sophie Mirabella who also argued children had been removed “for their own protection”.
Rudd recently described the apology to Guardian Australia Indigenous affairs editor Stan Grant as a “hearts and minds, guts, flesh and blood understanding that we have wronged Aboriginal people, and that as a representative of a nation and myself as a white Australian I had a particular responsibility – as a white male – to spell it in black and white in words that I meant as to why I was sorry.”
(Source : http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/feb/15/alan-jones-says-australia-needs-another-stolen-generation-to-protect-children#img-1)
