It is a sad, sad situation — indigenous peoples, marginalised since white settlement, living a substandard existence among non-Indigenous Australians who are among the healthiest, wealthiest and best-educated populations in the world.
It's now 10 years since the Bringing Them Home report exposed the horror of the stolen generations and 40 years since Aboriginal Australians won the right to vote in the historic 1967 referendum.
Linda Burney, in the 2007 Vincent Lingiari lecture gave a new generation’s voice to both the significance of the 1967 referendum and the continuing injustices that Indigenous people endure.
These anniversaries are reminders of the importance of 'sorry' in the reconciliation process.
Why is it so hard to admit that most human of qualities, fallibility? Regret, atonement and forgiveness lie very much at the core of spiritual values. John Howard's refusal to say sorry to Aboriginal Australians is a denial of an unsavoury truth in the face of irrefutable evidence, and as such demeans us as a nation. His intransigence has created an impasse in the Australian psyche, allowing no room for forgiveness, healing or hope.
What mother would teach her child that the right way to deal with a mistake is to sweep the facts under the carpet, ignore the evidence and hope with time no one will remember and all the evidence will have disappeared? Mistakes are made all the time which are neither necessarily intended or directly our fault. They happen in all kinds of relationships and circumstances: each of us can point to an experience when something was done that we wished undone.
Here in Australia, we have before us the possibility of a bright future for everyone, so long as we face the truth. Our young people — indigenous, migrant, and descendants of settlers over the generations — are all entitled to know the beauty and interest of a life that is open, not closed. A life where questions are valued more than acquiescence, where real difference is recognised as superior to superficial stereotypes, and where saying sorry for wrong actions, hard as it may be, is a necessary step righting the injustice and creating a better world.
What happened to the Stolen Generation was wrong. This has to be acknowledged and the regret articulated, so that as a nation we can face the truth. We owe it to our future Australians to do so with courage. They learn from us, and they in