This week's Apology in Parliament

This week the Prime Minister will stand up in Parliament and say sorry to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were taken from their families as children.

A description from historian Inga Clendinnen:

“….with no legal process at all, in clear violation of the common-law rights of children and of parents … with no inquiry into their actual physical and emotional care, on the authority of a public servant's signature on a form, and with no appeal, children were grabbed, transported and set down again, sometimes with white foster families, more often in institutions, in conditions of acute loneliness and emotional and often physical deprivation, and immured for years until they were released to serve the white world as cheap labour.”

Some useful links:

• Reconciliation Australia
• National Sorry Day Committee
• Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
• HREOC: Bringing them home education module
• HREOC: Us Taken-away kids

Source: memo from the Director-General, NSW Department of Education and Training received in today's email.