Opposition leader Kim Beazley argued that Ruddock was misinformed about history and that Aborigines were actually more technologically advanced than some other races. There is a very high likelihood that they were the first to discover the opportunity of movement by sea and that they arrived here not by crossing land but crossing oceans, that far back they go. While quick to label Ruddock as a racist, his critics could offer no other explanation as to why the majority of Aborigines remain so shockingly disadvantaged more than 200 years after European colonisation. All they could do was defend Aboriginal culture and rail against racism. To delve any deeper would reveal the role which successive governments, both Labor and Liberal, have played in oppressing the Aboriginal people.
Aborigines form the most oppressed section of the Australian working class.
They have limited access to jobs, decent housing, education and health care, and have borne the brunt of cuts to welfare and social services. But their plight, the product of policies implemented by every government since colonisation, is the most extreme expression of the situation increasingly confronting immigrants, refugees, single mothers, pensioners and tens of thousands of families constantly struggling to make ends meet. It brought disease, alcohol and a deliberate policy of genocide. As an impediment to the capitalist class, which needed to clear the land for development, Aborigines were hunted down and massacred, their drinking water poisoned, and the survivors rounded up and sent to reserves. Half-caste children were forcibly removed from their families well into the second half of the twentieth century, and Aborigines did not even have the right to vote until 1967.