Posted on 03/12/2008 1:39:40 AM PDT by naturalman1975
JOHN Howard says he has left Australia with a stronger, less ambiguous sense of national pride than before the Coalition won government in 1996.
"I think we were having a pointless debate about our identity in the early 1990s," the former prime minister said after a speech to Harvard University students yesterday. "I think we've shed that. We have now got a very positive view of Australian history and Australian achievement. I think our sense of national pride is stronger now than it was in the 1990s and less ambiguous. And that's tremendously important."
Mr Howard, who in Washington last week received the American Enterprise Institute's outstanding achievement award for 2008, broke his public silence on last month's apology to the Stolen Generations in his Harvard address.
The former Liberal leader said the apology could create a sense of the indigenous box being "ticked" when vital work needed to be done.
Mr Howard, the only living former prime minister who was not at federal parliament to hear the apology, said he was opposed to it on the grounds that today's generation could not be held responsible for the acts of previous generations and because some removal practices had been of benefit to Aborigines. He told the students that this latter point was supported by north Queensland Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson, whom he described as "the voice of contemporary indigenous Australia more than anyone else".
(Excerpt) Read more at theaustralian.news.com.au ...
He did. I wish John Howard could run for President of the United States.
He certainly did. He is welcome here anytime. An honorable and courageous man.
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