Canberra, August 30: Australia said on Sunday it would formally apologise to generations of children abused while in state care, in a gesture similar to last year’s acknowledgment of past injustices suffered by Aborigines.
The apology would help address terrible wrongs inflicted on the so-called “forgotten Australians” who were abused in orphanages and public institutions that were supposed to protect them, Families Minister Jenny Macklin said.
She said an estimated 500,000 people, many of them child migrants from Britain, had been abused or neglected while in state care over the past 100 years.
“This is a significant national step in the healing process for forgotten Australians and former child migrants,” she said in a statement.
“Many former child migrants and other children who were in institutions, their families and the wider community have suffered from a system that did not adequately provide for, or protect children in its care.”
A Senate inquiry in 2004 recommended the apology.
Macklin said it would be delivered by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the government would seek opposition support to make it a bipartisan gesture.
In February 2008, Rudd apologised to Aboriginal people for centuries of injustice, including the “stolen generations” of indigenous children taken from their families and placed in foster care with white families or institutions.
The apology was widely applauded at the time but Rudd’s centre-left government has since been criticised for failing to follow up the gesture by improving the live of Aborigines, Australia’s most impoverished community.
–Agencies