Dear Is Mise,

Thank You for your question - "What was it that
the voters of Australia decided in 1967?"

The following link may help:

http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/history/australian-1967-referendum

Dear individual,

What on earth is this?

“I challenge you to work for three years in an indigenous community governed by Labor supporting bureaucrats & then come back & express your views. I guarantee you'd be doing 180's all round. There is an immeasurable difference between what the leftie bureaucrats tell you in the Media & to what's really going on. If you cared to find out you'd be too ashamed to call yourself a leftie. That's another guarantee.”

Rubbish. You would have gone into that community with right wing views and, quite possibly through being in a subordinate position to a “leftie”, came out with all your prejudices intact and confirmed. Others would have gone in with quite different views and come out with quite different perspectives.

But what has this got to do with Nelson's speech? He felt he had to pander to the likes of you and thus might have diminished the day if it were not for the power of the occasion and the words of Kevin Rudd. Even he apologised later for parts of it. I walked past Wilson Tuckey that day on the upper balcony looking over those gathered in the foyer of the Parliament House. Hands on hips with an aggressive sneering attitude. He represented people like you but in the end you are a tiny minority.

Dear OTB,

Foxy most certainly did not intend to equate the Nazi's actions with the actions of early Australian settlers but then you know that, you really are far more concerned with getting under her skin than any imagined offence.

But I will make the connection loud and clear. The Aboriginal people as a race and a cultures suffered more devastation in relative terms from white settlement than the Jewish race and cultures did under the Holocaust.

To harbour any illusion that the opposite is true is a denial of facts.

Steele,
Your last statement is not only misleading it's immoral.
Jews were not an "oppressed" group in Germany before 1933 they were in many respects one of the most powerful, what's more they had no rightful historical claim to those positions of influence and actually did much to undermine and wreck the German nation. The moves made against them by the Nazis were in the context of their eliminating a powerful rival in the drive to dominate Europe with a new Aryan aristocracy, Hitler most definitely did not see Jews as materially or intellectually inferior to Aryans, it was all to do with race and "blood".
Indigenous Australian society was unintentionally destroyed by diseases which caused a collapse in their birthrate, no children equals no future, no future equals despair. There was no plan to remove them from the continent, they were not considered rivals in any sense of the word and they were portrayed by the media as inferior and backward. "White Settlement" didn't cause the collapse of Aboriginal societies, Typhus, Influenza and Measles aren't "White dieseases" and at the time of colonisation there were oral histories recorded of previous epidemics among Aboriginals.
Whatever the Nazis did to the Jews from 1941-44 was done in the name of Aryan only Lebensraum in Eastern Europe, what was going on in Australia in the 19th century had nothing to do with race in that sense, what's more the most drastic of the negative impacts upon indigenous people were unintentional and largely unforseeable.

The stolen generation was in fact an act of genocide, today many of us have come to realise what a most shameful chapter in Australia's history it was. When I first heard of it I believed it was merely an "isolated" incident in our history, basically something that happened in WA back in the 1930's, may be the movie 'Rabbit Proof Fence' conveyed that notion to some extent. Nothing could be future from the truth, it was the forced removal of Aboriginal children by the authorities on a massive scale all over Australia from late 1800's to the 1970's. it purpose was in the belief Aboriginal children would be "better off" with white families or in institutions, and that eventual through breeding the Aboriginal race would simply disappear.
The Rudd apology was a most important act in both the recognition of what had happened and in the process of healing. It was not an apology for something that had happened in Captain Cook's time, but for something that was happening in my lifetime and certainly in our parents life time.

http://www.nsdc.org.au/stolen-generations/history-of-the-stolen-generations/the-history-of-the-stolen-generations

Paul,
There's no such thing as genocide and there were no "stolen" generations:
http://www.stolengenerations.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=54&Itemid=50
I know, I know, the mind of the Leftist is wired so it fills in the blanks and reads between the lines so you may think you've seen evidence of stolen generations just like you think you've seen evidence of gas chambers at Auschwitz because you've seen some fictional movies, read some fictional books and listened to interviews with people who have been proven to be lying or exaggerating.
No evidence means no evidence, it doesn't mean "cover up", it doesn't mean "whitewash" it means that claims of children being "stolen" on a supposedly genocidal scale cannot be verified.

Actually, evidence exists.

As historians Henry Reynolds (and others) point out -
"It is now possible to explore the past by means
of primary sources - large numbers of books, archival
material, articles, and so on." The information is
available at all National and State libraries for those
who don't wish to live in ignorance. There is much
documented material available. The evidence is
overwhelming.

Peter Costello tells us in his Memoirs -

"The Report, "Bringing Them Home," was published in 1997.
It tells harrowing stories of children taken from
their families. It is hard to imagine the trauma this
would cause a young chi8ld. It would scar them for life.
The report gave people who had been hurt or damaged
by their experiences the opportunity to tell their
stories. It helped the wider community understand what
they had been through."

Obviously not everyone is capable of understanding.