This article seeks to understand, in historical and international perspective, recent governmental initiatives that aim to reinstate adoption as a viable policy option for the care and placement of children in Australia, with reference to two recent reports of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Human and Family Services, Overseas Adoption in Australia: Report of the Inquiry into Adoption of Children from Overseas (2005), and The Winnable War on Drugs: The Impact of Illicit Drug Use on Families (2007) which raises adoption as a policy option for children of drug‐addicted parents. These reports appear to signal a discursive shift away from the anti‐adoption attitudes that have characterised the post‐1970s period in response to the Stolen Generations and other past adoption practices. It is argued that this change can be understood as having been pushed to the fore by the conservative family policy of the Howard era and further fostered by international trends in adoption policy.

7 Barbara Maison circulated a copy of the questionnaire that she had submitted to FAHSCIA to members of the Apology Alliance. 8 Evelyn Robinson, a post-adoption activist, reports receiving a notice and invitation to attend the apology in Canberra which was later retracted (interview with Robinson by Denise Cuthbert, September 2010).

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In the years between 1992 and 2008 when a formal apology was finally delivered to the Indigenous Stolen Generations, the issue of Indigenous child removal cast a long shadow over Australian culture and society. In 2009 a further national apology -to former child migrants and institutionalised children -was delivered; and, in February 2012, a report of a Senate Committee of inquiry into past adoption practices recommended a national apology to the victims of past adoption in this country. The space of apology has been transformed from one focused on Indigenous-settler relations to a crowded space focused on the suffering associated with child removal. In this paper, we consider the unfolding politics of reconciliation in Australia, and its progressive de-Indigenisation. We conclude that the progressive universalisation of suffering in Australian apology politics, which comes at the cost of sustained engagement with the issues of race-and gender -based power, is damaging to the project of reconciliation and points to an immaturity in Australian politics which must be overcome if genuine reconciliation is to be achieved.