This was a great and long awaited day for Australia.
The text of the formal apology is as follows:
“Today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history.
We reflect on their past mistreatment.
We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations – this blemished chapter in our nation’s history.
The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.
We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.
We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.
For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.
To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.
And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.
We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation.
For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.
We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians.
A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again.
A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity.
A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed.
A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility.
A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.”
When I sat down in front of the television set to watch the ABC presentation of the occasion, I was quite nervous. This was an event that had to work well in a number of ways. I was aware that there were two audiences for the apology.
The first was the indigenous people and non-indigenous supporters of the apology. For these people the apology had to be strong, clear, if possible lyrical but most importantly genuine and sincere. John Howard's "deep regret" non-apology speech of 1999, springs to mind as an example of how badly such an event could be handled. If you see a movie clip of Howard's speech just watch the body language and you will realise the insincerity of his effort.
The second group consisted of the large minority of people who doubted the necessity of an apology. Some of these were far right wing journalists and academics who could never be convinced to support and issue that requires decency, honesty or justice. Most opponents of the apology are conservatively oriented people who are not driven by an ideological agenda, who don't fully understand the issue, and therefore are amenable to persuasion.
The PM, Kevin Rudd, gave a fine speech, maybe even a great one. Within the first minute he had said sorry three times:
The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.
We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.
We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.
For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.
To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.
And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.
We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation.
For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.
Such sentiments are primary in an apology speech, but are not enough on their own. It was necessary for Rudd to address the huge problems that indigenous people face in their daily lives. Howard spoke of practical reconciliation probably as a means of avoiding an apology. Rudd set targets with deadlines to guide policy and practical measuers:
This new partnership on closing the gap will set concrete targets for the future: within a decade to halve the widening gap in literacy, numeracy and employment outcomes and opportunities for indigenous Australians, within a decade to halve the appalling gap in infant mortality rates between indigenous and non-indigenous children and, within a generation, to close the equally appalling 17-year life gap between indigenous and non-indigenous in overall life expectancy.
Rudd was clearly very aware of the second constituency that I described above - those who remain unconvinced of the necessity of an apology. He addressed these people with three arguments:
- A detailed description of the experience of one member of the stolen generation - Nanna Nungala Fejo - which can be found at this post .
- The claim that the basic intention of the laws and their administration was racist and possibly genocidal - though, of cause, he didn't use those terms
But should there still be doubts as to why we must now act, let the Parliament reflect for a moment on the following facts: that, between 1910 and 1970, between 10 and 30% of indigenous children were forcibly taken from their mothers and fathers; that, as a result, up to 50,000 children were forcibly taken from their families; that this was the product
of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state as reflected in the explicit powers given to them under statute; that this policy was taken to such extremes by some in administrative authority that the forced extractions of children of so-called mixed lineage were seen as part of a broader policy of dealing with the problem of the Aboriginal population.
One of the most notorious examples of this approach was from the Northern Territory Protector of Natives, who stated: ''Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth generation, all native characteristics of the Australian Aborigine are eradicated. The problem of our half-castes'' - to quote the protector - ''will quickly be eliminated by the complete disappearance of the black race, and the swift submergence of their progeny in the white''. - An appeal for empathy from non-indigenous Australians:
I ask those non-indigenous Australians listening today who may not fully understand why what we are doing is so important to imagine for a moment that this had happened to you.
I say to honourable members here present: imagine if this had happened to us. Imagine the crippling effect. Imagine how hard it would be to forgive.
Knowing where we come from - ie who our parents and other ancestors are or were is very important to us as human beings. I have written two posts on this issue, here and here.
Rudd made a strong point that indigenous policy should be bipartisan, in particular with the "war cabinet" idea.
I said before the election that the nation needed a kind of war cabinet on parts of indigenous policy, because the challenges are too great and the consequences are too great to allow it all to become a political football, as it has been so often in the past.
I therefore propose a joint policy commission, to be led by the Leader of the Opposition and me, with a mandate to develop and implement, to begin with, an effective housing strategy for remote communities over the next five years.
There is probably more than one motivation for this approach. On the positive side a large measure of agreement between government and opposition would make it more likely that appropriate policy would be developed and implemented and it would increase the liklehood that most non-indigenous Australians would support it. On the negative side, it is good politics, as tying the opposition into government policy would make it more likely that legislation would be passed.
What to make of the speech of the Opposition Leader, Brendan Nelson?
It certainly started very well, saying sorry in the second paragraph.
