There! Was it so hard to say sorry?

It all went so well. A moving speech by new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. The Apology. Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson's endorsement, marred somewhat by an ill-timed attempt to mix in another side of the story. The acceptance by Aboriginal leaders.

But most moving were the responses of the Aboriginal people who crowded Canberra's parliamentary precinct, or who gathered in front of big screens around the nation. Some wept, some hugged, some seemed to have trouble accepting that our nation had finally said sorry.

The media did a splendid job. So many people were allowed to tell, in their own words, of the pain they had suffered with the separation from their mothers and their wider families, it must have helped white Australia understand a little better.

We need that better understanding. Just a week before the Apology, the left-leaning online activist group GetUp! reported the results of a Galaxy poll it had commissioned.

Only 55 per cent of Australians supported the Apology. Some 36 per cent did not. In Western Australia, and presumably in the north of Queensland, the numbers were the other way round.

We can sneer about rednecks. We can jeer at the "group-think" of the Quadrant mob, as I often do. We can talk about the Deep West, or the Deep North of Queensland.

We can march down streets, waving identically printed placards and chanting "Wadda we want?" till the cows come home, but we won't lift that figure much above 55 per cent unless we engage in rational, polite conversation with the people who hold other opinions.

We're unlikely to gain much ground with the 36 per cent who opposed an apology, but thoughtful discussion with the the 9 per cent in the middle, the people who hadn't made up their minds, should be fruitful.

To that end, GetUp! has launched one of its campaigns. Called Mythbusters, it provides a fact sheet to counter the major arguments against saying "sorry", in the hope that members will use them when they write to newspapers or call talkback radio (good luck with Alan Jones!).

GetUp! offers the factsheet on this web page, which also gives links to the full Bringing Them Home report about the Stolen Generations, and also to the Galaxy poll and to Reconciliation Australia factsheets.

Facts can be in short supply, or badly misused, in debate about the Stolen Generations. Some of the nastiest examples of this came last weekend when the Weekend Australian ran this feature by Keith Windschuttle, the new editor of Quadrant. So here's my own abbreviated factsheet.

"If the Rudd Government apologises to the Stolen Generations," Windschuttle began, "it should not stop at mere words. It should pay a substantial sum in compensation. This was the central recommendation of the Human Rights Commission's Bringing Them Home report in 1997."

Fact: The Rudd Government is not blindly implementing the recommendations of the inquiry, although it would have given weight to its findings. It has ruled out paying across-the-board compensation, and will instead spend the money on a focused program to close the appalling gap between the health, education and mortality rates of white and Aboriginal Australians.

"The charge that justified this, the report said, was genocide."

Fact: The report did say the policies amounted to genocide, but Windschuttle must know that one of the report's authors, Sir Ronald Wilson, recanted and regretted the use of the term. It was in all the papers after the Bulletin splashed it on its cover. [Since this original post, I've revisited the Bringing Them Home report about the issue of compensation, and have added further comment in a footnote below. -- Ian Skinner]

"The Bruce Trevorrow case in South Australia provided a benchmark for what that sum [to be paid to "virtually every person in Australia who claimed to be an Aborigine"] should be, a minimum of $500,000."

Fact: Trevorrow won this case under existing law because he convinced the court his removal was illegal, and that he'd suffered a lifetime of mental problems and alcoholism because of it. Few of those removed from their families could satisfy both criteria. Most removals took place under lawful authority. Even if the Rudd government changes its mind and sets up a compensation scheme, it would not be at this scale.

"Those who are serious about an apology should back it with a lump sum payment of $500,000 to each [Aboriginal] family, a total of $50 billion."

Fact: See above.

It's a pity Windschuttle wrote such tripe. Some of the other points he made, evidence he quoted, deserve to be put into the debate. In the past, he has played a valuable, if unwelcome, role in exposing the sloppiness of some historians on the other side of the culture wars. Forcing them to re-check their sources and revise their stories was no bad thing.

Windschuttle will publish the second volume of his Fabrication of Aboriginal History some time this year, and it's sure to damage some other historians' accounts. He'll find some major errors, and probably many you'd call nit-picking.

You and I, people of commonsense, may ask whether exposing these errors justifies a claim that all such accounts are false.

The Quadrant mob will have no such quibbles. I expect Miranda Devine to take no more than a fortnight to pronounce again that Windschuttle had refuted the "black armband" view of our history (as she did with volume one, in a Sydney Morning Herald comment on December 12, 2002). Dear old Frank Devine probably will hail Vol 2 with even more unseemly haste.

Footnote added February 17: A rereading of Chapter 13 of Bringing Them Home makes it clear the Human Rights Commission made out its case for reparation [its word] on wider grounds than its genocide claim.

These grounds, separately analysed for Australia's colonial era and for more recent times, broadly cover failures to meet proper legal standards in parliamentary acts authorising the removals, failure to provide for judicial review of removals, the states' failures in duty of care when they became the children's guardians, and breaches of international human rights in both racial discrimination terms and in what many Australians were to see as a rather too technical definition of genocide.

