KEY POINTS:
As the new Australian Government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd contemplates an apology to Aborigines for past injustices, the potential cost of the gesture appears to be skyrocketing.
A prominent Aboriginal lawyer, Michael Mansell, has called for the Labor Government to set aside A$1 billion ($1.13 billion) to
compensate the Stolen Generations - Aboriginal people who were removed from their families as children in a policy of forced assimilation. The practice lasted into the 1970s.
But yesterday other senior Aboriginal representatives upped the ante, saying A$1 billion was "really quite minimal" and it should be doubled or tripled.
The demand for a compensation fund could be a headache for Rudd, whose promise of an apology overturned the long-standing refusal of his predecessor, John Howard, to say sorry for past wrongs inflicted on indigenous people.
During his 11 years in power Howard argued that contemporary Australians bore no responsibility for the deeds of the past.
Even A$1 billion would dwarf the $793.7 million in compensation awarded to Maori under the Treaty of Waitangi settlements. The two largest of $170 million each were for Tainui and Ngai Tahu.
Professor Boni Robertson said the sum of A$1 billion was "just a starting point" as negotiations with the Rudd Government began.
Fellow indigenous academic Gracelyn Smallwood said the compensation fund would need to be A$2 billion to A$3 billion.
"It's very simple," Smallwood told the Australian. "You can't just apologise, you've got to mean it and the only way to prove that is through compensation. You can't reconcile without it."
But Christine King, co-chairwoman of Reconciliation Australia, told the Herald many Aboriginal people were not interested in compensation.
"A lot of people don't want the money because they feel that no amount can make up for what happened to them. They want the apology so that they can start to heal. The Stolen Generations ripped the heart out of Aboriginal people."
King is a member of the Stolen Generations - she was 7 and her sister 9 when they were removed from their mother in the Northern Territory.
"It's too painful to talk about, even now. There were very few Aboriginal families who were not affected in one way or another."
As well as the amount of money to be made available, the Government and Aboriginal leaders are debating the wording of the apology.
An influential lobby group led by veteran Aboriginal activist Lowitja O'Donoghue wants the declaration to acknowledge that removing Aboriginal children and placing them with white foster families or training them as domestic servants was evil and cruel.
Former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, who is backing the campaign for an apology, said it must acknowledge that the policy of child removal based on race was "disastrously wrong".
The Stolen Generations Alliance wants the wording to mirror an apology issued in 1998 by Canada's Uniting Church to native American children sent to church-run, government-funded Indian Residential Schools.
The Canadian apology referred to a "cruel and ill-conceived system of assimilation" and pledged to "never again use our power as a church to hurt others with attitudes of racial and spiritual superiority".
Two years ago the Canadian Government announced a A$1.9 billion compensation deal hailed by ministers as a "fair and lasting resolution" to the most disgraceful episode in the country's history.
If Rudd is true to his word, it would be the first time an Australian federal Government had apologised to the country's 450,000 Aborigines, who suffer low life expectancy, poor health and high rates of joblessness.
