Australia to Apologize to Aborigines

As posted in the New York Times: SYDNEY, Australia — The new Australian government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will apologize for past mistreatment of the country’s Aboriginal minority when Parliament convenes next month, addressing an issue that has blighted race relations in Australia for years. In a measure of the importance Mr. Rudd attaches to the issue, the apology will be the first item of business for the new government when Parliament convenes Feb. 13, Jenny Macklin, the federal minister for indigenous affairs, said Wednesday. Ms. Macklin said she had consulted widely with Aboriginal leaders, but it was still not clear what form the apology would take. However, she said the government would not bow to longstanding demands for a fund to compensate those damaged by the policies of past governments. The history of relations between Australia’s Aboriginal population and the broader population is one of brutality and neglect. Tens of thousands of Aborigines died from disease, war and dispossession in the years after European settlement. Aboriginal people were not permitted to vote in national elections until 1962. But the most lasting damage was done by the policy of placing Aboriginal children with white families or in state institutions as part of a drive to assimilate them. A comprehensive 1997 report estimates that 1 in 10 to 1 in 3 Aboriginal children, the so-called stolen generations, were taken from their homes and families in the century before the policy was formally abandoned in 1969. “A national apology to the stolen generations and their families is a first, necessary step to move forward from the past,” Ms. Macklin said. “The apology will be made on behalf of the Australian government and does not attribute guilt to the current generation of Australian people.” Marcia Langton, a professor of Australian indigenous studies at the University of Melbourne, said the apology was a good first step, but she added that it was hard to see where the government’s program would go from there. “There can’t be any next step without a compensation fund,” Ms. Langton, one of Australia’s most prominent Aboriginal advocates, said Wednesday. She said she suspected that the apology was aimed more at pleasing the core voter base of Mr. Rudd’s Labor Party than Aboriginal people. “It’s difficult not to be cynical,” she said. The previous government of Prime Minister John Howard, which was convincingly beaten in elections last November, had refused to apologize to the Aboriginal population for past wrongs. “There are millions of Australians who will never entertain an apology because they don’t believe that there is anything to apologize for,” Mr. Howard told a local radio station last year. “They are sorry for past mistreatment but that is different from assuming responsibility for it.” Many of Mr. Howard’s critics said that he was unwilling to apologize because it would open the flood gates to potentially huge claims for compensation. Ms. Langton estimates that 13,000 members of the stolen generations survive. Aborigines constitute about 2.7 percent of Australia’s 20.4 million people. Life expectancy for Aboriginal people is 17 years lower than for other Australians; they are 13 times more likely to be incarcerated; three times more likely to be unemployed; and twice as likely to be victims of violence or threats of violence. Successive governments have been wary of intervening in Aboriginal affairs, and many blame policies carried out in the 1970s as part of a drive to empower indigenous Australians for further marginalizing them.