CANBERRA, Australia — Aborigines organized breakfast barbecues in the Outback, schools held assemblies and giant TV screens went up in state capitals Wednesday as Australians watched a live broadcast of their government apologizing for policies that degraded its indigenous people.
In a historic parliamentary vote that supporters said would open a new chapter in race relations, lawmakers unanimously adopted Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s motion on behalf of all Australians.
“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,” Rudd said in Parliament, reading from the motion.
Aborigines remain the country’s poorest and most disadvantaged group, and Rudd has made improving their lives one of his government’s top priorities.
As part of that campaign, Aborigines were invited for the first time to give a traditional welcome Tuesday at the official opening of the Parliament session — symbolic recognition that the land on which the capital was built was taken from Aborigines without compensation.
The apology is directed at tens of thousands of Aborigines who were forcibly taken from their families as children under now-abandoned assimilation policies.
“To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry,” the apology motion says.
“And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.”
“This is a historic day,” said Tom Calma, who was selected by Stolen Generations organizations to give a formal response to the apology. “Today our leaders across the political spectrum have chosen dignity, hope and respect as the guiding principles for the relationship with our nation’s first people.”
The apology ended years of divisive debate and a decade of refusals by the previous conservative government that lost November’s elections.
It places Australia among a handful of nations that have offered official apologies to oppressed minorities, including Canada’s 1998 apology to its native peoples, South Africa’s 1992 expression of regret for apartheid and the U.S. Congress’ 1988 law apologizing to Japanese-Americans for their internment during World War II.
Aborigines lived mostly as hunter-gather ers for tens of thousands of years before British settlers arrived in 1788.
