The Australian Government, under recently-elected Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, will formally apologise to aborigines for the Stolen Generation. Defeated conservative Prime Minister John Howard flatly refused to do so.
The apology will be made at the first session of the new Parliament on February 13.
The Stolen Generation refers to aboriginal children who were taken by force from their parents and communities, often to be raised in orphanages. The policies existed in some from between around 1869 and 1969.
No one knows how many children were removed, but the Bringing Them Home Report in 1997 stated that at least 100,000 children were stolen. They estimated that in the period of 1910 and 1970, between one in three and one in ten aboriginal children were forcibly removed.
Howard's government disputed that this ever even happened, partly devolving the discussion to one of semantics. Mainly they argued that saying “sorry” would lead to compensation claims. They also argued that it would lead to a “culture of guilt” for modern Australians, a position the current leader of Howard's right wing Liberal Party has repeated.
This is, of course, a very big thing to aborigines. "It's fundamental to our healing, it's actually fundamental to the healing of the whole country and so we're very excited about it," sais Christine King of the Stolen Generations Alliance, as quoted in an AAP story in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Well done to the Rudd Government. Sometimes “sorry” really is the hardest word, but sometimes it's the word that's needed the most.
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