By Charles Letterman, February 13: ”...all of these apologies are meaningless. The groups are obviously resigned to their martyrdom, and nothing short of a financial pay-out will really satisfy them. And no modern day leader has the right to apologise for wrongs committed by previous generations anyway…”

Well, that’s what 1,000’s of people thought about the reply speech by the Australian federal government’s leader of the opposition conservate party (the Liberals). Their reaction was quite the opposite from the joy and relief expressed over prime minister Kevin Rudd’s introduction and apology….......

“Fed Square jeers Nelson speech” 2008-02-13 13:58: Thousands of people in Federation Square turn their backs to Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson during his screened apology speech…. 01:35 - find clip in ‘national news’ at http://media.theage.com.au/?rid=35456

Australia says sorry http://www.theage.com.au/photogallery/2008/02/13/1202760359640.html

By Tim, January 30: “This is seriously disgusting that they’re going to go ahead with this.  I’d like nothing more than to publically make it clear to these clowns…. that I’m absolultely not sorry.  And why should I be, for something that happened long before I was born…”

Apart from your lies about the existence of the “stolen generation”, Tim, you are in denial as well as living in the past…....

Rudd to make ‘healing’ apology http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/13/2161097.htm and note the links including Stolen Generations apology text and two video clips.

Eleven years after the Human Rights Commission said the Federal Parliament should apologise to Indigenous Australians, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will this morning say sorry. The Federal Parliament and its surrounds will be bulging with people this morning as people crowd in to witness the historic moment.

The text of the apology was tabled in the House yesterday, and it revealed Mr Rudd will say sorry three times during his apology….

I would be more impressed if the Turks apologized for stealing the crown jewel of Christian civilization (Constantinople) in 1453.  Is anyone suggesting to the Turks that maybe It’s Time to Give it Back?  Are there no Neo-Byzantines?

Dear Kevin Rudd and government of Australia, know this:-

1.We Are the People of Australia, both Indigenous and those races, regardless of colour or religion, who have migrated to this land.

2.We Realize that Universal Principle which is the Creator of all Life and of which we all are part.

3.We all Share the same Fate, that which we have worked to make for each other, and for the betterment of all.

Your previous Neocon government ignored this message a decade ago. It is now coming home to everyone. As a politician, you are only at the end of the line reflecting the views of your electorate. The presumptuousness of white mans’ law, the laws of “terra nullius”, must also eventually give way to a more humanely considerate approach to each other as well as to the Earth we live upon.

The era of Machiavellian politics, male misogyny, nuclear WMD’s and your disgusting pathetically repressive legalism carried on in the minds of boring old suits like yourself since the 1,000-year old Norman conquest of England must now come to an end. Such as you are, you still have the opportunity to create positive change in many ways.

Kindly do so as the imperatives of climate-change will now dictate policies around the globe. That be either for the better or for the worse. That choice must be made every time a multi-national corporation or a hegemonic state or a political party donor presses for their wants and desires to be placed above the values of human life and of the welfare of the natural environment.

That includes indigenous Australians as they have been so repressed and disadvantaged for so long. To quote Ms. Marion Scrymgour from her address at Sydney University last October: “...But there is another crisis here - another national emergency, another crying need for national response….... And that is the crisis of the ‘settler society’ - a society that appears incapable of resolving its own contradictions of occupying the Australian continent….... The second crisis is, in a sense, more deeply entrenched. There is an apparent lack of capacity by ‘settler society’ to resolve - let alone understand - the contradictions of living on the oldest continent…..”

Please do see to it that these issues are now indeed resolved for the better once and for all. That requires some changes in the viewpoints of white Australians. That includes you. You are only one more citizen, not some pompous figurehead. The Rudd Labor government seeks to benefit from simply saying “sorry” and then presuming to “move on”. That cannot be done until the generations of native Australians who see themselves as marginalised in their own country have passed on and their children have been happily accepted by “settler society”.

To do so now requires change in the hearts and minds of most Australians and that means learning to live by “the art of peace” instead of by the old exploitative and ultimately destructive “art of war”. That means changing how one sees one’s economic and domestic imperatives and also by giving up annually celebrating Australia’s national day as a kind of commemoration of the invasion of a people’s land and domination by white society. In despising the values of other races and cultures, white Australians have become as sick as the “settler socities” of North America and the fake state of Israel.

In seeking to avoid and deny our own fears and in our refusal to accept the truth about our own shameful past, white settler societies have unilaterally embarked on a war of terror against the rest of humanity on this planet. In reality, that has been going on for some 100’s of years. That, too, must now finally come to an end. Failure to do so will nullify the gains made with the historic climate change conference in Bali recently. Therefore, all of this must become part of “the roadmap” to our mutual future survival on this Earth in full good faith or the human race itself will perish.

The aggressions and atrocities brought upon,earlier by the oppressors in Australia, to subjugate the defenceless and innocent Aborigines natives are the heinous crimes comitted ever in that part of the world. The scars inflicted upon Aborigines may not be wiped off, so easily by means of just hollow apologetic wordings only.

The human beings possess a faculty of consciousness which is embedded and sunk very deep, in our souls and we can’t escape its grip. We may try our level best to suppress it down but some how it always surfaces up and bring us on our knees to repent; for our wrong doings.

They say:
What ever you do; what ever you say. Then those very uttering and deeds always come back to haunt you.

I hope this realisation and apology of Australian whites is genuine; and is not yet another covert move to suppress and subdue the indigenous Aborigines movements striving hard to claim aback their honour and dignity.
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Love for all, Hatred for none

The native people of Australia detest the term “aborigine,” which is considered the equivalent of the “N” word in the US.

For some reason, the term “aboriginal” is okay, as in “aboriginal people.” I don’t understand it, but know that it’s very incorrect to say “aborigine.”

Quote BBC: “Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced plans to apologise after his victory in last year’s general elections. The move is a highly symbolic one marking a definitive break from policies of previous administrations…”

It certainly is a definitive change from the previous inept Howard Neocon administration which was nothing more than a Bush puppet applauding every war and threat of war that the USA manufactured. Now in opposition and with a new party leader, the former Liberal government (a US Republican equivalent) has repudiated any responsibility for the consequences of its own actions.

That makes the Rudd labor government (a Democrats equivalent) responsible for the welfare of a section of the populace who have been shockingly neglected for generations. Prime minister Kevin Rudd has an opportunity , briefly, to try to catch up with the past before the mining companies renew their push to take over the remaining Aboriginal lands, mainly in the Northern Territory (NT).

Rudd was caught out before the election when he backed the Howard government’s policy of sending in the army in a kind of ‘friendly’ mini-martial-law occupation of remote Aboriginal/native Australian communities. Marion Scrymgour, an indigenous minister in the NT government bravely stood against the Labor party of which she is a member and embarrassed Rudd in a speech at Sydney University repudiating the Howard government’s “intervention” in remote communities.

In that speech, she targetted the hopelessness and the inability of white Australian “settler society” to come to terms with their own shallow existence on the coastal fringes of the Australian continent and their refusal and denial in accepting their own less-than-illustrious history as regards the treatment of native Australians since the commencement of white (English) settlement. Ms. Scrymgour’s father was one of the “stolen generations” and she dedicated her speech to his memory. http://womenforwik.freeforums.org/viewtopic.php?t=17 and other topics on the WomenForWik.org forum.