Mr Speaker, Members of this the 42nd Parliament of Australia, visitors and all Australians, in rising to speak strongly in support of this motion I recognise the Ngunnawal, first peoples of this Canberra land.
Today our nation crosses a threshold. We formally offer an apology. We say sorry to those Aboriginal people forcibly removed from their families through the first seven decades of the 20th century.
Like Rudd, Nelson gave some examples of the stealing of aboriginal children.
I was at the post office with my Mum and Auntie [and cousin]. They put us in the police ute and said they were taking us to Broome. They put the mums in there as well. But when we’d gone [about ten miles] they stopped, and threw the mothers out of the car. We jumped on our mothers’ backs, crying, trying not to be left behind. But the policemen pulled us off and threw us back in the car. They pushed the mothers away and drove off, while our mothers were chasing the car, running and crying after us. We were screaming in the back of that car. When we got to Broome they put me and my cousin in the Broome lockup. We were only ten years old. We were in the lockup for two days waiting for the boat to Perth.
Nelson also showed that he is aware of the damage caused by removing children from their families when he said:
It is reasonably argued that removal from squalor led to better lives: children fed, housed and educated for an adult world which they could not have imagined. However, from my life as a family doctor and knowing the impact of my own father’s removal from his unmarried, teenage mother, I know that not knowing who you are is the source of deep, scarring sorrows, the real meaning of which can be known only to those who have endured it.
My objection to that comment is that the intention was not to remove children from squalor, as children removed were largely light skinned "half casts".
After this promising beginning, Nelson strayed into territory that provoked spontaneous protest around the country.
He first discussed a compensation fund, an issue conspicuously absent from Rudd's speech.
There is no compensation fund for this—nor should there be. How can any sum of money replace a life deprived of knowing your family? Separation was then, and remains today, a painful but necessary part of public policy in the protection of children. Our restitution for this lies in our determination to address today’s injustices, learning from what was done and doing everything we can to heal those who suffered.
This is a position that is similar to that of the government. In the end I think a compensation fund is a moral requirement and might even be cheaper that civil law suits; but I understand the government's reluctance - which I think involves a fear that it would antagonise those who oppose the apology, which would make it more difficult to develop and implement appropriate policy.
Nelson then attempted to describe the intellectual, moral and political climate in the decades when the children were taken. There is nothing inherently reprehensible in this, I suspect the problems arose from Nelson's awkward phrasing of his argument. Discussion of the sufferings of war veterans was part of this attempt at filling in background to the times. At a stretch it might be justified on those grounds, but certainly when listening to the speech live seemed strange and unnecessary. In fact I expected him to follow up his comment that both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians were killed in the wars with by a comparison between the ways indigenous and non-indigenous veterans were treated when they returned from the wars. Non of that eventuated.
The section of Nelson's speech that provoked the most protest was his attempt to justify the Howard government's approach to indigenous policy and the following paragraph in particular:
The sexual abuse of Aboriginal children was found in every one of the 45 Northern Territory communities surveyed for the Little children are sacred report. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back, driving the Howard government’s decision to intervene with a suite of dramatically radical welfare, health and policing initiatives. I cannot imagine the strength upon which she drew, but the Alice Springs Crown Prosecutor, Nanette Rogers, with great courage, revealed to the nation in 2006 the case of a four-year-old girl drowned while being raped by a teenager who had been sniffing petrol. She told us of the two children, one a baby, sexually assaulted by two men while their mothers were drinking alcohol. Another baby was stabbed by a man trying to kill her mother. So too a 10-year-old girl was gang-raped in Aurukun, the offenders going free, barely punished. A boy was raped in another community by other children. Is this not an emergency, the most disturbing part of it being its endemic nature and Australia’s apparent desensitisation to it? Yet governments responsible for delivering services and security have resisted elements of a Northern Territory style intervention.
Some justification of the Howard legacy was inevitable and Rudd opened the door with the following claims:
... from the nation's Parliament there has been a stony, stubborn and deafening silence for more than a decade; a view that somehow we, the Parliament, should suspend our most basic instincts of what is right and what is wrong; a view that, instead, we should look for any pretext to push this great wrong to one side, to leave it languishing with thehistorians, the academics and the cultural warriors, as if the stolen generations are little more than an interesting sociological phenomenon.
All the same, Nelson's detailed descriptions of abuse in indigenous communities was seriously "over the top" and unnecessary.
Irrespective of the unfortunate middle of the speech, Nelson finished well, by referring to Neville Bonner, the first Aboriginal parliamentarian, and a Liberal.
