It took a while for Labor to catch up with John Howard, but they did it in the end.

Good evening. My name is John Howard and I’m speaking to you from Sydney, Australia, host-city of the year 2000 Olympic Games. At this important time and in an atmosphere of international goodwill and national pride, we here in Australia, all of us, would like to make a statement before all nations.

Australia, like many countries in the New World, is intensely proud of what it has achieved in the past 200 years. We have a vibrant and resourceful people. We share a freedom born in the abundance of nature, the richness of the earth, the bounty of the sea. We are the world’s biggest island. We have the world’s longest coastline. We have more animal species than any other country. Two-thirds of the world’s birds species are native to Australia. We are one of the few countries on earth with our own sky. We are a fabric woven of many colours and it’s this that gives us our strength.

However, these achievements have come at great cost.

We have been here for 200 years, but before that there was a people living here.

For over 40,000 years they lived in perfect balance with the land. There were many Aboriginal nations, just as there were many Indian nations in North America and across Canada, as there were many Maori tribes in New Zealand, and Incan and Mayan peoples in South America.

These indigenous Australians lived in areas as different from one another as Scotland is from Ethiopia. They lived in an area the size of Western Europe. They didn’t even share a common language. Yet, they had their own laws, their own beliefs, their own ways of understanding.

We destroyed this world.

We often didn’t mean to do it. Our forebears, fighting to establish themselves in what they saw as a harsh environment, were creating a national economy. But the Aboriginal world was decimated. A pattern of disease and dispossession was established. Alcohol was introduced. Social and racial differences were allowed to become fault-lines. Aboriginal families were broken up. Sadly, Aboriginal health and education are responsibilities we have yet to address successfully.

I speak for all Australians in expressing a profound sorrow to the Aboriginal people. I am sorry. We are sorry.

Let the world know and understand that it is with this sorrow, that we as a nation will grow and seek a better, a fairer and a wiser future. Thank you.