Mr ABBOTT (1:06 PM) —Like everyone, from the Governor-General and the Prime Minister (Mr Howard) down, I feel deeply and personally sorry for the pain and suffering of my Aboriginal fellow Australians. It is true that this generation is not responsible for the paternalism and the cruelties of the past but, if my grandfather had been thrown off his property by my neighbour's great-grandfather, who had lived off the fat of the land ever since, I suspect that I would be unreconciled, even if my neighbour was otherwise my best mate. It seems to me that we white Australians, who can readily feel, for instance, the antipathy of the Orange and the Green, sometimes suffer a serious failure of imagination when it comes to appreciating the pain in the hearts of our black brothers and sisters.

As the Prime Minister said yesterday, reconciliation is one of the great challenges of our time and one of the most important pieces of unfinished national business. Like slavery in the United States, dispossession of the Aborigines is a stain on our soul. But, together with the Prime Minister, I have always thought that repentance was better judged by deeds than words. Cultural annihilation was never the intention of official Australia. It is worth remembering Governor Phillip's instruction to live in amity with the native inhabitants. It is true that some of our forebears did poison the waterholes and massacre women and children, but that was never officially sanctioned and white men were hanged for the murder of black men as early as the 1830s.

Australia's past is not as morally simple as some promoters of a Sorry Day suggest. As anthropologist Kenneth Maddock has said, `What we are seeing is a struggle for the high moral ground, using the politics of embarrassment. The aim is to soften up your opponents by making them feel bad about themselves or their ancestors.' It is important that we remember our mistakes, but we should not forget our virtues just because not everyone is happy with the way things have turned out. The sorrow we share for the swamping of Aboriginal culture is of course a tribute to the better angels of our Western European natures.

We need to ask ourselves what benefit there is in a series of Sorry Days engendering resentment in some and guilt in others. How can we be reconciled with people who accuse us of racism? We need to ask ourselves whether sackcloth and ashes is the appropriate national garb as we enter a new century. The first Christian sermon preached in New South Wales took as its text, `What can I render unto the Lord for all his blessings towards me?', and it seems to me that, if they—who had so little—felt this way, it is surely niggardly of all of us not to feel more gratitude for the great gift of being Australian.