Andrew Bolt: Albo‘s speech accidentally exposes Stolen Generations myth that’s poisoned our past

Only a fool could believe the smug story that officials who removed some Aboriginal children 30, 40 or 50 years ago were racist, cruel and genocidal, but the ones today who remove even more are just keeping them safe.

What a farce.

On Tuesday – Sorry Day – Prime Minister Anthony Albanese declared his “proudest” day in politics was 16 years ago, when his mate Kevin Rudd said sorry to the “Stolen Generations”.

Yet in his next breath he announced that under him we’d taken more Aboriginal children than before.

The numbers are incredible: more than 22,000 Aboriginal children are now in out-of-home care.

They’re 10 times more likely than other children to be removed from their parents to save them from being bashed, raped, starved or neglected.

Bang.

In one speech Albanese accidentally exposed the Stolen Generations myth that’s poisoned our past.

Only a fool could believe such a smug and cartoonish story – that officials who removed some Aboriginal children 30, 40 or 50 years ago were racist, cruel and genocidal, but the ones today who remove even more are just keeping them safe.

In one speech Albanese accidentally exposed the Stolen Generations myth that’s poisoned our past. Picture: Martin Ollman

Albanese also said on Sorry Day he wanted “truth telling”, so let’s give him some.

Please get your children and grandchildren to read this, too, to arm them against the lies.

For more than 20 years I’ve watched activists, journalists and academics invent this Stolen Generations tale, while evidence kept contradicting the story – infamously put by the Human Rights Commission – that up to 100,000 Aboriginal children were stolen to make Australia white.

For instance, in 2000 the Federal Court dismissed the first big Stolen Generations test case for compensation, lodged in the Northern Territory by Peter Gunner and Lorna Cubillo.

It said that for the NT, “the evidence does not support a finding that there was any policy of removal of part-Aboriginal children such as that alleged”.

Nor had Gunner or Cubillo been stolen. Cubillo was taken to the Retta Dixon home in Darwin when she was eight years old because she’d been found in a bush ration camp with her mother and grandmother dead, her white father long gone, and a woman supposedly minding her often working instead at a station 60km away. Who leaves an eight-year-old in a bush camp, without school or proper care?

In 2000 the Federal Court dismissed the first big Stolen Generations test case for compensation, lodged in the Northern Territory by Peter Gunner and Lorna Cubillo.

As for Gunner, his mother out at Utopia Station put her mark on a form agreeing for her son to be sent to Alice Springs for schooling.

It’s much the same story in the dozens of Stolen Generations cases I’ve checked.

That’s why our courts still haven’t found even one case of a child stolen just for being Aboriginal.

The NSW Supreme Court, for instance, ruled that an Aboriginal woman wanting compensation hadn’t been stolen, but given away by her mother.

Western Australia’s Supreme Court ruled that seven children also weren’t stolen, but removed for their safety.

In Victoria, a Labor-appointed Stolen Generations Taskforce could find not one truly stolen child, and admitted the state had had “no formal policy for removing children”.

But let me tell you one of the many horrible examples I’ve reported these past two decades of the harm this myth has caused.

The day prime minister Kevin Rudd said his famous sorry, a Queensland appeal court heard a case involving an Aboriginal girl betrayed by the Stolen Generations myth.

Three years earlier, when she was seven, she’d been raped in Aurukun, in Cape York.

She was found with syphilis and foetal alcohol syndrome.

The day prime minister Kevin Rudd said his famous sorry, a Queensland appeal court heard a case involving an Aboriginal girl betrayed by the Stolen Generations myth.

Eventually white foster parents in Cairns looked after her.

One even quit work to give her more care, but two new social workers took over her case when she was 10, and reportedly told her white carers that taking her away from her culture was repeating the Stolen Generations.

So she was sent back to Aurukun for a while. And there she was pack raped again – six times by nine men and boys.

The court heard the rapists thought sex with a 10-year-old was normal.

Many of the boys seemed damaged themselves.

Most lived with grandparents because their parents couldn’t care for them.

The case is extreme but not unique.

I once challenged an academic, Robert Manne, to name even 10 children stolen just for being Aboriginal.

On his second failed attempt, he included a fatherless 12-year-old “half-caste” girl with syphilis in a black tribe, and a 13-year-old who had been found seven months’ pregnant and working for nothing on a station.

These were stolen children?

Yes, many people do now say they were stolen, but have incentives to say so.

Many states now hand “survivors” huge payouts – up to $100,000 – with few questions asked.

But I have a question.

Who does this myth really help?