Club Troppo

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30 Responses to “Sorry. Not that hard at all really”

1. pablo said:

   Notwithstanding Rex’s post could get him into trouble - ” youse boongs” - it is probably a good subtext for all those Opposition MP’s who Dr Nelson is insisting should have their chance to get it on the record (Hansard)in Tuesday’s ‘debate’
   or whatever you call the reply to Rudd’s announcement.
   So we will be subjected to a long litany of qualified apologies, regrets, qualifications and personal explanations. Interesting times…

   Posted on 08-Feb-08 at 11:17 am | Permalink
2. David said:

   One of the people I work with has sent this little gem (below) around. I’m slightly ashamed of myself that I haven’t fronted him on it (nor will I - I do have to work with him) and glad I don’t have too much to do with him directly as it will be difficult to be civil.

   Since it’s “in vogue” at the moment - here it is…..the APOLOGY Kevin Rudd should be giving to the aboriginals!!

   We apologise for giving you free doctors and free medical care and medications, which allows you to survive and multiply so that you can demand apologies.

   We apologise for helping you to read and teaching you the English language and thus we opened up to you the entire European civilisation, thought and enterprise.

   We feel that we must apologise for building hundreds of homes for you, which you have vandalised and destroyed.

   We apologise for giving you law and order which has helped prevent you from slaughtering one another and using the unfortunate for food purposes.

   We apologise for developing large farms and properties, which today feed you people, where before, you had the benefits of living off the land and starving during droughts.

   We apologise for providing you with warm clothing made of fabric to replace that animal skins you used before.

   We apologise for building roads and railway tracks between cities and building cars so that you no longer have to walk over harsh terrain.

   We apologise for paying off your vehicle when you fail to pay the installments.

   We apologise for giving you free vehicles, petrol, boats, firearms, fishing gear and other non traditional methods that you now use to carry out your traditional ways of hunting.

   We apologise for giving you free travel anywhere, whenever. We apologise for giving each and every member of your family $100.00 and free travel to attend an aboriginal funeral.

   We apologise for not charging you rent on any lands when white people have to pay.

   We apologise for giving you interest free loans.

   We apologise for developing oil wells and minerals, including gold and diamonds which you never used and had no idea of their value.

   We apologise for developing Ayers rock and Kakadu, and then handing them over to you so that you get all the money.

   We apologise for allowing taxpayers money paid towards daughters wedding ($8,000.00 each daughter)

   We apologise for giving you $1.7 billion per year for your people, which is $48,000.00 per aboriginal man, woman and child.

   We apologise for working hard to pay taxes that finance your welfare, medical care, education, etc to the tune of $1.2 billion each year.

   We apologise for having to approach your taxpayer funded aboriginal affairs department to verify the above figures.

   For the trouble you will have identifying the uncle toms in your own community who are getting richer and leaving some of you living in squalor and poverty. We do apologise. We really do. We humbly beg your forgiveness for all the above sins.

   We are only too happy to take back all the above and return you to the paradise of the outback, whenever you are ready

   There’s going to be a lot of this about for the next few weeks.

   Posted on 08-Feb-08 at 12:02 pm | Permalink
3. JM said:

   To be honest I’d call him on it if I were you.

   I presume this text was distributed as an email? Using your employer’s facilities?

   Surely that’s inappropriate use? You know the sort of thing that would get him fired if it was porn, sexual harrassment or anti-semitic?

   If it is, I find the trick here is not to say “Someone (not me) might be offended by this” but “I’m offended” and “This is unrelated to work, and likely to cause disharmony, and is surely against company policy”.

   I’ve done this a couple times (about sexually demeaning material) and it hasn’t caused problems. The perpetrator has been a little embarrassed, but we never spoke about it again, and it didn’t happen again either.

   Keep your temper and make the sole point that your collegue is the one being disruptive. Works a charm.

   The “I’m offended” bit works by removing the “but there’s none of here” excuse. I learnt that one from the manager of a bottle shop telling a couple of young men off for telling a loud sexist joke in his shop.

   Posted on 08-Feb-08 at 1:21 pm | Permalink
4. Laura said:

   David that’s really fucking appalling.

   Posted on 08-Feb-08 at 3:27 pm | Permalink
5. Niall said:

   I’m with Brendan Nelson and the unlamented John Winston Howard. I’m not sorry. Not one little iota. I haven’t done anything to be sorry for and buggered if I’m going to tolerate anyone saying so in my name.

   Posted on 08-Feb-08 at 4:37 pm | Permalink
6. Ken Parish said:

   I wonder whether David is really disgusted (as he professes) by the diatribe he posted, or whether it’s just a faux pose to provide cover for posting views to which he in fact subscribes? I see that someone posted exactly the same material on Yahoo! News message boards at around the same time (since deleted).

   Moreover, this isn’t a new “apology” document from the lunar right. It was apparently circulating 8 years ago, when Tim Dunlop posted an article about it on Online Opinion.

