I am not from the religious right or even the right, I do not disrespect the first Australians.
Yet I am sorry, sorry that this morning my home town streets will see drunks asleep in the gutters.
Women shouting the most filthy words, hard to understand words with the pitch of a Cockatoo.
Kids will shop lift and parents will share the spoils.
I am sorry that after more than 200 years a prime minister still needs to say kids must learn the country's main language.
And that he has to say children must go to school.
Most importantly of all I remain forever sorry that we needlessly use these people as a debating point and fight among ourselves about if it is wrong too demand a better education and life for these kids.
Endless stalling debate that leads no place and fails to stop or even help stop this dreadful lifestyle for so many of our country's people.
If we are fairdinkum we will remember first or not they are Australians caught up in a world that is a lessor one than ours.

Belly is right. We need to support first Australians, those of us who are the following Australians dont have to force the inane elements of our social structure upon them.

An example is the competitiveness of our society. We are engaged at undermining each other at all costs. We are an economy of conflict. Our education system is geared toward creating employment mercenaries and employment slaves. From gun boat policies of the 19th century, the Dutch East India Company to forcing workers to sign work place agreements we have become one with competition. From slipping in GM foods, coaxing kids to eat fatty food to running sweat shops we will do anything but anything to impress cohorts ,to get rich , to have authority over another.

The less values a person holds the better off they do in this society. That has not changed since the first fleet, the first Australians are a direct victim to our hostile way of life.

We owe our first Australians enough to help them rebuild their co-operative society and allow them to co-exist as a pluralistic society. We dont have to apply our competitiveness to them. This will not prevent us enaging in our Judeo-Christian based dog eat dog culture. We can still continue to undermine our friends and foes. Who knows , with oil , Uranium and now coal peaking threatening our competitive ways , making the stupidity of competition more stupid , having a co-operative society operating along side us may save us giving us the last laugh over our over seas competition.Or if we embrace a co-operative society and learn something we can teach and save our overseas competitors too.

The state of Indigenous Australia , climate change , monotheistic terrorism , resource wars,unsustainable consumption- our way certainly does not work, are we so stupid we think it the best way to live?

I wonder what I am personally supposed to feel sorry and guilty for.
Why do I have to apologise for something other people did. It should be sufficient to acknowledge that what was done and move on.
My great-grandmother came to Australia from Caithness. She had very little there and not a great deal more here but her children remember very well that she gave assistance to more than one aboriginal family.
Her husband employed them and gave them the same wage as his other workers.
On my other side my great-grandparents were in charge of a welfare centre where aboriginal families were able to seek assistance so that their children would not be taken from them.
I have aboriginal friends just as I have Chinese, African, Jewish, Muslim, Christian and atheist friends.
I don't see any need to say "sorry" nor do I want someone to say "sorry" on my behalf. I would be insulted if they did. What insults me is demands for an apology and financial compensation. Any available money would be far better spend on health and education programmes for the present generation of young aboriginal people. The demand for an apology is politics dressed up as a social issue and it is doing untold harm by giving the present generation a negative view of present political leaders who had no control over past decisions.

Apologising for the past is a conceptual base from which we may construct a material framework. It is also clarifying the positions of stakeholders in order to create a system of exchange in good faith for the future. It is more important for an institution to apologise for their role in the ethnic cleansing of this continents indigenous cultures than it is for individuals. I think it is important that individuals appreciate where the source of their lively hood was gained from. I dont think a person should say sorry if they dont mean it. From a government or institutional point of view not saying sorry is a declaraion of the continuation of the ideology and principles behind the ethnic cleansing. To not say sorry is to say the government or church still see's itself righteous within its attempts to destroy another people.

Financial compensation is a totally different argument. I personally am against compensation. I am more supportive of rebuilding the elements which made this countries indigenous culture survive longer than any other culture on earth. This could be protected by the resources and the best elements of Euro-antipodean culture we have to offer.

We should be willing to change our ways to accomodate pluralism as well. As it stands everything is about changes the indigenous communities are expected to make.

Back to the sorry statementone of the first things we should do is place the indigenous flag within the Australian flag.We still are talking us and them not in terms of family.

From the replies maybe some respondents are shooting from the hip. I went to the site and it seems quite OK to me. Have a look:

http://www.thanksgiving.org.au/article_view.asp?intid=42

West's arguments are misguided.

Most Indigenous people don't have an option of choosing not to live with our society's competitiveness. They are mostly in economically and socially weak positions, having to survive by whatever means are at hand. Finding time and resources to establish and maintain satisfying subsistence lifestyles outside the demands of our competitive, materialist society are beyond the grasp of most well-educated people. What would lead us to think that it's an option for the majority of Indigenous people who find themselves at the bottom of the urban pecking orders, or the many in remote communities who are starved of education and jobs?

We may have an economy dependent on conflict, but this is not new in history, and it is not foreign to Aboriginal societies, which remain based on a strong practise of 'territoriality' and 'custodianship' - often reliant on the owner/custodians' willingness to defend territory and resources by violent means including strong sorcery. Indigenous people generally want the education to survive and compete in this real world. It is not their duty to satisfy our longings for them to live a better way. It is the duty of people who want better ways to create them, but not to hamstring vulnerable people with their dreams.
As for the idea that we should 'help them rebuild their co-operative society', this is simplistic. Their co-operative society was (and to some extent remains) one of structured but limited co-operation within the extended family group, but also of structured conflict and competition between some family members and often with other groups. These processes were based on practices (including patriarchal control enforced by violence; absolute control of land and resources, usually by force; strict control of knowledge; constant hard physical exertion; 'feast and famine' subsistence) which are no longer tenable or possible.

Whatever 'the best way to live' might be, in our present circumstances, we should not expect that many Indigenous people are going to be the ones who are able to miraculously identify, develop and practise it.