{"id":299,"date":"2008-02-13T11:17:26","date_gmt":"2008-02-13T05:17:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/?p=299"},"modified":"2017-11-05T08:03:49","modified_gmt":"2017-11-05T08:03:49","slug":"apology-to-aborigines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/countries\/australasia\/australia\/299","title":{"rendered":"Apology to Aborigines"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Australian Prime Minister apologised<\/a> to indigenous Australians today for all the hardships visited on them by the rest of us. I’m of mixed feelings about this. My own feeling is that an apology offers nothing, especially coming from people who weren’t involved in the key wrongdoings such as Aboriginal hunting in the early nineteenth century and the stolen generation a few decades ago. I’ve said the same about China <\/a>waiting for an apology from Japan.<\/p>\n

Surely actions are more important than words and we seem to have done as much harm as good even in recent times. Rudd made new promises of bringing indigenous Australians’ life expectancy, standard of living and education into line with the rest of us, but is that really the right thing to do and can he manage it anyway? Time will tell.<\/p>\n

I was surprised to find that while some Aborigines staged demonstrations in the lead-up to the apology, demanding Rudd to revoke the interventions in the Northern Territory, most <\/a>seem to have taken the apology to heart and see it as the first real step to resolving our differences. So much that Aboriginal leaders officially welcomed <\/a>white Australians to this country for the first time in recorded history. And here’s the real surprise. That action – those words – touched me far more than I expected.<\/p>\n

If I’m touched by such words, I can understand how Aborigines and other indigenous Australians must be touched by the official apology. Perhaps Japan and China \/ Korea \/ Taiwan apologising to each other will have positive effects too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Australian Prime Minister apologised to indigenous Australians today for all the hardships visited on them by the rest of us. I’m of mixed feelings about this. My own feeling is that an apology offers nothing, especially coming from people who weren’t involved in the key wrongdoings such as Aboriginal hunting in the early nineteenth… Continue reading Apology to Aborigines<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1767,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions\/1767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraygunn.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}