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CANBERRA - To tears, cheering and applause, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd yesterday used one of Australia's darkest chapters to leapfrog decades of abuse and neglect to chart a new course in race relations.
Delivering a long-overdue federal apology to indigenous Australians in general and victims of the Stolen Generations in particular, Rudd told the nation that words would never be enough.
In wrestling for its own soul Australia needed to forge a new beginning and a new partnership with its impoverished and disenfranchised Aborigines.
"There comes a time in the history of nations when their people must become fully reconciled to their past if they are to go forward with confidence to embrace their future," he said in a powerful speech to the first Parliament of his Labor Government. "Our nation, Australia, has reached such a time, and that is why the Parliament is today here assembled, to deal with this unfinished business of the nation, to remove a stain from the nation's soul [and] in the true spirit of reconciliation to open a new chapter in the history of this great land."
Yesterday's apology was one of the most significant landmarks in Australia's fraught path to reconciliation, ranking alongside constitutional recognition as citizens and the right to vote in the 1960s, the first land rights legislation of the 1970s, and the High Court's recognition of native title in the 1990s.
Such a baring of the national psyche could never have occurred under earlier governments, bound as they were by partisan imperatives and prejudices. Rudd's November victory swept a new generation into power on both sides of the divide.
For the first time, all political parties were united in acceptance of the impact of racist laws passed by federal and state parliaments and the need to apologise for them - hugely potent symbolism that has created a common foundation for further, practical measures to address the appalling Third World lives of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.
More significantly, the apology recognised the failure of past policies and generated an unconditional commitment by the two major parties to form a joint commission to develop strategies to start pushing indigenous Australia into the economic and social mainstream of one of the most affluent societies on Earth.
Associated with this was a series of solid targets to attack "obscene" rates of indigenous infant mortality, education, health, housing and employment opportunities, and to develop specific programmes for individual remote communities in line with defined national objectives.
And both Rudd and Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson vowed that they would not let political bickering and points-scoring stand in the way of what has finally been officially and publicly accepted as the nation's single most damaging and shameful failure.
Both leaders gave personal examples of the "searing" pain and consequences of the forced removal of children from their families under policies that took all rights from parents until the 1970s, to underscore the need to say sorry. Said Rudd of the stories told in Bringing Them Home, the 1997 report of the inquiry into the Stolen Generations: "It screams from the pages."
Attacking the stubborn and deafening silence in Parliament in the wake of the report, and its ability to "suspend our most basic instincts of what is right and what is wrong," Rudd said Australia could no longer pretend the Stolen Generations were a black armband view of history.
Nor could opponents of an apology argue that the sins of previous generations should not be visited upon the present: "The 1970s [when forced removals ended] are not exactly a point in remote antiquity. There are still serving [MPs] who were elected in the early 1970s [and] it is well within the adult memory span of many."
This was the sole divergence between Rudd and Nelson, the successor of former Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, whose refusal to say "sorry" split the nation, and whose party remains - in private - divided on the issue. Howard - unlike former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and Labor counterparts Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating - boycotted the apology, as did three other Coalition MPs.
Nelson, while strongly supporting the apology and Rudd's plans to attack the "real, immediate, seemingly intractable and disgraceful circumstances" of indigenous life, attributed forced removal of children to tragically flawed good intentions - rather than inherently racist policies.
In contrast to the unanimous standing ovation and thunderous applause across the nation for Rudd, a number in Parliament House did not stand for Nelson, and others watching the apology on big-screen TV outside the House and in major cities turned their backs and booed as he spoke.
But Rudd urged the end of political divisions. "The nation is calling on us, the politicians, to move beyond our infinite bickering, our point-scoring, our mindlessly partisan politics to a rare position beyond the partisan divide."
Supported by Nelson, Rudd proposed the creation of a "kind of war cabinet" to address key issues too challenging and important to be used as a political football. Chaired by the two leaders, a joint policy commission would first develop a strategy on housing in remote indigenous communities then, if successful, move to a referendum on the symbolically crucial constitutional recognition of Aborigines as the first Australians.
"Unless the great symbolism of reconciliation is accompanied by an even greater substance [this apology] is little more than a clanging gong," Rudd said. "It is not sentiment that makes history it is our actions that make history."
Many Aborigines regard compensation as the first real requirement of a new partnership. Rudd and Nelson have flatly rejected this in favour of new and effective development programmes, backed by funding that runs at billions of dollars a year. Rudd has promised to shed the worst aspects of Howard's emergency intervention in the Northern Territory and to reshape it as a long-term development programme.
"None of this will be easy," Rudd said. "Most of it will be hard - very hard - but none of it is impossible, and all of it is achievable with clear goals, clear thinking, and by placing an absolute premium on respect, co-operation and mutual responsibility as the guiding principles of this new partnership."
* Britain faced demands yesterday to join Australia in apologising to Aborigines. As the former colonial power until the Australian colonies came together as a federation in 1901, Britain should also apologise for Aboriginal children being sent to foster families and institutions, said prominent human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, QC.
Robertson, an Australian based in London, said Britain bore a "heavy historic responsibility" because colonial authorities had created an office known as the Protector of Aborigines, which oversaw the removal of mostly mixed-race children.
He said it should "touch a guilty nerve in the UK".
PARTNERSHIP FOR THE FUTURE
* A new joint policy commission to be led by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson to develop national strategies, starting with housing in remote communities, followed by constitutional recognition for the first Australians.
* Within a decade, it aims to halve the gap in infant mortality, literacy and numeracy, and within a generation the 17-year gap in life expectancy between indigenous and non-indigenous populations.
* Within five years, all 4-year-olds in remote communities will be enrolled in early childhood education centres.
* A new approach to education and health for indigenous children.
* New approaches tailored to individual communities, rather than a one-size-fits-all policy.
* Help for members of the Stolen Generation to trace their families.
- additional reporting Nick Squires.
