Righting the Wrongs of the Past

I came to know the Stolen Generations only from Kalpana Sharma's "Sorry, a powerful word" piece.

Until the 1970s, Australia had a policy of separating Aboriginal children from their parents by force in an openly racist policy of social engineering that began in 1910 but remained unquestioned until 1970. In an effort to virtually eliminate Australia’s Aboriginals who have a living history going back some 60,000 years, the government adopted a policy of forced assimilation of Aboriginal children into white society.
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February 13, 2008 will be remembered as a historic day in Australia. For, on that day, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of the Labour Party opened the 43rd session of the Australian Parliament with an unqualified apology to the country’s Aboriginal people.

The complete text of Prime Minister's apology is available here. This apology would be one of the momentous gestures in the nation's history and the genuine spirit with which it has been tendered is moving, to say the least. And sample this for the exemplary leadership shown:

The nation is calling on us, the politicians, to move beyond our infantile bickering, our point-scoring and our mindlessly partisan politics and to elevate this one core area of national responsibility to a rare position beyond the partisan divide.
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Let me take this one step further and take what some may see as a piece of political posturing and make a practical proposal to the opposition on this day, the first full sitting day of the new Parliament.

I said before the election that the nation needed a kind of war cabinet on parts of indigenous policy, because the challenges are too great and the consequences are too great to allow it all to become a political football, as it has been so often in the past.

I therefore propose a joint policy commission, to be led by the Leader of the Opposition and me, with a mandate to develop and implement, to begin with, an effective housing strategy for remote communities over the next five years.

It will be consistent with the Government's policy framework, a new partnership for closing the gap. If this commission operates well, I then propose that it work on the further task of constitutional recognition of the first Australians, consistent with the longstanding platform commitments of my party and the pre-election position of the opposition.

This would probably be desirable in any event because, unless such a proposition were absolutely bipartisan, it would fail at a referendum. As I have said before, the time has come for new approaches to enduring problems.

Working constructively together on such defined projects would, I believe, meet with the support of the nation. It is time for fresh ideas to fashion the nation's future.