The Sydney Morning Herald RECONCILIATION How Mr Howard tricked us all Date: 30/08/99 Mere regrets are just a shabby refusal to accept our past, writes Robert Manne. Last Thursday the Federal Parliament passed a motion of reconciliation. With the exception of the Labor Party and the sharpest Aboriginal political minds, most progressively minded Australians were pleased. They mistook a tricky political manoeuvre for a genuine moral turning point in the history of the nation. But when people have time to reflect, last week's events will leave little but puzzlement and a bitter aftertaste. The most obvious shortcoming of the reconciliation motion is the inadequacy of the language. The motion speaks of the Aboriginal tragedy as Australian history's "blemished chapter". In ordinary speech a blemish means little more than a minor and superficial imperfection. Can anyone seriously argue that in a tale of dispossession and murder, of cultural destruction and contempt, of prolonged and radical denial of legal rights, the feeble word blemish does the work we expect it to do? According to last Thursday's motion, in regard to this blemished chapter, non-indigenous Australians do not need to apologise. Instead all they need to do is to express their "regret". Once again this word is carefully chosen and utterly wrong. An apology involves the present generation's implication in, and acceptance of, a responsibility for dealing with the injustices visited upon the Aboriginal people in the past. An expression of regret - which is non-committal on the question of inter-generational responsibility - does not. John Howard has always refused to apologise for earlier generations' misdeeds. By voting for a mere expression of regret last week, the entire Australian Parliament (with the exception of Senator Bob Brown) joined with the Prime Minister in his unwillingness to apologise. Yet the transaction which took place in Parliament last week is, in ways not yet grasped, even shabbier still. In 1997, in one of its key findings, the inquiry into forcible Aboriginal child removal, Bringing Them Home, recommended that every Australian parliament "officially acknowledge the responsibility of their predecessors for the laws, policies and practices of forcible removal". Alone among the parliaments of Australia, the Federal Parliament, under John Howard, refused. For many Australians, Howard's insensitivity to the pain felt by those Aborigines who had been taken from their mothers and communities, did both his personal reputation and the country's very real harm. It had long been rumoured that the arrival of the Aboriginal senator, Aden Ridgeway, might offer Howard a way out of the moral and political cul-de-sac he had created for himself. Not unexpectedly, in his maiden speech, Senator Ridgeway turned to the unfinished business of the apology. He pointed out that every State parliament had "expressed sorrow about the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families". Could not the Federal Parliament do as much? Within a day of this speech, a motion negotiated between the new senator and the Prime Minister was before the Parliament. Almost everyone simply assumed that Howard had, at last, agreed to make his apology to the stolen generations. This supposed reversal on the question of the apology seemed no small matter. Howard led a government which had instructed Commonwealth counsel representing it in a stolen generations test case in Darwin to mount an unambiguous defence of the practice of Aboriginal child removal on ancient assimilationist grounds. Moreover, Howard led a government whose Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Senator Herron, had openly associated himself with the argument put by Quadrant magazine, that the children forcibly removed from their mothers and communities were not "stolen" but "rescued". In Howard's successful negotiation with Ridgeway it seemed as if, finally, our Prime Minister had come to recognise the evil of Aboriginal child removal. When I read the text of the Howard-Ridgeway motion I could not believe my eyes. It spoke in very general terms of past injustices and present pain. Not one word referred in particular to the question of Aboriginal child removal or the stolen generations. On the evening before this motion was put, I was involved - alongside Lowitja O'Donoghue, who was taken from her mother at the age of two - in a television debate with Padraic McGuinness, the editor of Quadrant and a Herald columnist. The debate was dominated by discussion of the stolen generations. McGuinness agreed in general that Aborigines had suffered injustice. For that they were owed an apology. However - and notwithstanding the presence of O'Donoghue - he repeatedly referred to the issue of the stolen generations as a massive hoax. As I read the Howard-Ridgeway parliamentary motion, it occurred to me that there was not a word in it with which McGuinness need disagree. Most Australians are under the illusion that last Thursday the Australian Parliament issued an apology to the stolen generations. They are doubly wrong. The Parliament explicitly did not apologise. Moreover, it did not even express regret with regard to the forcible removal of Aboriginal children. I simply do not understand how Ridgeway was convinced to accept such a motion. The most intelligent summary of its meaning came from the former chair of the Reconciliation Council, Patrick Dodson. He labelled it the "Paddy McGuinness apology". One final point. In recent months the Reconciliation Council, supposedly supported by the Federal Government, has put together a much finer and more generous reconciliation statement and apology than last week's miserable "regrets" and "blemishes" attempt. Members of the council have travelled across Australia canvassing Aboriginal views. Last week's motion appears to be a kind of governmental pre-emptive strike in regard to this declaration. What role has the draft declaration now that the Federal Parliament has already passed a reconciliation motion of its own? The Government has prepared this motion furtively and it has pushed it through the Parliament with unseemly haste. It has not even invited the views of Aboriginal Australians on the form of words. What basis for genuine reconciliation can such a motion and such a process provide? Robert Manne is associate professor of politics at La Trobe University. 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