FED: MPs applauded after voting to apologise to stolen generations

AAP General News (Australia)
02-13-2008
FED: MPs applauded after voting to apologise to stolen generations

Eds: repeating, amending length of speech in 4th par



By Adam Gartrell

CANBERRA, Feb 13 AAP - Indigenous men and women gave Australia's federal politicians
a long, standing ovation after MPs formally apologised for the pain and suffering inflicted
on the stolen generations.

There were emotional scenes across Australia as thousands of people, including some
of those forcibly taken from their families, watched the historic, formal apology delivered
by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

In Canberra, hundreds packed into the House of Representatives as Mr Rudd moved a motion
that the parliament apologise for the "laws and policies of successive parliaments and
governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss" on the stolen generations.

Some people in the public gallery, indigenous and non-indigenous, wept as Mr Rudd read
out the 361-word apology, which was supported by the federal opposition.

At city squares and parks across Australia, and on the lawns outside parliament house
in Canberra, people cheered, applauded, hugged and cried after the apology was delivered.

But some also jeered and turned their backs when Opposition Leader Dr Brendan Nelson
spoke, at times emotionally, in support of the formal apology.

In his accompanying speech to parliament Mr Rudd said there came a time in history
when people had to reconcile the past with their future.

"Our nation Australia has reached such a time and that is why the parliament is today
here assembled," he said.

"To deal with this unfinished business of the nation.

"To remove a great 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 Australia."

Mr Rudd told the story of an "elegant, eloquent and wonderful" elderly indigenous woman,
a member of the stolen generations, who he visited a few days ago.

Mr Rudd said there was something "terribly primal" about such first hand accounts.

"The pain is searing, it screams from the pages, the hurt, the humiliation, the degradation
and the sheer brutality of the act of physically separating a mother from her children
is a deep assault on our senses and on our most elemental humanity," he said.

Today's formal apology came more than a decade after the release of the Bringing Them
Home report, which documented the stories of some of the tens of thousands of Aboriginal
children taken from their families by governments between 1910 and the early 1970s.

"Instead, from the nation's parliament, there has been a stony and stubborn and deafening
silence for more than a decade," Mr Rudd said.

"A view that somehow we the parliament should suspend our most basic instincts of what
is right and what is wrong, a view that instead we should look for any pretext to push
this great wrong to one side to leave it languishing with the historians, the academics
and the cultural warriors, as if the stolen generations are little more than an interesting
sociological phenomenon.

"The stolen generations are not intellectual curiosities, they are human beings, human
beings who have been damaged deeply by the decisions of parliaments and governments.

"As of today the time for denial, the time for delay, has at last come to an end."

The former Howard government, which lost last year's election, refused to issue a formal
apology, claiming it would leave the commonwealth liable to a flood of compensation claims.

Some coalition MPs were obviously displeased with the apology and some were absent
from the chamber as it was delivered.

One Liberal MP, Chris Pearce, read a magazine during the motion and the speeches, refusing
to get to his feet for several standing ovations.

He stood begrudgingly only when MPs were asked to vote on the motion.

Outspoken West Australian Liberal MP Wilson Tuckey was present in the house for a prayer
before the apology, but left when Mr Rudd rose to his feet.

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