Australia to Pay Reparations to ‘Stolen Generations’

Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced a reparations fund for some members of the “Stolen Generations” – the Indigenous Australians who were forcibly removed from their homes as children – three months after a group of Indigenous people began legal action for compensation.

Morrison told Parliament on Thursday that 378.6 million Australian dollars ($279.97m) would be allocated to redress the human damage of the policy, including one-off payments of 75,000 Australian dollars ($55,462.50) for its victims.

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Thousands of young children of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander origin were taken from their homes and put in foster care with white families under an official assimilation policy that Australia continued to pursue into the 1970s. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made a formal apology for what had happened in 2008 describing it as a “great stain on the nation’s soul”.

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The reparation fund is part of a one-billion Australian dollar ($739.2m) federal government initiative that aims to address the serious disadvantages faced by the country’s 700,000 Indigenous people who rank near the bottom of nearly every economic and social indicator in comparison with other Australians.

In April, 800 survivors in the Northern Territory launched a class-action suit against the federal government in the New South Wales Supreme Court seeking reparations, covering a period ranging from 1910 to the 1970s.

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The life expectancy of Indigenous Australians is eight years less than for non-Indigenous people and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community is more likely to be arrested and overrepresented in prison, according to official statistics.

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