STOLEN GENERATION

The premier of Tasmania has announced yesterday that the stolen generation victims will share $5 million from the Tasmanian government. (The Australian)
So far the federal government has refused to compensate that tragedy with money. However Kevin Rudd the new prime minister of Australia has pledged that he will apologised to Aborigines for all the suffering the white men did to them.
What is the stolen generation? I recommend a wonderful book and a movie based on the book. ”Follow the Rabbit-Proof” fence by author Doris Pikington Garimara and the movie is Rabbit-proof fence from director Phillip Noyce ( The Bone Collector, The Saint).
The stolen generation is all the mixed race children (usually from an Aborigine mother and a White father) who were removed from their families by the Australian government. The authorities wanted to assimilate the children in an all white Australian society, because anyway the” Aborigines were supposed to disappear”.

The question is can the Australian government compensate so much suffering with money? I am not in position to judge, I am not a stolen generation victim. The Tasmanian premier said:” "No amount of money can make up for Aboriginal children being removed from their families simply on the basis of race," (the Australian 22/01/08). Sure. But I know that the federal government will not follow the example of Tasmania because I think if they accept to compensate the “Stolen generation”, what about all the Aborigines people?
But in Australia change comes from the legal system. Last year the Supreme Court of Western Australia has granted rights in some large lands to Aborigines in this state. And in 1992, in the Mabo versus Queensland case the High Court of Australia made irrelevant the terra nullius concept. It meant that before this judgment the Australian government did not recognize that before the White man came in Australia, the Aborigines were already there.

But it is a hard question that the Australian government has to think about, if they have to compensate the Aborigines? And it is the same question with the American government, does it have to compensate Native Americans for all the suffering they endured and the dispossession of their lands? And what about African-Americans and their deportation from Africa and their work in cotton fields? Is compensation the only way to apologize? And why asking the taxpayer to pay for something he has nothing to do with? Why someone will receive some money from some work he never did but his ancestors actually did. I have no answers to these tricky questions, but we can think about it.