Yesterday Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made a formal apology to the ‘stolen generation’, a generation of aboriginal children who were forcibly removed from their parents and put into convents for their upbringing. Many of these children never saw their parents again. One of the most shocking aspects of these policies is that they continued right up until the early 1970’s, which is only 10 years before I was born. There are millions of Australians living today who were alive when this policy was taking place, and there are tens of thousands of aboriginals who were victims of it.

A national apology for these policies is something that is long overdue. The previous Prime Minister, John Howard, resisted calls for an apology for his entire 11 years in office. You can watch the apology on YouTube (part 1, part 2, part 3) [duration 30 mins].