Bringing Them Home

Absolutely.

That's the entire basis of it, is that this child placement principle was brought in after the Bringing Them Home report, which has canvassed and spoke about the experiences of members of the stolen generation, and it has been completely disregarded.

The government might pretend it hasn't, but that is the reality of what it is, and the fears are real.

We've seen, uh, recent Aboriginal child commissioner Sue-Ann Hunter say basically this, that it, the removal of this principle makes the likelihood of another stolen generation much more apparent.

Nagasaki's dust in there, I think, as well.

I always think about the Bringing Them Home report, where our children got stolen.

You need to bring them back to the fire, because home is where the hearth is.

So did you have white fellas that were attracted to the flame as well and came and stood with you? Too

Yes, yes, she was very active in Stolen Generations activism and advocacy.

She helped set up the Stolen Generations Victoria, which became Connecting Home, which was a service for members of the Stolen Generations.

And she was also very active when the people were testifying to what became the Bringing Them Home Report, supporting people to testify because she was a qualified social worker.

And so we worked together in a lot of different ways.

But in terms of the powers we have, so we have, uh, powers to conduct inquiries into, um, issues.

So the most famous inquiry that we've done is the Bringing Them Home report, which looked at the injustice of the, uh, Stolen Generations.

So building on, uh, generations of advocacy by Stolen Gen survivors, the commission decided in, in the late '90s decided to do a national inquiry into that, received-

Can I just break in there?

Uh, Cathy Branson, who was the president before her, looked at, uh, uh...

It was a, a small but important inquiry into boat crews from Indonesian fishing vessels and how they were treated, um, in the criminal justice system because a lot of children were wrongly being identified through flawed technology as adults and being placed in adult prisons when they were intervened on people smuggling, um, ventures and things like that.

So in the late '90s, the commission, with the support of the Australian government at the time, uh, previously, but then the government changed, looked at this inquiry into the Stolen Generations, did the Bringing Them Home report.

Mick Dodson, I think it was Sir Ronald Wilson, um, led that inquiry, and it's good to look at that report as sort of an, uh, an example of the long arc of law and policy and social change.