Abbott’s pronouncements on Aboriginal Australia coincide with his waning political will to amend the constitution so it meaningfully recognises Indigenous Australians

On the way to government, Tony Abbott vowed he’d be a special prime minister for Indigenous Australians. He said:

It is my hope that I could be, not just a prime minister, but a prime minister for Aboriginal affairs. The first, I imagine, that we have ever had.

Australia is a blessed country. Our climate, our land, our people, our institutions rightly make us the envy of the earth; except for one thing – we have never fully made peace with the first Australians. This is the stain on our soul that prime minister Keating so movingly evoked at Redfern 21 years ago. We have to acknowledge that pre-1788, this land was as Aboriginal then as it is Australian now and until we have acknowledged that, we will be an incomplete nation and a torn people.

...surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the first Australians - the people to whom the most injustice has been done. 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 that act of recognition ... that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.

Our country is unimaginable without foreign investment. I guess our country owes its existence to a form of foreign investment by the British government in the then unsettled or, um, scarcely settled, Great South Land.

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