Australia entered 2008 as one of the richest nations in the world. Far from fearing recession like Europe and America, the “Lucky Country” recently burst into its 17th year of uninterrupted economic growth with its currency surging to 23-year highs, its unemployment rate hovering around 4 percent, and its weekly wages roughly 20 percent higher than those in the United States and Britain.

Yet for the country’s half-million Aborigines—the descendants of Australia’s original inhabitants—this prosperity has proved as remote as the Great Sandy Desert. At less than 61 years, male Aboriginal life expectancy is lower than that in Cambodia, even though Australia’s overall life expectancy is higher than Switzerland’s. Tuberculosis and hepatitis are respectively five and eight times more prevalent among Aborigines than among white Australians. Aborigines are almost three times more likely than white Australians to kill themselves and over 15 times more likely to be imprisoned.

But even these startling statistics do not paint a complete picture of life in remote Aboriginal towns, where up to half of Australia’s Aborigines live. In May 2006, the Northern Territory crown prosecutor, Nannette Rogers, exposed conditions bordering on dystopian. Children and babies had routinely been raped and abused. Extreme substance abuse (including children sniffing gasoline to the point of brain damage) and general lawlessness had given central Australia (where many Aborigines live) a homicide rate ten times the national average, and Aboriginal women were 52 times more likely to be hospitalized due to domestic violence than white women. By June 2007, the situation had reached such “depths of depravity and despair,” as Australia’s indigenous affairs minister, Mal Brough, put it, that the center-right government of Prime Minister John Howard sent in the military to restore social order.

That such an execrable state of affairs exists in such a rich country is surely deserving of an apology—a real apology, coupled with practical action to stem the cycle of poverty, violence, and squalor. Indeed, many of Australia’s political and media elites spent decades agitating for a national apology to the Aborigines. Last month, an apology finally came, courtesy of the new prime minister, Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd. “We apologize for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering, and loss on [Aborigines],” Rudd said.

But Rudd was actually apologizing for the “stolen generations,” a phrase that refers to thousands of Aboriginal children who, between 1910 and 1970, were taken from their families by Australian state governments and placed in the care of churches or white foster families. Sometimes they were taken against their mothers’ will, but often the removals stemmed from evidence of serious abuse or neglect. It was thought that the churches or foster families would provide these children with better life chances.

Aboriginal policies have been driven by a misguided devotion to 'multiculturalism.' One judge sentenced a 50-year-old man to one day in jail for raping a 15-year-old girl, citing traditional Aboriginal culture in his defense.

The 1997 government report that uncovered the impact of these policies, “Bringing Them Home,” although tendentious, ticked off a litany of very sad stories of abuse and heartache. But it also noted that “the predominant aim of Aboriginal child removals was the…assimilation of the children into the wider, non-Aboriginal community so that their unique cultural values and ethnic identities would disappear, giving way to models of Western culture…. Removal of children with this in mind is genocidal.” Since the report was issued, the “genocide” charge in particular had animated concern for a national apology. Perhaps surprisingly, no legal action has yet proceeded on the basis of such a serious claim, and only one Aborigine has achieved compensation in the courts for his removal.

The whole episode remains a deeply controversial part of Australian history. On the same day that Rudd gave his apology, the new conservative opposition leader, Liberal Party chief Brendan Nelson, offered a more balanced speech, which underlined the “complexity” of the Aboriginal issue, warned against “moral superiority” across generations, and reminded Aussie MPs that they had more pressing concerns. Many Labor supporters in the Australian Parliament’s Great Hall—including two of Rudd’s senior staffers—turned their backs on Nelson and slow-clapped to drown him out.

To truly help the Aborigines, Australia’s government must move beyond symbolism and take practical action to encourage assimilation. Despite the hysterical remarks of many apology supporters, “assimilation” would not require the destruction of Aboriginal culture. But it would require integrating Aborigines into the mainstream of Australian society, and it would require efforts to curb the social and economic pathologies that plague so many Aboriginal towns.

Unfortunately, the government’s record does not inspire confidence. Since gaining the constitutional power to make laws for Aborigines in 1967, it has effectively subsidized hundreds of tiny, remote Aboriginal communities. It has provided massive welfare payments without any requirement to work: the labor force participation rate (LFPR) among Aborigines is only half of the white LFPR. It has shut off remote communities to “non-Aborigines,” requiring entrance permits granted by local “elders.” It has undermined the teaching of English in remote schools, producing an 80 percent illiteracy rate among young Aborigines in remote areas and leaving many unable to communicate in English.

In 1938, two Aborigines from the Aborigines Progressive Association issued a clarion call for assimilation and equal treatment. “We do not wish to be regarded with sentimental sympathy,” they wrote, “or to be ‘preserved,’ like the koala bears, as exhibits; but we do ask for your real sympathy and understanding of our plight. We do not wish to be ‘studied’ as scientific or anthropological curiosities. All such efforts on our behalf are wasted. We have no desire to go back to primitive conditions of the Stone Age. We ask you to teach our people to live in the Modern Age, as modern citizens. Our people are very good and quick learners. Why do you deliberately keep us backward?”

Prime Minister Rudd has apologized for the past treatment of Aborigines; now he should apologize for their present treatment, and provide genuine redress. Indeed, the Labor government should pursue the wholesale integration of Aborigines into modern Australian society—just as those two Aborigines suggested back in 1938.

Adam Creighton is a Commonwealth Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. A native Australian, he was born and raised in Sydney.