Australia’s prime minister elect Kevin Rudd on Monday pledged his government would make an early groveling formal apology to Aborigines for the “stolen generation” of indigenous children snatched from their parents. Rudd, 50, who came to power in a general election landslide Saturday, said his would become the first federal administration ever to apologise for the policy. “It will be early in the parliamentary term,” Rudd told reporters in Brisbane after receiving a rock star welcome from screaming school children elated by the centre-left Labor Party leader’s election. “We will frame it in a consultative fashion with communities and that may take some time,” he said two days after sweeping conservative Prime Minister John Howard from power. Howard, like previous Australian leaders, had refused to say sorry to the Aboriginal community for the policy in which children were removed from their families in a bid to force ethnic assimilation between the 1930s and 1970s. |