Reconciliation
What is reconciliation? How successful have the steps taken by successive Australian governments been towards reconciliation? What more, if anything should be done?
Reconciliation is about building a better Australia, this includes improving the relationships between the wider Australian community and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for the benefit of all Australians. In 1991, an Act of parliament established the council for Aboriginal reconciliation, this was a group of twenty five prominent Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. The council defined reconciliation as: 'A united Australia which respects this land of ours; values the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage; and provides justice and equity…show more content… Our government has expressed it’s determination to “close the gap” amongst non-Indigenous and Indigenous Australians in many different ways, such as; access to early childhood education, high school education, employment out comes, life expectancy, literacy and numeracy, infant mortality rates and many more. The truth is that the work in closing the gap and putting the first peoples in Australia on generally equal footing likened to the rest of the community, will not be and has not been an easy task, it is a job that will take lots of time and determination. Lucky there are many people in Australia who are determined and progress towards reconciliation is being…show more content… The work was given a huge boost in 2992 when prime minister, paul keating, made his historic speech known as the ‘Redfern speech’. In december of 1992 the Prime Minister, Paul Keating, delivered a speech in the Sydney suberb of Redfern, which is an area with a high population of indigenous Australians. He spoke of reconciliation in these words: 'It begins with an 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 diseases, the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion…. 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