PC Australians
',coin Mr Ron Brunton The most endearing quality of Aus- tralia's self-righteous intellectuals is that their arguments are easily punctured. Bob Ellis (Letters, 13 May) is so keen to indulge to a display of conspicuous compassion that he accuses Michael Duffy (The world's ,next white pariah', 15 April) of being indif- e'erent to Aboriginal suffering, a mis- dilievfts statement whose falsity is easily demonstrated by reading the original article, But most readers will not be in a position to assess Ellis's other claim that Duffy 112Iged the figures regarding the percentage ,t Aboriginal children forcibly removed 'crotn their parents. Ellis says Duffy's 10 per bent includes Aborigines born since 1972 — 2, which time the forced separations had n-naRsed — and that the real figure when the policy was in force was therefore about 20 per Cent In fact, Duffy's figures came from a large-scale survey carried out by the Aus- tralian Bureau of Statistics in 1994, which found that some 10 per cent of Aborigines over 25 years old had been taken away from their parents. For the Aboriginal popula- tion as a whole the figure was 5.7 per cent.
The survey's results did not define what `taken away' really meant. But 'forcible removal' is a very plastic concept in Aus- tralia today. Our Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission even uses it to cover cases where Aboriginal families in remote areas decided to send children to schools in regional or metropolitan centres. The commission assumes patronisingly that such families rarely wished to provide their children with an education, and that they were acting 'under duress'.
Ron Brunton
Institute of Public Affairs, Queensland, Australia
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