I'm sorry

Tomorrow is a historic day for Australia. After the previous conservative government refused for almost 12 years to apologise to Australia's indigenous peoples for policies that removed thousands of Aboriginal children from their families, our new government has made it one of their first items of business.

The apology will be delivered tomorrow in Canberra, on behalf of the Australian government and does in no way attribute guilt to today's generation. Our new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says it reflects on the past mistreatment of Aboriginal people. The parliament will apologise to the indigenous people for breaking up families and for causing enormous pain, degradation and suffering.

Although the apology is close to the heart of many people, the previous government under John Howard persistantly refused to bow to the pressure, claiming that saying sorry would place the blame on the public and leave the commonwealth liable to a flood of compensation claims.

Between 1910 and the early 1970s, about 100,000 Aboriginal children were forcefully removed from their parents and held in prison-like facilities before being placed with new families, based on the premise that they would have a better life growing up with white people's culture and lifestyle. Most of the stolen children were of mixed-blood Aboriginal heritage. A nation-wide national inquiry called the "Bringing Them Home Report" has shown that the majority of the children from the stolen generation suffered long-term psychological trauma.

The apology will read that "we today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians. A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again."

Although an apology alone is not enough, I am grateful that we finally have a government in place who can see that reconciliation is necessary in order to move forward together in peace and with mutual respect. A considerable number of people in Australia still feel that they should not say sorry for something they are not personally responsible for, and some of them feel quite strongly about it. Some friends and I were insulted today on Facebook as "commie bastards" and told to "get fucked" because we put our Facebook status to "I'm sorry". What those people don't understand (apart from the fact that the connection to communism is also very unclear) is that it is not about attributing guilt. It is about recognising that unspeakable trauma has been inflicted on many families and that considering we also live on their land, we need say on behalf of our ancestors that we are sorry for what happend. I too, say sorry.