What was the Keating apology?

The Keating apology was the speech delivered by Prime Minister Paul Keating at Redfern Park in Sydney on 10 December 1992 acknowledging Australian responsibility for the historical mistreatment of Aboriginal Australians. The speech is widely considered one of the most important speeches in modern Australian history and represented the first major federal acknowledgement of responsibility for the consequences of colonisation.

The speech was delivered to launch the United Nations International Year of the World's Indigenous People (1993). Keating spoke at Redfern Park in central Sydney, a location of particular significance to the Indigenous Australian community as the centre of Aboriginal political activism since the 1960s. The Redfern Park speech was written by Don Watson, Keating's chief speechwriter, with Keating's substantial personal involvement.

Several specific phrases have entered Australian political memory. '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 diseases. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion'. The speech called on Australians to imagine the impact if the same things had happened to them, asking 'how would I feel if this were done to me?' The speech argued that Australia could not be a complete nation until Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians were fully recognised as members of it.

The Keating speech was not a formal apology in the legal sense. It acknowledged responsibility but did not include the word 'sorry' as the central term, and was delivered as a personal expression rather than a parliamentary motion. Subsequent calls for a more formal apology built across the 1990s, particularly after the 1997 Bringing Them Home report. Prime Minister John Howard refused to deliver a formal parliamentary apology during his 11 years in office (1996 to 2007), expressing personal regret but arguing that current generations should not apologise for the actions of past governments. The full federal Apology came on 13 February 2008 from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. The Redfern Park speech is now widely studied in Australian schools and universities. A commemorative plaque in Redfern Park marks the speech's location. Keating's Redfern speech and Rudd's Apology are often discussed together as the two most important federal statements on Indigenous policy in modern Australian history.