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 onlast 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".
Speaking at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Mr Howard claimed Australia had wasted 20-30 years pursuing discredited policies of separate Aboriginal development.
He said the only practical future for Aborigines lay in mainstream Australia. "I think the only way indigenous people can get what we call a fair go is for them to become part of the mainstream community and get the benefits and opportunities available in mainstream Australia," he said.
Asked by a Harvard student why he did not accept the symbolic importance of the apology to the Stolen Generations, Mr Howard gave three reasons.
"The first is I do not believe, as an issue of principle, that one generation can assume responsibility for the acts of an earlier generation," he said. "My second reason was that the circumstances of the removal of indigenous children when those policies were practised were not uniform.
"Children were wrongly removed; in other cases, they were removed for good reason; in other cases, they were given up; and in other cases, the judgment of the removal is obscured.
"The third reason I wasn't in favour of it was that it seems to me that there is a real danger that when we do something like that, there's a psychological reaction of the indigenous box has been ticked, and we've solved the problem.
"The commitment to do practical things such as reducing the gap between the life expectancy of indigenous Australians and other Australians, which is unacceptably high, is pushed into the background."
Mr Howard said his critics had wrongly suggested in 1996 that Asian leaders would not deal with him. "They said we would project insensitivity towards the countries of Asia. That hasn't turned out to be the case in any sense," he said. "We have further deepened our relationship with the United States. The free trade agreement will grow in significance as access to the giant government procurement and service sector in the US becomes more and more available to Australian participants."
Asked how he managed the conflict between the long-term policy goals of government and short-term political realities, Mr Howard said he could point to several long-term positions that had had a short-term political cost to his government.
These included the Coalition's support for nuclear power, running the 1998 election on a goods and services tax and, more recently, labour market reform.
All were of "long-term importance to Australia", he said.
File Photo of John Howard. 

Former Australian Prime Minister, John Howard has criticised the Rudd Labor government for apologising to the Stolen Generations in parliament last month. Mr Howard was prime minister before the election last year.

Mr Howard's successor, opposition leader and leader of the Liberal party, Brendan Nelson supported the apology, making a speech of his own in parliament. The apology was unanimously supported by the House of Representatives.

While speaking to students at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, the former Prime Minister defended his decision not to apologise to indigenous Australians during his 11 years in office.

"I do not believe, as a matter of principle, that one generation can accept responsibility for the acts of an earlier generation. I don't accept that as a matter of principle," Mr Howard said.

"In some cases, children were wrongly removed; in other cases, they were removed for good reason; in other cases, they were given up; and in other cases, the judgment on the removal is obscure or difficult to make."

Mr Howard said the apology was dangerous as it led many to believe that the government had "ticked the box" on indigenous issues in Australia. "The third reason I wasn't in favour of it was that it seems to me that there is a real danger that when we do something like that, there's a psychological reaction of the indigenous box has been ticked, and we've solved the problem,"

"The commitment to do practical things such as reducing the gap between the life expectancy of indigenous Australians and other Australians, which is unacceptably high, is pushed into the background," the former PM told listeners.

Mr Howard said there had been a failure over the past few decades to address indigenous affairs. "I think we persevered for too long with the notion of separate development. I think the only way the indigenous people of Australia can get what we call a fair go is for them to become part of the mainstream of the community and get the benefits and opportunities available from mainstream Australian society, whilst recognising … the particular and special place of the indigenous culture in the life of the country," said Mr Howard.

Mr Howard rejected suggestions from a member of the audience that his refusal to apologise to indigenous Australians and refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol lost his government the election. "The first lesson I learned is you win some, you lose some,"

"I did have the opportunity of winning four elections," said Mr Howard.