Paul Keating as Prime Minister

In December 1992, the year after Paul Keating became the 24th Prime Minister of Australia, he made clear his intention to apologise by and became the first Prime Minister to publicly admit the past when he said:

“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. 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”.