   Finally, I can’t help wondering whether there’s something about our commenter’s name that serves as an innate attractor to holocaust denying, whether of Jews or Aborigines. Big Brother is watching you Davie. And mining companies rely rather heavily on the goodwill of Aboriginal people these days.

   Posted on 08-Feb-08 at 4:49 pm | Permalink
7. Jacques Chester said:

   The history books, or the blogopshere if it still exists, will tell future generations the whole, complex, wayward story of it all.

   This part of the blogosphere will exist in perpetuity, courtesy of the Australian taxpayer.

   Posted on 08-Feb-08 at 6:31 pm | Permalink
8. Jacques Chester said:

   I imagine that if we get as far as a post modernist’s worse deconstructed nightmares after reading Count Zero, Philly, I will have other priorities than Club Troppo.

   Posted on 08-Feb-08 at 7:24 pm | Permalink
9. James Farrell said:

   Nial

   If you think the apology is on behalf of you, you’re missing the point. It’s an apology from the parliament the actions by governments on both sides, over many decades — actions that were cruel, discriminatory, and humiliating.

   If you’re saying, on the other hand, that you don’t think any wrong was done, and you don’t see the need for any expression of regret, why not just ignore it then? The gesture means a lot to some people and costs you nothing.

   Posted on 08-Feb-08 at 7:28 pm | Permalink
10. Jacques Chester said:

    James;

    That has broadly been my argument for some time now.

    Posted on 08-Feb-08 at 8:37 pm | Permalink
11. Vee said:

    And who does the parliament represent? The people. That’s you and me and God knows who else? Its twisted logic to say it is only on behalf of parliament or solely the members of the government.

    That aside, just like the Howard government, it’ll go ahead whether we like it or not.

    Posted on 08-Feb-08 at 8:57 pm | Permalink
12. Alphonse said:

    Sorry Week antonyms (that’s opposites) for beginners:

    responsible - not responsible

    If not responsible, as an Australian

    ashamed/proud - apathetic

    Personally, as an Australian today:

    sorry/glad - don’t care

    Yes Niall, you’re not responsible. Since we can safely rule out apathetic, are you proud or ashamed? (remember, stolen G - not Kokoda)

    You’ve ruled out sorry and you care enough to post. So are you glad or just antonymically challenged?

    Actually the whole nation is lousy at antonyms. We should be talking about an acknowledgment of shame - something less relevant to immigrants who, though beneficiaries of Australia’s europeanisation, have histories elswhere.

    Sorry, sadly, is personal - and there’s a lot syntax yet to be widely observed.

    Posted on 08-Feb-08 at 9:21 pm | Permalink
13. James Farrell said:

    Vee

    Apologies can be, and are routinely, made on behalf of public agencies, offices, departments, and even governments, without any suggestion that all of the citizens are implicated in the action in question. It’s also reasonable in cases of systematic mistreatment of a minority to apologise on behalf of a ‘nation’, if a broader set of institutions (rather than merely the central apparatus of government) were involved, and if the citizens in general approved or behaved as if they approved. Post-war German governments apologised to the Jews on behalf of the nation, but no-one understand this to mean that a child born in 1945 was complicit in the holocaust.

    Posted on 08-Feb-08 at 10:17 pm | Permalink
14. David Coles said:

    I have seen the thing that the other David put up at 2 before a number of times. A sad indictment on the ignorance of its author.

    I am a little surprised at some of the comments on this thread. I guess I had hoped that more would understand the potency of symbols in society.

    Australia had an attitude once that held that the Aborigines were going to die out. Australians didn’t necessarily hate them and most didn’t wish them ill. It was simply the fact. Some were worth saving. The ones with a bit of white, or even sometimes a bit of Asian, in them. These were removed from their Aboriginal families by governments, churches and some other very well intentioned organisations. As a country we agreed with this policy and supported the governments that acted on it for many years.

    These days the ‘Stolen Generation’ has grown somewhat to include some who were removed from their families for some other reasons - a lack of proper care, deceased mothers, ‘wrong side’ babies who were rejected and those simply handed up for adoption in the way that was common for many unmarried mothers at the time.

    It is high time for the country to draw a line under that old attitude without equivocation. This is about the Stolen Generation certainly but it should also serve as a clear symbol that, as a nation, we no longer seek to smooth the dying pillow. We are blessed that there is a painless and available way to draw the line. We say sorry and continue with a process of reconciliation.

    And please let us lose the ignorant arguments that we weren’t alive when these things were done. Tell the Irish, the Jews or the Chechens among many others that history doesn’t matter and that you shouldn’t visit the sins of the fathers on their sons. I still hold the English accountable for sending most of my forebears here against their will although I don’t do any more about it than enjoy their failures at cricket or rugby.

