Andrew Bolt: Are we now compensating children for saving them from harm?

It’s bizarre that we are compensating “stolen generations survivors” when courts haven’t identified any child stolen from caring parents just for being Aboriginal.

Who are all these “stolen generations survivors” getting huge payouts? It’s bizarre, when courts haven’t identified any child stolen from caring parents just for being Aboriginal.

The Victorian government, for instance, has paid $100,000 to more than 117 “stolen” children, with 1000 others expected to be compensated too.

Yet in 2003, a Labor-appointed Stolen Generations Taskforce headed by Aboriginal activist Jim Berg couldn’t find one truly stolen child in the state, and admitted that in Victoria, at least, there had been “no formal policy for removing children”. Ever.

Meanwhile, the federal government has so far paid $100,000 each to at least 417 “Stolen Generations survivors” in the NT, ACT and Jervis Bay.

People gather at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy at Old Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: Gary Ramage

Yet the first big test case for compensation in the NT failed in 2000, when the judge concluded the “evidence does not support a finding that there was any policy of removal of part-Aboriginal children such as that alleged by the applicants”.

He dismissed the claims of Peter Gunner and Lorna Cubillo, who presumably had the strongest cases of the 700 NT people then claiming compensation.

Gunner had in fact been sent by his mother from Utopia to Alice Springs to get an education. Cubillo had been rescued from a ration camp with her father gone, her mother and grandmother dead, and the aunt she called “mother” working at a station a 65km walk away.

In NSW, 320 “survivors” have been paid $75,000 each. In South Australia, 343 got $38,000, even though the SA Aborigines Protection Board complained in 1958 that despite the “considerable amount of undernourishment, malnutrition and neglect … there is not a high proportion of Aboriginal children who are wards of the state, simply because our legislation does not provide that neglected children can be removed”.

Courts haven’t identified any children stolen from caring parents just for being Aboriginal.

The oldest compensation scheme is Tasmania’s, which gave 106 “victims” $58,000.

Yet the first three “victims” suggested they weren’t “stolen”, either.

One said her mother “was actually in prison for three months’ hard labour for neglect of children”.

The second claimed his grandmother was “duped into signing a consent form” putting him into care when his mother died. Really?

The third said she and six other children were taken from her home for reasons she couldn’t explain.

Are we now compensating children for saving them from harm?

Is this poisonous victim cult why we today leave some Aboriginal children in dangers we’d never tolerate if they were white?