The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.
Too often in time past, religion has brought forth criminal and shameful actions... How many evils has religion caused?
Throughout history, most of the wrongs of the world have resulted from people absolutely sure they were in the right.
The injustices of the past are past. There’s no way to make them up.
Only when we ensure that the mistakes of our past are not the vision for our future, will we truly have achieved justice.
In the nineteenth century, slavery was the greatest wrong, and government never stood so tall as when it was redressing that wrong.
The Canadian government has had a field day apologising for past policies towards a series of ethnic groups: Italian, Ukrainian, Sikh, Chinese, Japanese and Jews.
The question shouldn't be 'Are we guilty about our colonial past;' it should be 'Why aren't we more guilty about our corporate present'?
To ask about the 'source' of rights or morals assumes an erreous conclusion. To ask about the source of morals is to assume that such a source exists. As if it existed outside of human constructed systems. The 'source' is the human ability to learn from experience and to entrench rights in our laws and in our consciousness. Our rights come from our long history of wrongs.