The following link will take you to Chapter 13 of the report.
http://www.humanrights.gov.au/social_justice/bth_report/report/ch13_part4.html

Why not use John Howard's sincere and moving apology?

A fortnight to go, and we will hear that long awaited sorry. Kevin Rudd has promised his new national government will deliver its apology to Australia's Aboriginal people on February 13.

It will be an emotional time. I expect to see some of my fellow Australians weeping, Aboriginals who experienced or know of the years of dispossession, family separations and social exclusion. And more than a few whitefellas, too. Even your grumpy old blogger will have a box of tissues nearby, just in case.

The Federal Government is still negotiating with Aboriginal leaders on the phrasing of the apology.

However, I'd like to suggest we use the text of an apology given by John Howard on July 3, 2000. (There's a bit of trick here, but if you don't know of it I'll explain later.)

Good evening. My name is John Howard and I'm speaking to you from Sydney, Australia, host city of the year 2000 Olympic Games.

At this important time, and in an atmosphere of international goodwill and national pride, we here in Australia – all of us – would like to make a statement before all nations. Australia, like many countries in the new world, is intensely proud of what it has achieved in the past 200 years.

We are a vibrant and resourceful people. We share a freedom born in the abundance of nature, the richness of the earth, the bounty of the sea. We are the world's biggest island. We have the world's longest coastline. We have more animal species than any other country. Two thirds of the world's birds are native to Australia. We are one of the few countries on earth with our own sky. We are a fabric woven of many colours and it is this that gives us our strength.

However, these achievements have come at great cost. We have been here for 200 years but before that, there was a people living here. For 40,000 years they lived in a perfect balance with the land.

There were many Aboriginal nations, just as there were many Indian nations in North America and across Canada, as there were many Maori tribes in New Zealand and Incan and Mayan peoples in South America.

These indigenous Australians lived in areas as different from one another as Scotland is from Ethiopia. They lived in an area the size of Western Europe. They did not even have a common language. Yet they had their own laws, their own beliefs, their own ways of understanding.

We destroyed this world.

We often did not mean to do it. Our forebears, fighting to establish themselves in what they saw as a harsh environment, were creating a national economy. But the Aboriginal world was decimated. A pattern of disease and dispossession was established. Alcohol was introduced. Social and racial differences were allowed to become fault-lines. Aboriginal families were broken up.

Sadly, Aboriginal health and education are responsibilities we have still yet to address successfully.

I speak for all Australians in expressing a profound sorrow to the Aboriginal people. I am sorry. We are sorry. Let the world know and understand, that it is with this sorrow, that we as a nation will grow and seek a better, a fairer and a wiser future. Thank you.

John Howard, July 3, 2000

To my mind, the apology, delivered by a John Howard seen indistinctly but heard clearly across the nation on ABC television, says all the right things, and could provide the basis of our nation's apology.

The John Howard who delivered the apology was not, of course, the Prime Minister we have recently voted out, but the Australian actor hired to appear on the ABC's satirical and somewhat manic series The Games.

In this episode, the Olympic Games organisers are frantic – visiting dignitaries will strip the games from Australia unless they hear that apology. So they call in the actor to pretend to be the Prime Minister, stand him in shadows, and have him read the words above.

The ABC noted: Any other John Howard who wishes to make this announcement should apply for copyright permission here, which will be granted immediately.

Most sorry resolutions passed by our state parliaments about a decade ago were apologies for the Stolen Generation, and it seems this will be focus of the Rudd government's apology on behalf of the nation.

I believe our nation should express sorrow for the wider suffering experienced by Aboriginal people since Europeans arrived on their lands, including the removal of children from their families. We need not assume the policies of our governments and the actions of some of our white settlers had evil or genocidal intent – although, at times, that may have been true – but we should acknowlege that often they were disastrous, and for that we should be sorry.

Nobody else seems to have noted it, but there's a remarkable resonance between the apology above and words written by historian Geoffrey Blainey quarter of a century ago.

In many ways the European history of this land has been a remarkable achievement. Today this land feeds fifty times as many Australians as it fed in Aboriginal times. We clothe hundreds of millions of people, across the seas; we supply minerals to hundreds of millions of people; and we feed millions in other lands.

But this great European achievement has been accompanied by failures. And the greatest of all the failures is the dispossession of the people who once roamed these lands.

As a nation we have to redeem that failure. We have to remind ourselves that we were not the only pioneers. We have to give back to Aboriginals the hope and the sense of security they have lost.

Blainey goes on to express reservations about land rights, but says:

Aboriginal land rights is not a gateway to paradise. But I can't help thinking that if this land is to be one land, and we are all to be one people, then we have no alternative but to give Aboriginals a
reasonable share of that land which was once their own.

The historian wrote these words in the opening chapter of The Blainey View, which accompanied the ABC television series of that name in 1982.

* I'm a member of the Central Coast Reconciliation Group. My views might not be shared by all members of the group, and I appreciate their tolerance and understanding if at times we differ.