Apology to Aborigines will lift 'blight on nation's soul'

The Australian Parliament's apology to Aborigines to be delivered next week will remove a "blight on the nation's soul", Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said on Sunday. Rudd, who was elected to the government in November, has pledged to offer the apology to the so-called "stolen generations", who were taken from their families as children, as the first act of the new Parliament. The previous conservative government of John Howard had doggedly refused to say "sorry", saying current generations should not apologise for the wrongs of their forebears. But Rudd said Australians felt an "overwhelming desire" to recognise the tens of thousands of indigenous people taken from their homes as children under policies designed to force assimilation. "It is unfinished business for the nation," he told the Nine Network. "It's never going to be a unity ticket, a whole lot of people out there have raised objections and concerns. "But I think this is a blight on the nation's soul. I think we need to act on it." The prime minister said he was finalising the wording of the apology he will make in front of more than 100 members of the "stolen generations" at Parliament House in Canberra on Wednesday. "The key thing, the absolute key thing here is to get it right in terms of the stolen generations themselves, to make sure the language is right," he said. "That's my first responsibility, otherwise next Wednesday is a wasted event." Rudd said he had met with an elderly Aboriginal woman on Saturday who told him her first-hand experience of being taken in the 1930s, when she was three or four, and who never saw her mother again. "Those stories are writ large across the country and they are the source of enormous pain," Rudd said. -- AFP SOURCE OF THIS STORY