108
... at our very doors the apostles of class and race
hatred have stirred up many good people to support
a cause which is aimed at the creation of apartheid
and race friction.
The government is not.prepared to see a separate
race within a race developed in Australia with an
embassy from the Aborigines to the Government of
Australia as though this were a foreign power.
Like all other groups within our widening society,
we welcome, their participation and their political
aspirations as part of a family, not as aliens holding
the nation to ransom. (Commonwealth Hansard, Appropriation
Bill No. 1, Debate, Senate, 23rd August, 1972).
• 4 * * ap
Assimilation now means the assimilation of political activity.
The Aboriginal people were to be ’part of a family’. To accomplish
this therapeutic intent of incorporation into the family, political
activity had to be nihilated.
In the instance quoted, the credibility of the Aborigines’
grievances was further destroyed by aligning them, not only with
apostles of class and race hatred (read Communists), but with Labor
politicians. Mackay continued his speech:
But once again Labor stands, in most of its expressions,
with the apostles of radical and even violent action
to divide and denigrate this nation in our own eyes
and in the esteem of the world.
The notion of exercising of human rights by Aborigines as
a group was nihilated. Therapy was proposed as the appropriate
conceptual machinery to control Aborigines. The form of therapy'
was to assimilate the Aboriginal people ’’into the same customs
beliefs, hopes and loyalties''^ . The beneficiaries were to be
the majority group who would thus be freed of the criticism of
an outgroup.
IVhile Commonwealth Government policies changed with the advent
of the Labor Government in 1973, earlier policies continued to
be applied in Queensland, and to a lesser extent in Western Australia.
As late as 1982, Bjelke Petersen, Premier of Queensland, set out
See p. 105 above, Aboriginal Welfare Conference, Darwin, 1963.
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