The speech is on youtube. Our new PM gave a calm and precise little speech which was absolutely marvelous; who knew the nerd had it in him? If it was Bob Hawke there’d have been some crocodile tears, if it was Keating we’d all be angry, if it was Howard we’d never have heard it. Rudd got it right. Videos over the fold.
Now that the air has been cleared of this one word, we can get on with the heavy lifting.
I agree. A (surprisingly) sober, clear, concise statement blaming past governments for wrongs they did. The other guy fluffed it. An error of judgement. The speeches are here:
http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard/index.htm
Did he fluff it? I’m no fan of Nelson’s. I’ve observed elsewhere that he’s a uniquely oleaginous combination of Uriah Heap and an aging GQ casual wear model, but I thought he pretty much delivered yesterday. His was always going to be a harder political ask than the PM’s and sure, were I he I wouldn’t have delved quite as deeply into Liberal historical iconography, but he spoke convincingly to a middle Australia that recognises past injustice, wants to acknowledge it (in some cases – sure- if only to get past it) but which doesn’t want to wallow endlessly in self-abnegation.
He was right to articulate the current-day challenge – though I’m not sure that “existential aimlessness” (whatever that is) is a concept that worked in context. He was quite lyrical – more so than Rudd – about the gut-wrenching horror of forced separation and I thought he almost, but not quite, got the balance right.
If we’re honest we’d acknowledge that he couldn’t win yesterday. If he’d just run with Rudd’s take the entire innerurbanati commentariat would be climbing all over his gutless, hypocritical, insincere arse today – including me. FWIW, I thought the back-turning was sadly predictable, kneejerk and graceless and it’s worth reflecting that not even 0.01% of Australians were hanging out in front of enormous plasma screens in metropolitan plazas (I certainly hope Clive Hamilton wasn’t) waiting to be “outraged” by Tory recalcitrance.
Still, it was a remarkable day and the sight of Rudd and Nelson moving through the House to accept the gift of the Stolen Generations and then returning to the dispatch box together to jointly commend the Motion to the House was an extraordinary national moment.
I thought Rudd’s performance was exceptional and if there was a better way for the new Governnment to have commenced its time in office, I can’t think of what it would have been.
Now. On to fixing the rest of it.
a magnificent, intelligent, well informed, open-hearted speech
Thanks for posting these Jacques. I saw the first third on YouTube but couldn’t find the rest. I think it was a very fine speech. I can’t really fault it. And there were so many ways it could have disappointed (me anyway).
Crikey! in their increasingly irritating flip way, said that the brief mention of our recalcitrance over the last decade was a low point. It was amongst the many elements that were necessary to make it the very fine speech that it was. One has to acknowledge that as the context surely! That IS the context for us whitefellas – and I guess for the blackfellas. It was a speech that pulled no punches – and so it mentioned the context – though it never went out of its way to offend or to settle scores.
In fact before the speech I was very jaundiced about it. The reason was that in my opinion the apology had already been offered by Paul Keating at Redfern. It was a bit of typical political panto that that in the washup of the speech we had the campaign for an apology. As Germaine Greer says, an apology is the least you can offer in the circumstances. To have given it would have been the smallest decency – to refuse to give it – what a monumental and horrible slight. The apology having been so stubbornly and horribly – almost ghoulishly – refused, I wondered what the point of asking for it was. You can’t get a real apology by demanding it.
So it was important that after all that unpleasantness (too weak a word, but we’ll run with it) we had a change of personnel. Imagine Howard being forced into an apology – not an impossibility given his turning on a dime on most other things – David Hicks, Greenhouse etc etc as he cleared the decks for the election. Now that would have been a horrible thing. Then what would we have done? (Noel Pearson would have cheered almost as loudly as he criticised Rudd’s speech – overtaken by glee that Howard had ‘brought conservatives along’ – whoopee!).
I really liked the deep emotional content, the directness and the lack of histrionics. (Well, that’s not quite true – lets say subdued histrionics).
I agree with Robert Manne in yesterday’s Crikey!:
Jacques Chester
Spot on about Keating. I was in Martin Place and thought at the end Keatings Culture Wars are finally over. Keating could never have made that speech. If one wanted to get all Hegelian, we could say Rudd supplied the synthesis of the Keating thesis and Howard antithesis.
Keating could never have made that speech. His would have been hateful, divisive, and all about him.
Other than the fact Rudd’s apology was a bit of a dog and pony show inviting a bunch of Aboriginals to here a motion of parliament and thus give it a broader showcase to be acknowledged by the Australian public and the fact he limited it to only the Stolen Generations, how does it differ from John Howards?
Oh Geoff, I just think if youre going to apologise then apologise. The lurid passages demean Nelsons speech and look like hedging.
It doesn’t differ particularly – that’s my point. It differs in substance but not very much in semantics. One was an act of generosity, straightforwardness and open heartedness. The actual words of the other weren’t all that bad, but we all know that was not generous, straightforward, or open hearted.
Pingback: The left online and the apology « Ozleft
Nelson’s speech was more of an answer from the opposition to the apology from the government, than an apology in itself and this may be no bad thing for democracy and the completeness of this conversation.
‘
I personally prefer ‘the fulsome apology’ (as Ken will attest) but I have grown to understand the (what I used to call) ‘qualified apology’ which I am now able to accept as ‘the in context apology’. This broad mindedness on my part has been honed the hard way by Ken’s stubborn refusal to rarely employ the preferred model ‘the fulsome apology’ – he in turn has modified ‘the in context apology’ to ‘the fair apology’ which takes into account my feelings regarding the unequivocal nature of ‘proper’ apologies and keeps the peace around here.
With this broad understanding of apologies at the forefront of my mind I consider Nelson’s predicament. In order to bring conservative members of the Liberal constituency to the table at all he was obliged by the principles of democracy to represent them in his speech. And perhaps some of his outraged constituents (and colleagues) were mollified a little by the references to the wars and to good intentions.
In much the same way, the back turning was narrow minded and ungracious – but there you have it again, the voice of the people.
In an ideal Hollywood world we would have stayed with Rudd’s standing ovation.
The Liberal Party’s equivocal apology response and the ‘we don’t want to hear this’ backturning are precious examples of exactly where we are at as a nation on this issue.
As well as the fact that it is now Friday and most of us have forgotten anything even happened on Wednesday morning, if they knew about it in the first place. No-one at the school in which I was working mentioned it and my daughter, a student at another school heard about it only in passing.
Or maybe like me, everyone is just waiting for the well funded practical policies to start rolling forth from Canberra so we can all get busy making the world a better place. Ha!
In other words, a completely appropriate response to a sadly predictable, kneejerk and graceless speech?