Bringing-Them-Home-Report-Web

implications’ of this task ‘should be seen as a part of the overall reparation package towhich governments have a legal and moral obligation’ (submission 754 page 22).Appropriate implementation of the tasks of identification, preservation and indexingwill involve a partnership with relevant Indigenous user services and individuals (ATSICsecond submission 684 page 2). Prioritising needs within the records held and identifyingwhich records and collections are most likely to contain information of relevance will beamong the roles allocated to the Commonwealth, State and Territory Records Taskforcesproposed below.Record preservationRecommendation 22a: That all government record agencies be funded as a matter ofurgency by the relevant government to preserve and index records relating toIndigenous individuals, families and/or communities and records relating to allchildren, Indigenous or otherwise, removed from their families for any reason.Recommendations 22b: That indexes and other finding aids be developed andmanaged in a way that protects the privacy of individuals and, in particular, preventsthe compilation of dossiers.Enhancing accessCommon access guidelines are needed in each State and Territory. Retrievingrelevant personal and family information is currently unnecessarily complicated by thediverse access provisions in the various record agencies. Additional difficulty isattributable to the refusal of access by non-government agencies or, where access isprovided, to the different conditions of access. The development of appropriateguidelines will require detailed discussions with Indigenous users. A taskforce should becreated by each government, constituted by all interested parties, including recordagencies and Indigenous family reunion services. The 1994 Going Home Conferencerecommended,…that a representative Aboriginal Advisory Committee be established to advise theCommonwealth archives agency on all matters of interest and concern to Aboriginal people, witha view to ensuring that Aboriginal people have ready access to any information of concern tothem for use as the Aboriginal people themselves determine.Joint records taskforcesRecommendation 23: That the Commonwealth and each State and TerritoryGovernment establish and fund a Records Taskforce constituted by representativesfrom government and church and other non-government record agencies andIndigenous user services to,1. develop common access guidelines to Indigenous personal, family and communityrecords as appropriate to the jurisdiction and in accordance with establishedprivacy principles,2. advise the government whether any church or other non-government record-