The Australian government yesterday rejected Aboriginal demands for hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the "stolen generation" of indigenous children taken from their parents.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has pledged to apologize to Aborigines for the widely criticized policy, something his predecessor John Howard refused to do during his 11 years in power before being ousted in November elections.
But Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin yesterday ruled out backing the apology with the establishment of a compensation fund of A$1 billion (US$870 million), as demanded by some Aboriginal leaders.
"What we will be doing is putting the funding into health and education services, and providing additional support for services needed for counseling, to enable people to find their relatives," she told national radio. "So we won't be creating a compensation fund."
Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre legal director Michael Mansell had called on the government to establish a A$1 billion fund to give to some 13,000 Aborigines taken from their parents as children over four decades up to the 1970s.
The children were put into institutions or foster care with white families as part of an attempt to force assimilation and some of them never saw their families again.
"The prime minister is going to stand up in front of the world and say that on behalf of the nation we are genuinely sorry that this happened," Mansell said. "If he then walks away and says, `But I'm not going to compensate you,' it would give a hollow ring to the words he would be using."
Stolen Generations Victoria chairwoman Lyn Austin backed the establishment of such a fund.
"People get paid crimes compensation for victims of crime," she said. "You are looking at the gross violation and the act of genocide and all the inhuman things that have happened to our people."
Australia's original inhabitants were marginalized after the first British settlers arrived in 1788 and now number just 470,000 out of a population of 21 million.
They have much higher rates of infant mortality, health problems and suicide than other Australians, with many living in squalid camps where unemployment, alcoholism and lawlessness are rife.
Austin said she believed stolen generation victims should sue the government if it failed to set up a compensation fund.
Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner told reporters people had the right to take legal action.
"It is up to people who are involved to make their own choices about how they want to pursue a particular issue," Tanner said.
In a landmark court case in August last year, an Aborigine removed from his family as a baby in 1958 won A$525,000 compensation.
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