Saying sorry seems to be a mute point

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Last year millions of Australians across the country stopped what they were doing, turned their faces to Canberra and listened to the Prime Minister deliver an extremely long-awaited apology for past wrongs to indigenous Australians.

It cost nothing, but its value was priceless - to indigenous people affected by brutal past practices, to sympathetic fellow Australians, and for Kevin Rudd's political credibility. A win-win-win, in other words.

The apology flowed from recommendations in a 1997 Human Rights Commission report into the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal people, Bringing Them Home, a pitiful account of the indescribable harm done to those ripped from the bosoms of their mothers and placed in white missions and homes.

There were two other inquiries initiated by one of the Stolen Generations' parliamentary advocates, the Democrats Senator Andrew Murray.

The second inquiry scrutinised the appalling treatment of many British child migrants, the ensuing 2001 report, Lost Innocents, laying out a string of recommendations, including a formal government apology.

The third looked at the often tragic lives of hundreds of thousands of youngsters who were abused while in the care of state and religious orphanages. That 2004 report, Forgotten Australians, also made many recommendations, which included a formal apology.

Together the three reports represented a trifecta of shame detailing wrongs from Australia's past that needed to be righted for hundreds of thousands of current Australians, their families, and their families into the future.

As Senator Murray always said, if you hurt a child, a harmed adult will result - then another hurt child, another harmed adult . . . and the vicious cycle continues. It's not just the 50,000 damaged children identified in Lost Innocents and Forgotten Australians. The multiplier effect - their families and children - swells the number whose lives are adversely affected by a factor of at least four.

Apologies go a long way to assuaging hurts and grievances.

In the very least, they allow sufferers to feel they are being recognised and the trauma of their lives acknowledged.

But so far, the only group to receive a formal apology has been the stolen generation. The others have been waiting for up to nine years for that important act of contrition that will allow them to either start healing, or complete the healing journey.

Just last month, the Senate again delivered a report on the two neglected groups of Australians in a report titled, naturally enough, the Lost Innocents and Forgotten Australians Revisited report.

Many former wards of state travelled wearily to Canberra - again - to see if anything was going to happen. Jenny Macklin, the minister responsible, made all the right noises about moving, in both practical and symbolic ways, to ameliorate the deep traumas countless children suffered at the hands of state and federal authorities.

Macklin said she would consider the recommendation for an apology, describing the abuse and neglect suffered by survivors of brutal institutional care, and child migrants, as a tragedy.

The Government understood that more needed to be done, she assured, and the past hurts of sufferers acknowledged and assistance offered.

So what, then, is the problem? Why has it taken so long for those in office - starting with the Howard government back in 2001 - to do anything to help as much as possible these people?

Some wanting a result believe it's because the grief and plight of these two groups of people aren't as visible as those of indigenous Australians and, they say perhaps cynically, an apology won't carry the same political Brownie points.

Perhaps. Or maybe, as is the case with many things, it's been put in the political too-hard basket.

If it doesn't know now, then Labor had better wise up that many survivors are battle-strengthened. They won't be going away.

And just like indigenous Australians torn from their families and brutalised, they, too want to know that the rest of us understand what they've been through, and are still going through, along with generations of their families.

Is it really that difficult to utter "sorry", and start the healing?