A pretty decent media article about yesterday's events...From the ABC website. I have bolded the quotes which I think were points well made!
Apology the latest salvo fired in the 'culture wars'
By Tony Jones
Undercurrents of the so-called "culture wars" were never far from the surface of yesterday's apology to the Stolen Generations in Parliament. "These stories cry out to be heard. They cry out for an apology," Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said during his address.
"Instead, from the nation's Parliament, there has been a stony and stubborn and deafening silence for more than a decade. 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 is a little more that an interesting sociological phenomenon."
Professor Henry Reynolds, who has written extensively about the conflicts between black and white Australians, particularly in the early years of settlement, told ABC TV's Lateline program that Mr Rudd's words clearly laid the blame for this "stony and stubborn and deafening silence" with former prime minister John Howard and the culture wars. "It was obviously a reference to John Howard and he was clearly marking out the clear difference between the previous government and his own new government," Professor Reynolds said.
But he says parts of Federal Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson's speech picked up on some of the old themes of the Howard years. I think he obviously faced a difficult situation," he said. "He wanted to be seen, to be part of the great occasion but at the same time he felt he had to appeal to a conservative audience, out and beyond those in Canberra. "He was doing what my old friend [former Queensland premier] Joh Bjelke-Petersen once said was like trying to walk on both sides of a barbed wire fence."
Backs turned
Large groups of people watching from Parliament's Great Hall and in Federation Square in Melbourne turned their backs to Dr Nelson when he spoke. The images reminded some of a reconciliation conference in Melbourne in 1997, where Indigenous people turned their backs on former prime minister John Howard. At the time, Mr Howard was railing against symbolism. Gerard Henderson, the executive director of the Sydney Institute and author of several books on the Liberal Party, said he wouldn't have written the kind of speech that Dr Nelson gave, but that the criticism is a bit over the top.
"I think Brendan Nelson made a mistake referring to sexual crime in an address of this kind," Dr Henderson said. "But in other matters what he said was accurate to a large extent, and I think he paid due regard to those people, many of them Christian workers, who gave up their lives to help Aborigines and who thought they were doing well - and on many accounts did do well.
"What I am interested in in a sense is what wasn't said today. "For example, there is no reference to genocide, which was a central part of Ronald Wilson's report, 'Bringing Them Home'. There is no reference to murder, as in 'we committed the murders', which was a central part of Paul Keating's address at Redfern in 1992. "So I think what you see here is some concessions on the Government's side of the debate to moderate the language and I think that Kevin Rudd has done well in doing that."
"There have been some changes in the debate and, whilst I think Brendan Nelson's speech was unwise in part, some of which he said was true. If you go back and look at the history of the last 40 years, large numbers of the problems were caused by people with goodwill. "Going back to the 1965 Aboriginal stockman's case where the arbitration commission put Aboriginal workers on wage levels knowing that they couldn't sustain them and that that would lead to unemployment - it was all done with the best will in the world."
Changing the country
Professor Reynolds says he thought the Rudd speech was far better than he had been expecting. "I think it was a very moving speech," he said. "I think all sorts of people were deeply moved by it and indeed, behind the speech was clearly a quite different interpretation of Australia's history than was favoured during the John Howard era.
"To that extent, I think it does represent a very dramatic change. The reaction of so many people all over Australia indicated just how much he had touched the nation, and I think that was the most amazing thing about it. "It wasn't so much what happened within the Parliament House in Canberra, it was this extraordinary national experience that was felt all over the country." Professor Reynolds was one of the main targets when Geoffrey Blainey originally coined the phrase 'black armband history'. He says the apology will have an effect on the academic conflict over Australia's history.
"The academic debate has never been separated from the political debate," he said. "Quite obviously the new government is adopting a radically different interpretation of what has happened in the past and there's no doubt that that will affect the way Australians generally think about the past - even though there will be many people who will continue to oppose strongly the views that were implicit in the Prime Minister's statement."
It was former prime minister Paul Keating who said "change the Government and you change the country".
But Dr Henderson said he's not sure the country has been changed. "It was a good speech by the Prime Minister and it wasn't surprising that he did it," he said. "He said he was going to do it and he did it ... It doesn't necessarily change the country.
"If you look at the kind of matters Noel Pearson was writing about in The Australian a couple of days ago, he made the point that some of the people in the separated generation went there in chains and some went there with one or more parents and he made the point that the problems of welfare, dependency, remain after an apology. "I don't have a problem with an apology. I am pleased it's out of the way. But realistically, a lot of the problems faced by Aborigines in Australia today have been caused by well-meaning policies of well-meaning people, predominantly white people, in governments in Canberra and in Queensland and the Northern Territory and in Western Australia."
Good intentions?
Professor Reynolds says he does not agree with a lot of what Noel Pearson says. "There's much about his interpretation of the past and there's much about Gerard's interpretation that I don't agree with. "I don't agree for one moment that the main problem is well-meaning but mistaken policies. I think a great deal of the problem has been neglect and indifference.
"The policies for much of the time we're talking about weren't well-intentioned in the obvious sense. They were designed to absorb and assimilate the Aboriginal people. And the people who put those policies into practice were open and frank about their objectives. They wanted to make the Aborigines disappear. "If that is well-meaning, it certainly was seen at the time to be in the national interest to do that, but that doesn't mean that we should now look back and say they were well-meaning.
"The idea was that the Aborigines were a minority, it was bad to have a minority in a nation and the minority should be absorbed. That was the policy, that was the objective, the objective was absorption and assimilation. "That has been the fundamental policy the Howard Government over the last 11 years and indeed the policy that I imagine Gerard Henderson favours." But Dr Henderson said the Aboriginal stockman's case in the 1960s shows that many people were trying to help Aborigines. "They were trying to give them more money," he said.
"It proved to be an absolute disaster and people like Noel Pearson and people who live in these parts of Australia have understood that through their families and own experiences. "I don't think this has to do with the culture wars. To a large extent the culture wars are an invention of the left in objection to other people contesting their territory. "I don't think Kevin Rudd's engaged in a culture war, I think John Howard has made a number of errors as he conceded at his speech at the Sydney Institute but he did do a lot to actually help Aborigines. I don't think this has anything to do with the culture wars.
"We've seen Kevin Rudd's approach today but he acknowledges it has to be followed up with policy and we will look to see how the policy goes. It's got to be judged over five or 10 years. "But I think it's diminishing the debate a bit saying this has to do with a few academics and a few universities talking to one another about what they consider to be the culture wars."
hi Timboh, here is a link you might find informative. i apologise for being snappy - i admit i was in effect going against the purpose of reconciliation - to unify ALL aussies.
