Should Australia formally recognise that genocide was perpetrated against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples?
Introduction to the media issue
Video clip at right: On June 4, 2019, Al Jazeera televised a report which found that the deaths in Canada of more than 1,000 Aboriginal women and girls in recent decades was a national genocide.What they said...
History is generally written from a dominant society's point of view and not that of the suppressed...therefore true history is brushed aside, masked, dismissed or destroyed
Ken Wyatt, federal Minister for Indigenous Australians
I didn't believe genocide had taken place, and I still don't
John Howard, prime minister of Australia from 1996 to 2007
The issue at a glance
On July 10, 2019, the federal minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, gave a speech in which he committed to 'address[ing] truth telling.' He referred to the 'brutal realities of the past' and the trauma of the stolen generations - Indigenous children removed from their families.
In an address given at the National Press Club, the minister stated, 'We need to hear the lies they were told, the casual cruelty of the fates they were dealt and the unthinkable loss in their hearts'. He declared that the country's 'true' history could not be 'brushed aside, masked, dismissed or destroyed.'
On June 4, 2019, the Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau endorsed the finding of the National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls that their treatment 'was genocide'.
Whether the use of this term is appropriate to refer to Indigenous deaths and disappearances has been widely debated in Canada.In Australia there is still no consensus as to whether the term 'genocide' should be applied to the Indigenous deaths which resulted from colonisation or to the subsequent removal of indigenous children from their families.
The manner in which Australia's past might be truthfully viewed remains contentious.