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In 2008, it was left to Kevin Rudd of the Australian Labor Party (who succeeded Howard as prime minister a year earlier) to do what Stephen Harper also did that year, offer an unconditional official apology for the country’s appalling aboriginal policy — the product of European thinking and values that has left us to ponder our history of colonialism, imperialism and racism.

In an emotional speech, Rudd, urged all Australians to “honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history” and to “reflect on their past mistreatment.” Adding that, “We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations — this blemished chapter in our nation’s history. The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologize for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.”

Yet, like Howard before him, Rudd would not go so far as to accept the Bringing Them Home report assertion that genocide had been perpetrated in Australia. Instead, his focus was on the future, and as he put it, on removing “a great stain from the nation’s soul and, in a true spirit of reconciliation, to open a new chapter in the history of this great land.” Sound familiar?

“The survivors know why genocide was buried in the national apology,” wrote Tony Barta, who teaches history at La Trobe University in Melbourne in a 2008 article in the Journal of Genocide Research. “The nation — the Australia constructed on their suffering — is not ready to face the historical truth of its foundation or the ways the original dispossession contributed to the destruction of not just one people, but many peoples who have disappeared during the two centuries of European triumph.” The key theme of Rudd’s apology, he added, was reconciliation to ease the guilt of white Australians. The apology did not “recognize the depth of the aboriginal historical trauma or give them a national memorial. It is meant to validate enough of their suffering to enable the celebratory memory of the Australian past to progress with less dissent into the future.