Wednesday 13 February will be a significant day in Australia's history, as the Prime Minister delivers an apology to the Aboriginal people who were stolen or separated from their families under government policies which still applied up until the 1970s in some places.
Whatever Mr Rudd says in his speech, it is unlikely that he will capture the core issues better than Paul Keating did in his speech at Redfern Park in 1992:
"... in truth, we cannot confidently say that we have succeeded as we would like to have succeeded if we have not managed to extend opportunity and care, dignity and hope to the indigenous people of Australia - the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people."
" This is a fundamental test of our social goals and our national will: our ability to say to ourselves and the rest of the world that Australia is a first rate social democracy, that we are what we should be - truly the land of the fair go and the better chance."
"There is no more basic test of how seriously we mean these things.
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It is a test of our self-knowledge. Of how well we know the land we live in. How well we know our history. How well we recognise the fact that, complex as our contemporary identity is, it cannot be separated from Aboriginal Australia. How well we know what Aboriginal Australians know about Australia."
Keating went on to say, in one of the most famous speeches in Australian history:
"And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians."
"It begins, I think, with the act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.
"It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me?
"As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us."
"Down the years, there has been no shortage of guilt, but it has not produced the responses we need. Guilt is not a very constructive emotion.
"I think what we need to do is open our hearts a bit.
"All of us.
"Perhaps when we recognise what we have in common we will see the things which must be done - the practical things."
