Apology Promise Abandoned

Following the revelation in Quadrant (“Compensation and Aboriginal Corruption”, March 2022) that current and former Territories ministers Anthony Albanese, Paul Keating and Barnaby Joyce could be called upon to apologise to children “stolen” during their tenures as the responsible ministers, the federal government has quietly abandoned this element of its Territories Stolen Generation Redress Scheme.

Announced last August and commencing on March 1 this year, the scheme includes individual payments of $75,000 to Stolen Generations claimants removed by the Commonwealth in the Northern Territory or Australian Capital Territory before self-government (1978 and 1989 respectively) or in Jervis Bay up to the present day. This includes periods when Keating, Joyce and Albanese were been the ministers responsible—Keating in the 1970s and Joyce and Albanese in recent decades.

When the Prime Minister and Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt made the $378 million announcement on August 5 last year they said that, in addition to cash compensation, successful claimants would be entitled to “receive a face-to-face or written apology for their removal and resulting trauma”. On March 1, the day the scheme officially opened for applications, the minister repeated the offer of individual apologies, saying in a press statement that claimants would be able to “confidentially tell their story about the impact of their removal to a senior government official, have it acknowledged and receive a face-to-face or written apology”.

That was the same week that the March edition of Quadrant highlighted the role of Keating, Albanese and Joyce in child removal and therefore their potential involvement in the provision of individual apologies, possibly face-to-face. Since then, all references to the prospect of apology have been quietly deleted from the scheme. The government website inviting applications and detailing the Territories Stolen Generations Redress Scheme now refers only to what it calls “a Direct Personal Response”:

A Direct Personal Response is telling your story to a senior government person about the impact of [sic] removal from your family or community had on you. Your story can be acknowledge [sic] face-to-face, or you could ask for a personal letter, or ask for both.

There is no longer any mention of the promised individual apologies, least of all an apology from a responsible minister.

Is this the result of belated pushback from an angrily surprised Deputy Prime Minister? Will the alternative Prime Minister recommit to individual apologies? Was a certain former Prime Minister displeased to find himself caught in such a spotlight?

Other concerns have come to light since Quadrant’s March edition highlighted some of the unanticipated ramifications of the ill-considered scheme. These problems arise largely from the fact that Wyatt and his department have been in thrall to the Healing Foundation, the Canberra-based Stolen Generations advocacy entity that has been prominent in lobbying for and now designing the Redress Scheme. Wyatt, who describes his own mother as “a survivor of the Stolen Generation”, frequently waxes emotional about the whole issue.

As outlined in the March issue, the Healing Foundation commissioned and continues to promote the spurious “analysis” of ABS survey data purporting to show that one in five Aboriginal people born before 1970 (including one in four in the Commonwealth Territories) were “stolen” and that one in three of current adults are their “descendants”. What the Foundation fails to disclose is that, as a consequence of continuing use of ATSIC’s poorly (if not mischievously) designed survey questions, these figures include not just people identifying as “stolen” but also anyone who had lived on an Aboriginal reserve or mission during the pre-1970s “protection” era (plus descendants thereof). The Foundation relies upon the same fundamentally corrupted data to infer lifetime and intergenerational consequences.

The ultimate reality check as to how many children were actually stolen in that era has been provided by the experience of the three states (New South Wales, Tasmania and South Australia) that have implemented schemes to compensate those who may have been wrongfully—without cause or consent—removed. The resultant number of verified claimants amounted to slightly less than 3 per cent of adults born in those jurisdictions before the mid-1970s. This contrasts with the Healing Foundation’s claim of one in five and with the premise of the 2008 parliamentary Apology, as asserted by Kevin Rudd: “Between 1910 and 1970 between 10 and 30 per cent of Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their families.”

During Ken Wyatt’s tenure as minister the Healing Foundation has successfully inveigled itself into the heart of Canberra policy-making. Its inordinate influence—playing to the minister’s emotional blind spot—possibly accounts for the spectacular overreach that resulted in Canberra’s compensation scheme targeting not just last century’s assimilation practices in the Northern Territory but also today’s judicially sanctioned child protection removals on the New South Wales south coast, thus inadvertently ensnaring Joyce and Albanese in the process.

Where were the normal public service checks and balances when this idea was first canvassed? Didn’t anyone, especially the Finance Department, probe the evidence base on which the $378 million budget was calculated? Were Barnaby and the rest asleep when Wyatt proposed his idea to Cabinet (assuming it was subjected to Cabinet scrutiny)? Was his Indigenous Australians agency cowed or complicit (these being the same officials now assessing individual claims)? Where was the Attorney-General when they decided to revisit and compensate court orders? Didn’t the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet warn the Prime Minister of the management risks and political implications? Did nobody speak truth to power? Frank and fearless advice? This is how you make bad policy.

The states did not make this mistake. Even the equivalent scheme finally announced by Victoria in March this year applies only to those removed before 1976 under administrative discretion, similar to the New South Wales, Tasmanian and South Australian schemes. Those schemes also revealed the extent of the risks involved when financial incentives are in play: one in three of their claimants proved to be not stolen, not Aboriginal, or otherwise unentitled.

Canberra’s scheme aims to be “survivor focused and trauma informed” but will also need to be rigorous and transparent if it is to be fraud-resistant and genuine-survivor focused.

The Healing Foundation has been intimately involved in Canberra’s decision-making from the start. At the August 5 press conference announcing the Redress Scheme the Prime Minister revealed, “Earlier this year I met with the Healing Foundation and I committed then that I would look at this important issue. Today we are delivering on that commitment.” The Foundation’s CEO featured at that announcement. Since then Wyatt, who facilitated its original meeting with the Prime Minister, has announced that the Foundation would, in tandem with his department, co-chair the external advisory board that will “guide the scheme”.

Given the Foundation’s outlook and record, this is unlikely to facilitate a robust claims assessment process. Future grist for the Auditor-General’s mill?

Governments need to maintain a healthy arms-length relationship with lobby groups if they are to protect the common good and the public purse. The Foundation has been exempted on the assumption that it is accountable to its clientele and properly run. But this assumption is not true.

In particular the Foundation is described as “community controlled”, whereas for all practical purposes it is a private club. Incorporated as an unlisted public company, membership is by invitation only, whenever the directors need to fill a board vacancy, which is rare (most of the existing eight directors, including the chair, have been on the board for at least eight years).

There are also questions concerning the Foundation’s financial affairs. Over the past decade, according to its financial statements, the Foundation has received Commonwealth grants totalling $77 million! During the same period it has raised less than $1 million in public donations (most of it in a single tranche). Its auditors have repeatedly cautioned that “The company is dependent on the National Indigenous Australians Agency for the majority of its revenue used to operate the company.”

Over the last four years annual remuneration payments to the Foundation’s “key management personnel” have increased by almost 60 per cent, from $401,000 to $637,000. The most recent auditor’s report (2021) is overtly critical of remuneration practices for the Foundation’s senior staff. Fees paid to directors have never been publicly disclosed (and you can’t go to an AGM to ask). Nonetheless, Canberra pours millions into the Foundation annually and permits it to “guide” a $378 million public program.

The Healing Foundation is fundamentally compromised—by its closed-shop corporate structure, its worrying financial affairs, and its conscious misuse of unsound data to mislead the public.

The minister, whether or not re-elected, and his bureaucrats have a case to answer for their favoured treatment of this company and for the unravelling consequences.

Paul Thomas wrote “Compensation and Aboriginal Corruption”, published in the March issue.