Hi, Russell Coker replied...
The issue is not the overall survival rate but whether children were removed from safe family environments for no good reason.
Hmm, "no good reason". I personally consider saving as many children's lives as possible, using the most effective remedies known of at the time, as being a fairly good reason. Hmm, "safe family environments". Given that there were a limited number of adoptive families and orphanages at the time, I'd be extremely surprised if most of those who managed those programs didn't attempt to prioritise high-risk-cases on some then-recognised criteria. But the stridency of your response indicated that you saw some flaw in my assumptions. So I guess "they were all a pack of filthy racists, hell-bent on eradicating the Aboriginal People" must be much more logically patent and better-supported by the body of evidence.
The issue is not whether the damage that was done to the entire Aboriginal population by removing children from their families was worse than the damage that would have been done if no child had ever been removed from abusive parents.
Thank you for rephrasing my statement to its exact opposite, and then discounting it as irrelevant. Quite entertaining. My apologies... I had NO idea that you (or any other individual or group) had been empowered with deciding what is or isn't an issue to consider when addressing one of the most emotionally-charged and divisive topics of today's Australia.
There is also the issue of whether there are other interventions that could be done to improve things which didn't involve removing children from their parents.
How evil and sadistic of our elders, 50-100 years ago (?), to not have accurately predicted and employed modern-day preferred social service solutions. Thank you for the inspiration and new standards to follow. I wonder what travesties of justice we're =currently= practising, due to our inability to fully predict the intricacies of our (then mature) (grand)children's generation? Perhaps contemporary science fiction should guide our lawmakers. I wonder if Jules Verne or H. G. Wells could have similarly taught our ancestors how to "get it right"? To this very day, they're lauded for their brilliant insights. Maybe the cutting-edge psychologists of their days, like Jung, Adler, or Spock (not HIM, the other one)? Oops. Now-a-days even =they= are seen as quaint and ham-fisted buffoons by most modern mental health professionals. Guide us, please.
Consider what abilities are required to be successful in the FOSS community before trying to boast about such things.
It's true, as a mere (l)user in the FOSS community, I'm ill-equipped to comment in this forum on The Stolen Generation. My general intelligence, childhood of psychological abuse, Masters in Public Policy, and 59-year lifetime as the member of minorities much smaller than the Aboriginal one, are useless. I'll stop commenting on this thread, now. Carl