    Posted on 09-Feb-08 at 9:19 am | Permalink
15. David who sent the racist "apology" said:

    I feel chastened. I didn’t realize that particular piece of nastiness had been around for so long, or spread so widely, as I haven’t seen it before. I must lead a sheltered life. I just thought it was something lurking in a dark corner that needed a bright light shone on it. It’s disturbing that, 40 years after the referendum that recognized the first Australians as fully human, so many people still don’t seem to accept it.

    The holocaust denier is no relation, btw.

    Posted on 09-Feb-08 at 2:18 pm | Permalink
16. Ken Parish said:

    OK fair enough David. But you can see how someone might take it the wrong way (or suspect that it was so intended).

    Posted on 09-Feb-08 at 4:00 pm | Permalink
17. Phil said:

    Hope the apology will include one about the disgusting treatment of young aboriginal boys by one of yours…I mean Bob Collins.

    Posted on 09-Feb-08 at 4:26 pm | Permalink
18. Jacques Chester said:

    It’s not a pop quiz, Philly.

    Posted on 10-Feb-08 at 6:47 pm | Permalink
19. Ted said:

    It’s a public record of Club Troppo.

    It will speak for itself, Jacques.

    Posted on 10-Feb-08 at 7:17 pm | Permalink
20. Jacques Chester said:

    A good point, Ted. Those who failed to fulsomely agree with Philly according Philly’s schedule will be damned — damned I say — by future historians, according to the assumptions made about unimpeachable evidence of this thread!

    Posted on 10-Feb-08 at 8:24 pm | Permalink
21. Liam said:

    Does jinmaro? Does wolfe? Do I?

    you wouldn’t believe the subterfuge that goes on, on the net.

    You wouldn’t, would you.

    Posted on 10-Feb-08 at 9:07 pm | Permalink
22. James Farrell said:

    Philly, of the dozen people who have commented on this thread, only two have said they disagree with the apology. No one is obliged to make ‘unequivocal’ statement for your benefit.

    If you’re not a troll, you’re doing a very good impression of one. Please either try to either to add value or refrain from commenting.

    Posted on 10-Feb-08 at 9:55 pm | Permalink
23. Jc said:

    Does Jc?

    I didn’t until recently, but I have become quite Ok with it as my wife did a good job of explaining it to me in human terms (she a lefty). She believes that they deserve and aplology as bad things have happened to these people. If it manages to help them and reconcile the relationship and making them feel good about themselves it is a worthwhile thing. she also argued that the state though it’s institutions did wrong so the state has a responsiblity to apologise even if these people are not alive. Hey. I’m fine with that.

    Posted on 10-Feb-08 at 10:22 pm | Permalink
24. Liam said:

    Liam is a bit of a lead weight, isn’t it.

    That’s a sentence is it, Shakespeare?

    Posted on 11-Feb-08 at 8:01 am | Permalink
25. John Greenfield said:

    I am really pleased the Apology is the first point of business of the first Parliament on a new government, and shall be in Martin Place to watch it live. It seems Rudd has consulted a great cross-section of Stolen Generations groups. Let’s hope he gets the wording correct and a huge cloud of sadness and resentment is lifted from our society.

    Posted on 11-Feb-08 at 8:45 am | Permalink
26. NPOV said:

    Jc, so it’s necessary to be a “lefty” to explain things in “human terms”?
    What other terms could you possibly expect to explain political matters in anyway?

    Posted on 11-Feb-08 at 8:59 am | Permalink
27. Jc said:

    Jc, so it’s necessary to be a “lefty” to explain things in “human terms”?

    Dude, I was asked a question and tried to answer it in terms of how I arrived at my decision. Don’t think too hard.

    Posted on 11-Feb-08 at 1:38 pm | Permalink
28. Club Troppo » As though someone had turned the lights out said:

    [...] But it’s clear from comments by several parliamentarians, as well as the resurfacing of an infamous email letter that Hansonism is alive and well. It’s no great surprise to hear right-wing Liberals and [...]

    Posted on 11-Feb-08 at 2:02 pm | Permalink
29. wilful said:

    I wonder what correlation there is between people who don’t think ‘we’ should say sorry because ‘they’ didn’t personally do it, but are still proud of ‘our’ diggers in France, Gallipoli, Iraq and East Timor, and talk about ‘us’ losing the cricket last night.

    yeah I’m bloody sorry about the fucked up plight of aborigines in Australia, today and ever since my ancestors and my ancestors compatriots came and dispossessed them. Much of what was done was done with the best of intentions, or at least according to the standards of the times, but it still wasn’t and isn’t right.

    Still, at least Australia wasn’t colonised by the spanish, dutch, belgians, portuguese, the english were as benign as you’d get in those days.

    Posted on 11-Feb-08 at 5:01 pm | Permalink
30. Max said:

    Is the information in David’s posting true? If it is I am very sorry about that!

    Posted on 13-Feb-08 at 8:42 am | Permalink

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