Just as he doesn't understand the office of the PM as an entity aside from who occupies it, he doesn't understand Parliament in that light either. Everything has to revolve around Johnny for it to exist. Funny, most children grow out of feeling themselves to be the centre of the universe at around age two.... Trudy ****************************** Howard holds line on apology By CLAIRE FOY-SMITH of news.com.au, The Australian's STUART RINTOUL and AAP 05may00 PRIME Minister John Howard today rejected renewed calls on the Government to apologise for stolen generation policies. He said it would be a great shame if the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation's, Corroboree 2000, was postponed and he would do everything possible to ensure it was a success. But with just three weeks to go to the crowning event, he rejected suggestions from former Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser that Australia's human rights record was being harmed by the government's stand. "I am sorry. I have said that I am sorry. Millions of Australians are sorry for any past injustices inflicted on Aboriginal people," he said on Channel Nine. "What I am not willing to do is to apologise for things my government and my generation of Australians didn't do. That is the point of difference. "I just simply hold the view that the current generation of Australians can't be formally held responsible, which a national apology implies, for the actions of past generations. Particularly when those actions in the case of separated children were sanctioned (under) the law of the time and thought at the time by many people to be the right thing to do." Yesterday Mr Fraser said full reconciliation would never be achieved without a national apology to the stolen generations and that many Aboriginal children were taken from their parents for reasons that were not honourable. In a series of comments directly at odds with the stance taken by Mr Howard, Mr Fraser said he saw no obstacle to a national government apology to the stolen generations. He also called for the establishment of a multi-million-dollar "healing fund", similar to Canada's $350 million fund, to deal with compensation and take the issue out of the courts. In a swipe at Mr Howard's emphasis on "practical reconciliation", Mr Fraser said "matters of the heart and matters of the spirit" needed to be addressed as well as raising Aboriginal people out of Third-World living conditions. He commended Aboriginal leaders, with rare exceptions, for acting in a "remarkably moderate" way in the face of "significant provocations". Mr Fraser said there needed to be "a much greater national determination to redress past wrongs and, symbolically, the most important element of that may be to redress past wrongs in relation to the stolen generation, which we know is not 100 per cent of any one generation, but we know it is something that flowed across a number of generations". While there had been attempts to say Aboriginal children were taken from their parents for welfare reasons, he said, "we know that is by no means the full truth". In many cases "it was not true and there were other purposes which were not honourable". Council members and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission yesterday described Mr Fraser's comments as a helpful intervention in the run-up to Corroboree 2000 Council member and Democrats senator Aden Ridgeway said it was now up to the Prime Minister to get himself out of an "awkward position" and accept the council's final document, which refers to an apology to the stolen generations. Mr Fraser said a national apology was "absolutely critical" to reconciliation. But he said that between May 27 � when Mr Howard receives the reconciliation documents � and the end of the year, there was time for "significant negotiation" on which parts could be adopted now and which "need to be set aside for another day". Mr Fraser, the co-patron with Lowitja O'Donoghue of this year's Journey of Healing, or Sorry Day, on May 26 � the day before Corroboree 2000 � said it would be a tragedy if there warned Australia's standing would suffer during the Olympics if there were no progress. But Mr Howard said Australian credentials in international human rights, far from being eroded, were now far better regarded because of East Timor. -- _________________________________ Truth is a pathless land. --- Krishnamurti ------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------ RecOzNet2 has a page @ http://www.green.net.au/recoznet2 and is archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/ To unsubscribe from this list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED], and in the body of the message, include the words: unsubscribe announce or click here mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20announce This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." 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