It appears that Aboriginal leaders in Australia have threatened to launch a class action to demand compensation to the tune of 1 billion dollars for the actions of various State and/or Commonwealth governments which resulted in Aboriginal children being taken from their homes and made wards of the State for their own protection.
Apparently the Rudd government has already ruled out any compensation I suspect that the States will soon follow.
Given the most recent set of events in Central and Northern Australia where there are continuing allegations of child abuse in Aboriginal communities I wonder whether officers of various Child Welfare Departments who try to protect children today are also likely to be at risk of doing the wrong thing by removing children from abusive parents.
More to the point though, my personal question to the Aboriginal communities around Australia is to ask how far back in history do we look for find actions for which we should be able to claim compensation from today's society?
Fifty years? One Hundred Years? 500 years or should we be allowed to go back even further?
If we look back far enough we might be able to argue that really most of the issues in the Middle and the near east are due to the invasions of the Egyptian Pharaohs, the Mongol hordes, the Macedonian/Greeks armies of Alexander and the Roman Legions.
Then a little later in history we could blame the Napoleonic wars, the British Empire and so on for dozens of other historical injustices, deaths and dispossession. Let's not forget either the German, Japanese and the Soviet regimes which managed between them to get well over 20 million people killed not to mention dispossessed.
Are we now seriously suggesting that since China is becoming an economic superpower we should all go back in our family histories and look for signs of the Mongol invasions and if we can manage to track our ancestors back that far, sue the Chinese government and people of today for all the damages that were suffered by our ancestors at the hands of the Mongol hordes.
Ludicrous? OK Let's wind the clock on. What about the Greeks and the Romans?
Surely they have a lot to answer for. Why not sue the Italian and Greek governments for the damage that they did?
I have no problem with accepting that whoever had the great idea to remove children from their Aboriginal parents may have got it badly wrong and I have no problems with accepting that if there are any of the people responsible for those tragedies today then they should be asked to explain what happened and why they did what they did and then if the Aboriginal community wants to sue them - do so!
As for the rest of us who were either not alive at the time nor necessarily even IN Australia at the time - I can see no reason why OUR hard earned taxes should now compensate those descendants of the Stolen Generation who suggest that they suffered as a result of the actions of officialdom at that time.
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