The Australian foreign minister is furious and the Government has said
.
There’s a report in the Sydney Morning herald here.
This is because of a UN report condemning, mainly, if I understand correctly, the high rate of imprisonment of Aboriginals in Australia.
Have the Americans been similarly admonished?
The same surely applies in the USA with it’s high level of incarceration of blacks. Are the Australians being uncharacteristically thin-skinned? Would the US take notice of such a report?
This topic is red hot news at the moment, and part of a huge controversy in this country over a concept called “mandatory sentencing”.
Mandatory sentencing is a legal practice that is enshrined in very recent legislation in West Australia and the Northern Territory. The basic thrust is to increase the severity of sentences handed down upon conviction, without regard to the nature of the offence. For example, if I stole a car on my first offence, and a packet of biscuits on my second offence, the second offence would be punished more severely than the first.
This has attracted much criticism from the legal profession: no less than seven High Court judges (equivalent to the US Supreme Court} have taken issue by noting that it takes away the judges right to make the punishment fit the crime, a fundamental tenet of our justice system.
The greatest controversy is over the thinly-veiled fact that these laws have enacted to target specifically petty crime as is often committed by aboriginal youths, thus leading to the claim that mandatory sentencing is racially discrimitory in practice. of course, the governments in question flatly deny this.
The federal government has the constitutional power to override state laws but has wimped out over this issue, despite the fact that most government members believe the mandatory sentencing laws to be repugnant. The Prime Minister claims it would violate states rights to make their own laws if he were to promulgate legislation to overturn mandatory sentencing, but I personally believe that his reticence is because the two state governments are formed by his own political party.
BTW, the minister’s comments you referred to above have attracted much criticism from many quarters today, and have led to the government being labelled as hypocritical: they are quite happy to play the moral watch dog on behalf of the UN in other countries (ie East Timor, Persian Gulf, Kosavo etc) but they are not prepared to accept legitimate criticism by a UN body of matters in their own back yard.
Hope this gives you a bit more of an idea as to what is going on.
Knock softly but firmly, 'cause I like soft firm knockers…
Thanks for the info.
Of course any youth can decide whether to commit a crime, petty or otherwise, right?
Couldn’t you just exile the criminals to a large island/small continent thousands of miles away? 
“I must leave this planet, if only for an hour.” – Antoine de St. Exupéry
Are you a turtle?
Knock softly but firmly, 'cause I like soft firm knockers…
…which would be very short, it’s a bit colder in the UK than in the NT’s ;).
Another question for you Aussies: a while back there was a TV show in the US, that detailed how England basically deported thousands of young children to Australia, after WWII. These kids were told that their parents had died, and were shipped to Western Australia, with most ending up in orphanages, under truly horrifying , almost Dikensian conditions.Was there no public outcry over this? I understant that to add insult to injury, most of these people were not even given Australian citizenship! How did the brits get away with sessentially deporting their own citizens!
US citizens would undoubtedly pitch fits if the UN said such things about the US justice system. However, the US is well known for “watch-dogging” other nations for behaviour that is ignored when it happens in the US.
And the situations are fairly similar. US fairly recently (80’s, I think?) implemented mandatory sentencing, primarily for Drug War offenses. The War on Drugs has been criticized for years as being a thinly-veiled attack on poor urban minorities. (For example, the penalty for crack cocaine, a “poor man’s” drug, is immensely higher than that for powder cocaine, a “rich man’s” drug, even though the two are essentially the same drug.) Judges at all levels have complained for years about mandatory sentencing, because they can’t suit the punishment to the circumstance.
The adage “Knowledge is Power” is incorrect. The correct formulation is “Knowledge that other people don’t have is Power”. - The Donald
This practice wasn’t just confined to the kids being transported from Britain. During the same time aboriginal kids were also removed from their homelands and adopted out to white families, ostensibly for their betterment.
In recent times this Stolen Generation (as they call themselves) has come out and told their story, which was truly a revelation for most of the rest of the Australian community. This prompted strong community pressure on the current federal government to deliver a formal apology, but the same Prime Minister mentioned above has as much difficulty with this idea as he does in blocking mandatory sentencing.
There was a whole swathe of state sanctioned child abduction in Australia in the years following WW2. Many (medically) naive unmarried mothers were told their babies were still-born or died during delivery, instead these children were removed by authorities and handed over to adoption agencies.
Other children who came from low socio-economic circumstances were also “stolen” in much the same way as the aboriginal kids.
As these facts have emerged during recent years, most Australians have been truly horrified to learn that such atrocities were carried with official sanction by the federal government. Even more shocking is the fact that mainstream churches were directly behind the practice of removing aboriginal children from their homelands.
Kinda makes me ashamed to be an Australian…
Knock softly but firmly, 'cause I like soft firm knockers…
Sadly the “stolen generation” would not have had a much better life in the UK.
