By The Guardian (World News) | Created at 2024-09-24 09:05:15 | Updated at 2024-09-30 11:41:39
6 days ago
The health, police and other departments “failed” Aboriginal people “for 160 years”, Queensland’s truth-telling and healing inquiry has heard.
Seven heads of state government departments, including the police commissioner, Steve Gollschewski, and the Department of Premier and Cabinet director general, Mike Kaiser, appeared at the inquiry on Tuesday.
All seven acknowledged the organisations they led had failed Indigenous people, even going so far as to deliberately kill them.
It’s estimated that more than 24,000 Indigenous people were killed by the state’s ‘native police’, a paramilitary organisation made up of Aboriginal police with white officers.
“I’m reading up on this now,” Gollschewski told media outside the inquiry.
“It’s really confronting for us to remember that they were acting out policies that were set by the government of the day, that believed, for whatever reason, that they were doing something that was in the interest of the state.”
Some historians and lawyers consider their actions to amount to genocide.
Gollschewski said he wouldn’t use the word.
“There’s almost an attempt to say that they were trying to protect rather than to do that, but the actions didn’t match with what the rhetoric was,” he said.
All seven department heads appearing on Tuesday told the inquiry they were searching their archives for additional documentation of the settlement process.
Much of the native police archive has been destroyed, but Gollschewski said the police had made efforts to track down more information under Operation Maiwar, which is the Turrbal word for the Brisbane River.
Its director general, Clare O’Connor, said the Department of Treaty and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Partnerships was committed to “decolonising” the archives.
“At the moment the Queensland state archives holds a range of records that Queenslanders may not realise are there,” she said.
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“I do believe they can be made far more available.”
Departments also made submissions about their involvement and responsibility for the processes of colonisation.
O’Connor’s submission said her department’s “policy of forced removals or separations impacted on virtually every Aboriginal family in the state of Queensland and the effects of the dislocations continue to be experienced to this day.” About one in six Aboriginal children were taken from their families, it says.
The Department of Justice and Attorney General’s submission confessed the department had been “instrumental in discriminatory practices that removed, isolated, deprived and sentenced First Nations Queenslanders”.
“If I could sum up what I’ve heard this morning it’s generally from representative government that ‘we failed you for 160 years in various forms’,” inquiry chair, Joshua Creamer said.
“And really this might be the first opportunity, then, to create a level of accountability”.
Creamer said it was important to look back at history, in order to develop better public policy in the future.
The inquiry has no more scheduled hearings. Creamer said it plans to hold a number of truth-telling sessions with people in communities and with experts.
