Hone Harawira believes the only way to give substance to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology to Australia's Stolen Generation is through financial redress.
The Australian PM has ruled out compensation for decades of government policy which led to the destruction of many Aboriginal families.
But Mr Harawira, aMaori Party MP, said there still had to be some sort of financial plan to lift Aborigines from the bottom of the heap.
"In the golden land - Australians call it the golden land - there can be no excuses. There has to be a financial component to the whole thing, to bring [Aborigines] back to their status as a first nation."
Momentum for positive change shouldn't stop at the apology, he said.
The country could consider a setting up a national body to investigate the history of colonisation, the effect it has had on indigenous people and a financial plan to start addressing current disadvantage.
Mr Harawira is in Canberra - a self-funded trip at the invitation of leaders he met in Alice Springs last year when he left from a taxpayer-funded parliamentary trip to Victoria.
Yesterday, he was visiting the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the lawns of Old Parliament House, where people were gathering for the formal apology.
Although Harawira's language wasn't as blunt as a year ago when he called then-Prime Minister John Howard a 'racist bastard' for sending in the military as an emergency response to combat high rates of sexual abuse against children, he was still at his undiplomatic best when he said the only way to improve the lives of Aborigines was for the Government to work with indigenous communities.
"It's not about charging in. No offence, the Australian governments have been charging in for the last 150 years and they've screwed things up."
Seeing the poverty, social ills and standard of living had been a bleak experience, and it was hard to get a sense that people could see their futures, he said.
"Particularly, it was depressing because in a land full of opportunity, society allows it to happen."
Mr Harawira said he was in Australia to support demands for Aboriginal sovereignty.
