Rudd asks 1000 people if he is clueless

It turns out that Kevin Rudd never had the answers to our problems, after all:

The Prime Minister announced yesterday that 1000 of the nation’s “best and brightest” would be picked to attend a two-day summit in Canberra to articulate radical solutions to the 10 most pressing problems facing the nation over the next decade.

Rudd is now me-tooing Bob Hawke, who held a great summit soon after his 1983 win, both to show he was indeed “Bringing Australians Together” and to lock them in behind a program he’d largely settled already.

No doubt Rudd wants to achieve much the same thing - to prove he’s listening and to make what he eventually does seem like the agreed program of all sensible folk, and thus beyond criticism. In short: He’s looking for spin, not solutions. And he’s also buying time before actually doing anything.

I may be ungenerous. Rudd might really, truly be looking for practical advice he couldn’t get in the usual way, and may even get some:

Each of the groups will tackle a specific challenge outlined by the Government. These are productivity; infrastructure and the digital economy; population, sustainability and climate change; rural Australia; health; families and communities; the future of indigenous Australia; the arts; the structure of government; and Australia’s future in the region and the world.

Except ask yourself this. Will the 100 Australian experts chosen by Rudd to discuss, say, “the future of indigenous Australia” include many who believe a “sorry” is misguided?

Will the 100 who will discuss “climate change” included any prepared to point out that the world has in fact not warmed for almost a decade now, and the science of warming is most certainly not settled? Will the 100 who will discuss “the arts” include many with the honesty to point out that the arts now attract record levels of government funding, and our failure to produce much of quality lies not in a lack of cash but a lack of connection with an audience?

Already Rudd has made sure of his co-chairman, appointing his close friend Glyn Davis.

You see the dynamic. Rudd wants to prove he is listening, but is almost certain to appoint to his summit largely those who will tell him exactly what he wants to hear (aside from a few token and outnumbered mavericks and Liberals).

I may be wrong. But let’s see who Rudd invites and how closely he actually listens.

Yet there are other reasons to be cynical.

A summit is a grossly inefficient way to get the views of 1000 experts, where one presents while the rest listen. As anyway who has been to such corporate raa-raas themselves know, such things are usually about telling the crowd rather than listening to it. What’s more, it’s a format in which dissenters are marginalised and consensus imposed.

No, I susect this will be as much an exercise in spin as was Rudd’s “community cabinet”, and almost as unproductive.

Read more here. Or here.

Apology 'must acknowledge evil'

AUSTRALIA'S apology to the Stolen Generation should not only use the word "sorry", it should also concede that removing Aboriginal children from their families was "evil" and "cruel" and part of a policy that could not be justified or excused.

This form of wording, taken from a similar apology in Canada, was put to Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin last week by an influential lobby group led by Aboriginal leader Lowitja O'Donoghue and former prime minister Malcolm Fraser.

Details of the meeting emerged yesterday as Ms O'Donoghue backed a push for a $1billion compensation fund to be established for the Stolen Generation, saying an apology without compensation "won't settle anything", while compensation would head off the potential for "a litany of court cases".

While Ms Macklin has said it is more important for the Federal Government to close the 17-year gap in Aboriginal life expectancy and deficiencies in health and education, Ms O'Donoghue said these were statutory obligations and the Stolen Generation of indigenous children removed from their families needed to be separately resolved.

In the first suggestion of a form of words that might be used in the apology, Ms Macklin was asked by the Stolen Generations Alliance, of which Ms O'Donoghue and Mr Fraser are patrons, to consider a 1998 apology by the moderator of the United Church of Canada to children sent into church-run, government-funded Indian Residential Schools.

In the apology, church moderator Bill Phipps referred to a "cruel and ill-conceived system of assimilation", "evil acts" and a "horrendous period in Canadian history".

In November 2005, the Canadian Government announced a $1.9 billion compensation package, with government ministers calling it a "fair and lasting resolution" for "the single most harmful, disgraceful and racist act in our history".

At the meeting last Tuesday with the National Sorry Day Committee, the Stolen Generations Alliance, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner Tom Calma and indigenous leader Mick Dodson, Ms Macklin was told there was a difference between the words "sorry" and "apology", with "sorry" holding far more emotional power.

"Some say that 'apology' comes from the head, whereas 'sorry' comes from the heart," she was told.

The Canadian apology was included in a document handed to Ms Macklin by the Stolen Generations Alliance, titled "Some thoughts on how the Prime Minister might say sorry".

It was endorsed yesterday by Ms O'Donoghue and alliance co-chair Christine King, who said it was "absolutely" appropriate to describe Australia's child separation policies as cruel and evil.

It was suggested the apology should be offered to indigenous people "for the policies which removed tens of thousands of their children from their families". It could be given by the Prime Minister on Sorry Day in May next year in the Great Hall of parliament in a ceremony at which members of the stolen generations would speak.

Ms O'Donoghue and Ms King backed a call by Aboriginal lawyer Michael Mansell for a $1billion compensation fund for the Stolen Generation, contributed to by federal and state governments. They said $1 billion was not a large amount to compensate for the damage that was done to thousands of Aboriginal children.

"Aboriginal people will not move on until this matter is resolved," Ms O'Donoghue said. Without compensation, the Government would be faced with "a litany of Trevorrows, a litany of court cases".

In August, South Australia's Supreme Court became the first jurisdiction in the country to recognise the Stolen Generation as a basis for legal compensation, when it found Bruce Trevorrow, now 50, was treated unlawfully and falsely imprisoned when he was removed from his mother's care and handed over to a white family in 1957, aged 13 months. He was awarded $525,000.

Ms King said the Alliance would meet next month to work on a draft apology to put to the Government. Ms O'Donoghue said peak Aboriginal organisations and leaders should be brought into the discussions about the apology.

Asked whether a 10-year-old girl in the Cape York community of Aurukun should have been removed from her family, Ms King said it was "the paramount right of every child to be safe". She said the children of the Stolen Generation were not taken away to save them, but to change them.