That "sorry" is the most difficult and yet liberating word in the political vocabulary has once more been affirmed in Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd's eloquent apology to the country's Aboriginal population this week.
He said sorry for the "laws and policies of successive parliaments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these, our fellow Australians" - and especially for the "removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country". This refers to the policy of forcibly taking children from their families so that they could be better "absorbed" or "assimilated" in the wider society over a prolonged period from the 1880s to the 1960s. The policy was justified on the assumption that this was the only way to prevent their communities' supposed backwardness from being reproduced, and by supplementary worries about child protection in a depressed community.
Australia was not the only country to treat its Aboriginal population like this, nor to apply such notions of social eugenics to pastoral or hunting peoples who stood in the way of "modernity". Other colonising societies had just as violent early histories, and as misguided later ones, amounting successively to genocide, ethnic cleansing and forced or induced assimilation over the whole span of European imperial expansion and independent statehood.
Some of these countries, such as Canada and New Zealand, have developed better political and social policies to deal with the costly human legacies of that long history. In Australia this necessary ethical and social accounting was delayed politically by Mr Rudd's predecessor, John Howard, over his 10 years in office. He steadfastly refused to apologise on the grounds that this generation is not responsible for the injustice, despite the findings of Australia's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission in 1997, which demanded an apology and compensation for the victims. Thus the issue became politically charged and utterly partisan. It is to Mr Rudd's abiding credit that he has made it the first major act of his new government after being sworn in this week to deliver on that moral undertaking, which has been supported by a broadly-based protest campaign.
His words have been widely and enthusiastically welcomed, including by Aborigines themselves. His proposal for a bipartisan action programme on health, education and child protection has been accepted by the opposition and will test public commitment in the years ahead. The compensation issue will not go away either, whether it is driven by the courts or a political change of mind.