Nobel peace prize winner Mr Jose Ramos Horta said yesterday that Australian Prime Minister, Mr John Howard's, approach to Aborigines was based on a "bankrupt argument" and "meanness".
In contrast, Mr Horta praised the former Labour prime minister, Mr Paul Keating, as a statesman who showed leadership in 1993 when he apologised for crimes committed against Aborigines.
Mr Horta, citing Germany's apology for the Holocaust, said he could not understand why Mr Howard would not issue a government apology to Aborigines forcibly taken as children from their parents under government assimilation policies.
"Sometimes we must recognise that atrocities begin at home," Mr Horta, the East Timorese independence leader and joint winner of the 1996 Nobel peace prize, said in a speech on human rights at the University of New South Wales.
Australia's human rights commission in May issued a report on the "Stolen Generation", the tens of thousands of Aborigines taken from their parents, labelling the assimilation practices from the 1880s to the 1960s as attempted genocide. The report also called on the government to apologise and to compensate Aborigines.
Mr Howard has issued a personal apology to the "Stolen Generation", but has refused to apologise on behalf of the government, saying modern Australia should not feel guilty about the past.