National Apology Breakfast 2024

Hon Dr Kevin Rudd AC
26th Prime Minister of Australia
Co-Chair, National Apology Foundation

13 February 2024

 E&OE

[Acknowledgements] 

I’m sorry I cannot be with you all in person. I’d like very much to be. But even from here in Washington DC, I sense a particular loss on this day. This anniversary of the Apology is the first we celebrate in the absence of a truly great Australian, Dr Lowitja O’Donoghue.

Our nation has lost an remarkable woman. A beautiful human being. A leader for all Australians, black and white. And we mourn deeply her passing. She was central to the campaign for the Apology over many years, even when it seemed Canberra had shut its ears and all hope was lost.

These were the days when some still denied the very existence of the Stolen Generations. And that was despite the fact of the irrefutable documentary evidence – records that children were, in fact, stolen from their families.

Lowitja understood the power of telling the simple, unvarnished truth about our history. Because the simple truth is: our history shapes our future. If we don’t have a basic shared understanding of our history of what we’ve done right together and what we’ve done wrong, we cannot build a shared vision for the future. Lowitja understood that, just as you can’t build a strong house on a weak foundation, you can’t build a strong nation on uncertain footings.

Lowitja was the embodiment of sublime determination, personal grace, a woman of great distinction and abiding passion for social justice. In other words, she was the very best of all of us – the very best that is Australian. And that determination is one of the reasons we are all gathered here today.

Just moments after I delivered the National Apology 16 years ago, Lowitja and I embraced on the floor of the parliament. I remember it as if it happened yesterday. I remember also the look of delight – unrestrained delight – on her face that day. She said to me… “Wonderfully done Kevie, only 200 years too late”. That was her way of handling things. A word of encouragement, a compliment, reinforced with a good solid whack. That was our Lowitja.

And many of us, as you know, also knew full well that Lowitja herself had been stolen – stolen from her mother as a toddler and put in a mission. When she left that institutional home, the matron told her she wouldn’t amount to anything. Well, those self-satisfied, judgmental, and downright cruel remarks only served to make Lowitja that much more determined.

 It’s a sad thing that Lowitja did not live to see constitutional recognition. Aboriginal people today are hurting. They are hurting again. And we’ve heard something of that this morning. There are now fresh wounds, and these wounds are still very raw. And for this, I am saddened, and I am sorry for the further pain that has been caused our Aboriginal brothers and sisters.

But I have no doubt at all that today, if Lowitja were still with us, she would be encouraging us to, once again, put our shoulder to the wheel - just as she had done over her lifetime – to keep working on the hard business of reconciliation. To keep working on the hard business of closing the gap. To keep working on the hard business that lies in the question of treaty.

It’s all to easy to become downcast in the face of adversity. But, as Martin Luther King reminded us, the arc of history bends slowly towards justice. But it doesn’t happen of its own accord. It happens because women and men of good heart and good will choose to make it happen. They choose to make it bend. And everywhere around this country, our fellow Australians are working on the front lines to do just that.

One of the National Apology Foundation’s projects in the past year has been a podcast called “Listen Learn Respect”. It’s a series of interviews with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders doing that hard work, often in obscurity, a long long way away from the nation’s television cameras, to close the gap.

 I’m grateful to the Foundation’s co-chair, my daughter Jess, for leading and hosting that podcast. It’s about shining a lantern on the things that working, and the things that don’t work, in closing the gap.

And whatever area of endeavour - whichever closing the gap target they were focused on - the message of local Aboriginal people has been the same. The difference, so often, between success and failure has been local self-determination. Trusting Indigenous communities and organisations to make decisions on the ground that they believe will work for them.

You see, there are no silver bullets in this business. There are very few universal policy formulae across our vast nation that work across so many Indigenous groups that make up Indigenous Australia. It’s what works locally, under local Aboriginal leadership, that matters. Autonomy in local decision-making is the essential ingredient.

For example, you can see it working in healthcare. When a patient is treated by a community-controlled health organisation, peer-reviewed evidence shows that community-controlled services achieve far better outcomes for less money.

 Services delivered by community-controlled health organisations are 50% more effective in health terms alone than those performed by mainstream clinics. And they are also 23% better at attracting and retaining clients. 

And there are flow-on impacts for Indigenous employment, for Indigenous education and for social mobility.

And so, therefore, the government’s decision to more than double its pre-election commitment to building and refurbishing critical health infrastructure at no less than 17 community-controlled organisations across Aboriginal Australia is a great step in the right direction.

Remember, my friends, the Apology that had two parts.

First, acknowledgement and acceptance of our history. I take enormous solace from the knowledge that my grandkids have a far better appreciation of Australia’s Indigenous past than my own kids had at their age. And that is miles ahead of what I learned at primary school in country Queensland way back in the Mesolithic period where frankly these things were never discussed at all.

 And also now the Australian states will undertake their truth-telling and agreement-making processes. So we are about to learn a lot about massacres we’ve never heard of, the killing of infectious diseases brought by Europeans, and the forced removal of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral homes to parts of the country to which they had no connection at all. 

This truth-telling is the foundation for the second part of the apology, which is closing the gap. Because an apology is only made up of meaningless words unless it is accompanied by action in the real world.

That work is being done by the nation’s governments, corporations and philanthropists to enable and empower communities on the ground to get on with the hard business of closing the gap in reality.

The Australian voting public have decided not to empower those local voices with a national voice to advise the national parliament – that adds to the need for political leaders gathered in Parliament House today to find those voices and to listen to them.

We’ve heard one of them this morning in Ian Hamm’s comments as he addressed the gathering earlier.

I urge everyone on all sides of the political divide to do just that. To find your local Aboriginal voices, to listen carefully, and respond. Because, as Lowitja O’Donoghue showed us through her remarkable life, we can never give up.

Perseverance was Lowitja’s signature strength. Let it be our strength as well. When one of us falls, it’s up to the rest of us to pick up the ball and keep running – and running and running and running until this race is won. Only then will the arc of history still bend towards justice in our land, Australia. 

I thank you.