Russell Coker wrote:
It was also controversial to apologise for the Stolen Generation. Before it happened right-wing people I knew were predicting all sorts of bad things, but nothing bad happened at all. Kevin Rudd did the right thing and made Australia a better place for EVERYONE. Kevin Rudd will go down in history as someone who did the right thing to reduce the problems of racism in Australia.
Being a leftie pinko nutter, I never understood how it could be anything BUT a good idea. A glance at the demographic disparities in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Australian#Life_expectancy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Australian#Education http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Australian#Employment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Australian#Health http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Australian#Crime_and_imprisonment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Australian#Substance_abuse suggests that an apology alone isn't going to cut it. (To be fair, most of those statistics are from before 2008.)