The Relevance of Human Rights to Health Status in Australiam Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities.

With these words, Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, while launching the Year of Indigenous Peoples at Redfern Park in Sydney in December 1992, officially acknowledged that in the process of colonization, white Australia had denied generations of Aboriginal children their most precious and fundamental right-that of a mother's love and family's care. He further stressed that the starting point in finding solutions to the problems that beset indigenous Australians is to recognize that the problem started with non-Aboriginal Australia. It began, he said, with recognition that white Australia did the dispossessing, that white Australia took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life, that white Australia brought the disease and alcohol, that white Australia committed the murders, that white Australia practiced discrimination and exclusion, and that white Australia took the children from their mothers. White Australia failed, the Prime Minister said, to make the most basic human response, and enter into the hearts and minds of the Aboriginal people.