Since the first acts of colonisation, institutional and systemic racism have been firmly fixed in government’s actions towards First Peoples. The government used laws and policies to try to:
- assimilate First Peoples into the general population
- deny First Peoples their connections to community, culture and Country.
Laws are framed and informed by the cultural, social and historical context they are developed in. The laws and policies that were used to dispossess and exclude First Peoples from social, economic and political life in Victoria were reinforced by racist beliefs about the inferiority of First Peoples. Such laws included:
- Aborigines Protection Act 1869 (Vic)
- Aborigines Protection Act 1886 (Vic).
Through these laws, First Peoples children were forcibly and cruelly removed from their families. We refer to the children subjected to these policies as the Stolen Generations. The displacement of successive generations of children has resulted in significant trauma. It also disrupted the passing down of traditional knowledge, oral traditions and cultural heritage for First Peoples.
State policies and legislation have had long-lasting effects on First Peoples, including ongoing and unequal intergenerational social and economic outcomes. For example, the 1997 Bringing them home report found that Stolen Generations were more likely to:
- face police attention as they reached adolescence
- suffer low self-esteem, depression and mental illness.
The report also found that Stolen Generations were almost always taught to reject their Aboriginality and Aboriginal culture. Instead, they were told to ‘think and act like a white person’.[9]
The impact of dispossession and colonisation on First Peoples in Victoria lives on in systems like child protection and justice. First Peoples continue to be over-represented in these systems.
As the Yoorrook Justice Commission has noted:
Colonisation, as implemented by colonial and later Victorian state authorities, created the structure, systems and conditions under which First Peoples continue to be subjected to harm and systemic injustice, as well as human and cultural rights violations.[10]
The government has taken significant steps to address the harm it has caused. Still, the pursuit of Treaty aims to:
- better address the widespread and enduring forms of interpersonal, institutional and structural racism affecting First Peoples
- provide the pathway for self-determination.
In April 2024 the Premier of Victoria’s statement to the Yoorrook Justice Commission noted that the Victorian Government recognises First Peoples’ ongoing resilience and strength in maintaining and protecting their connection to community, culture and Country.
[9] Commonwealth of Australia, Bringing them home: national Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, 1997, p 131
[10] Yoorrook Justice Commission, Yoorrook for Justice: report into Victoria’s child protection and criminal justice systems, p 62
Updated