Bonner was a
Yagara man abandoned by his non-Aboriginal father before his birth on Ukerebagh Island in the mouth of the Tweed River, Neville was born into a life of hardship known only to some who are here today as visitors. He grew up in a hollow that had been carved by his grandfather under lantana bushes. The year before his mother’s death when he was nine, she sent him to a school near Lismore. He lasted two days before the non-Aboriginal people forced his exclusion.
It was to his grandmother Ida he attributed his final success. Arguing that at 14 the boy must go to school, she had said to him: ‘Neville, if you learn to read and write, express yourself well and treat people with decency and courtesy, it will take you a long way,’ and it did. Through a life as a scrub clearer, a ringer, a stockman, a bridge carpenter and 11 years on Palm Island, it brought him to this parliament in 1971, as the events of this motion were nearing an end. He said in prophetic words to the Liberal Party members who selected him: ‘In my experience of this world, two qualities are always in greater need—human understanding and compassion.’
When he was asked by Robin Hughes in 1992 to reflect on his life, Neville observed that the unjust hardships he had endured ‘can only be changed when people of non-Aboriginal extraction are prepared to listen, to hear what Aboriginal people are saying, and then work with us to achieve those ends’. Asked to nominate his greatest achievement, he replied: ‘It is that I was there. They no longer spoke of boongs or blacks. They spoke instead of Aboriginal people.’
Today is about ‘being there’ as a nation and as individual Australians. It is about Neville Bonner’s understanding of one another and the compassion that shaped his life in literally reaching out to those whom he considered had suffered more than him. We honour those in our past who have suffered—many of whom are here today—and all who have made sacrifices for us by the way we live our lives and shape our nation. Today we recommit to do so—as one people. We are sorry.
Surprisingly, when reading the speech some weeks after it was delivered, there is less to abject to that appeared when Nelson was speaking.
The event was watched live around the country in homes and by groups of people on large screens in public places. Many of those watching turned their backs on the screens and some began slow hand clapping to drown out Nelson's words. I understand the reaction, I was dismayed, myself, by the middle section of the speech, and given the record of the Howard government, a Liberal leader would always be suspected by aboriginal people and their white activist supporters. All the same I was disappointed when I learned of the adverse public reaction. As I stated at the beginning, one of the two main objectives of the day was to convince as many as possible of the opponents of the apology that it was an appropriate and correct response. As I watched the television journalists avidly describe the reaction to Nelson, I felt that many opponents of the apology would latch onto that behaviour to justify their opposition. I understood the reaction but thought it was bad and thoughtless politics.
In the end one can excuse the "ordinary" people for reacting to Nelson, but that two or Rudd's senior staffers also joined in the protest was astounding. How someone who is very close to the centre of power, who have made politics their life could not see the obvious political danger in the protest is astounding.
Some of the poor imagery of the protesters was canceled by Rudd's strong emphasis on bipartisanship in the chamber, in particular his emphasis that he and Nelson hand the coolamon to the speaker together.
Not all conservatives could bring themselves to move on from the failed policies and attitudes of the past. Howard was the only former PM not to attend, and five conservative MPs boycotted the apology. The most notorious was iron bar Tuckey, who said to reporters:
"I'm there to say hallelujah. Tomorrow there will be no petrol sniffing. Tomorrow little girls can sleep in their beds without any concern. It's all fixed."
What an amazing lack of understanding of a basic human characteristic. As Malcolm Fraser noted that Tuckey and his like would "come to be marginalised and increasingly irrelevant".
It is important and fair to add that Tuckey does not represent the majority opinion in the Liberal party. This can be seen from Nick Minchin's comment:
If there was any failure on our part, it was in relation to recognising the significance of symbolism in helping Indigenous communities to move forward. We were unashamedly focused on practical outcomes but we can now acknowledge that that was at the expense of important symbolic acts… We do accept that the lack of a formal apology from the federal government has been an impediment to better relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. The Coalition now recognise that this apology is very important to Indigenous Australians and that the parliament should adopt this motion in the interests of enhancing their hopes, their aspirations and their opportunities.
My concern that the controversy generated on the day would have adversely effected support for the apology has proved unfounded. Before the apology, 55% of the population supported an apology while 36% opposed it. In a survey taken the following weekend, those figures had changed to 68% support and 22% opposed.
The poll was commissioned by GetUp! and Brett Solomon the executive director said:
This is an unprecedented turnaround of opinion in such a short time
It shows that bold leadership on indigenous affairs will be rewarded, and that 'sorry' was indeed a healing moment for all Australians - the process of reconciliation has been breathed new life with this important first step.
The poll proved that saying "sorry" was a concrete step towards reconciliation.
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