You may not have caught the UK media but for the last few months they have been reporting on several child abuse enquiries the sheer scale of which is terrifying but personally I reckon it’s only a fraction of what ocurred.
Many children who were placed in care in the 1960’s are the sort that would have probably been transported had they been around in the '50s.
The failure of state care has been utterly disastrous in the UK where something over 66% of children have ended up in prison and now comprise 1/3rd of the jail population.
My experience-I spent 15 years in care, and was not made aware that any family survived,nor they of me.I left care quite literally with one 1/2 empty suitcase aged 16yrs8mths and with absolutely no backup and no home.
I know several who ended up in jail, I myself work in one- the the atmosphere is not too differant to state childrens homes.
The British state has abrogated its responsibility to the most vulnerable, it always has .
People ask why things were not done when children and sometimes their parents complained .We became invisible out of sight and out of mind ,no-one gave a damn.
I joined the Royal Navy and got my trade there, best thing I ever did but,can you imagine what it was like when everyone else went home on leave?
BIBBLE
I thought that I remembered the U.N. had released a report about human rights in the U.S. but I looked and couldn’t find anything except for Amnesty International’s report on the same. It’s a pretty good report, if your interested:
http://www.rightsforall-usa.org/info/report/index.htm
That’s because the US has a permanent seat on the Security Council and can veto any action including issuing a report criticising US incarceration practices.
Also, if the U.S. were to withdraw from the U.N. in protest, the U.N. would likely collapse. Hell, we pay over a quarter of their budget and are always the lion’s share (eagle’s share?) of any U.N. troop deployment. The U.N. simply can’t afford to piss off Uncle Sam.
Synonym: the word you use in place of a word you can’t spell.
Canada had a similar experience to that of Australia, both in terms of residential schools for native children, and “Home Children” brought over from the U.K. The results were just as unpretty here as they were in Oz.
Dee da dee da dee dee do do / Dee ba ditty doh / Deedle dooby doo ba dee um bee ooby / Be doodle oodle doodle dee doh http://members.xoom.com/labradorian/
Just something to lighten things a little.
Whilst I was in care there was a lad(call him Eric so I won’t embarrass him)
He was due to leave the state care system with ,typically ,no hope.
Out of the blue there came a couple of strangers who talked to him,left him a watch worth more than the home we were in and said they would come later and show him the rest of his family.
Turns out that his Scottish father after a marital argument with his Belgian mother had dumped him off with the social services before going back home.He did time for this but refused to reveal where he left him.
Eventually Eric was traced which was very important to the Belgian side of the family as he was nearing his 18th and due to inherit.
Ah, but what you ask.
The Belgian mothers family owns a merchant bank over there,no really, our Eric is a multi-millionaire!
This is not apocryphal ,I watched it happen.
I know it’s off the point but it still gives me fond memories.
Johnny L.A.: You bet your sweet ass I am! (I even had a card when I was in college)
I would dispute that last statement. The US is massively in arrears with regards to payment of their dues to the UN and American troops may well form the largest part of UN missions but those missions are usually in support of American goals anyway.
radar ralf: Were you replying to this thread?
I find it hard to be sympathetic in the case of mandatory sentencing. They say it’s unfair because most crimes are committed by aboriginal youths. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s like saying laws are unfair to criminals. If aboriginal youths are committing the most crimes, then something needs to be done. Something that can be done is putting in place penalties that discourage criminal behaviour. Now, these kids can count to three. Three strikes and you’re out means they get three chances before they get the super bad punishment. If they can’t make a choice to obey the law by then, will they ever? Meanwhile, should the rest of the community have to suffer because of people who continually violate the laws? No! So I say, lock them up. They know the consequences of their actions before they start.
White babies were stolen from their parents too, but no one ever acknowledges these children. The Stolen Generation wasn’t black, it was a social and economic class that was stolen. I don’t see how aboriginal people can claim it was levelled totally at them when poor white children were stolen too, and if we’re going to compensate aboriginal people for it, then we have to compensate white people too. My family suffered the mysterious loss of a newborn child in 1955, whose birth records have vanished, whose gravesite is unmarked and unlisted in cemetery records, whose death certificate is incorrect in many details. We don’t know what happened. We suspect she was stolen, but for what reason, we don’t know. Could be stolen generation - my grandparents were poor. Could be switched with a “better” families dead infant. Could be one of the bodies stolen for Britain’s nuclear testing. Could be careless recording of her details by hospital, cemetery and state registry. We have no way to know, but I’m damn sure no one in my family would attempt to sue. Like that would erase the past and make it all better.
3)I knew a man who’d been sent to Australia from England during the war. He doesn’t know what happened to his parents. He remembers having a brother and thinks he may have had a sister. He’s never tried to find them, and seems content to let it go.
I thought this stuff only happened in Hollywood and not in real life. Well, your mate sounded more deserving than most heirs…