Pragmatism Behind Three National Apologies By Australian Labor Government-

In the age of apology, a series of apologies made by former Australian Prime Ministers still attracted great attention and the studies on such apologies are never rare covering fields like pragmatics, sociology, anthropology and so on. The three national apologies made by Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard formed a trilogy of apologies, which firstly focused on Indigenous people began to change to ones dedicated to white Australians. Victor Turner’s Social Drama theory being a method in analyzing political conflicts each individual apology was trying to resolve as well as the two Prime Minsters’ actions, this paper argues that the three apologies were made out of political pragmatism, which caused the changing of political focus from Aboriginal issues to White Australian ones. Through the paper, Nobles’"membership theory" in explaining the meaning of and her division of actors in political apologies will be referred to.The three apologies, although made separately, could be treated as one analyzing subject since in the first place, they were all dedicated to innocent children victims (partially so for the third national apology), and secondly, the latter two were made under the influence of the first one in the sense that pressure groups of the latter two apologies imitated what Indigenous activists had down. In the first apology, Kevin Rudd took advantage of the Stolen Generation issue to outflank John Howard in electioneering, appeasing Indigenous people’s anger as well as providing white Australians a vent to the guilt sensation. His pragmatism lies in that he was dodging from a wide range of issues and that his "cold snake" heart resulted in more-than-less fruit than he had promised albeit his more-than-sincere apology. The2009apology was pragmatic in changing the focus of polity from aboriginal issues to a white Australian one, seeking to resolve the identity crisis "Forgotten Australians" encountered. And the last one, made by Julia Gillard was also out of pragmatic thinking in that except from resolving the political turbulence caused by the forced adoption mothers, Gillard used it to bail herself out of the criticism caused by a media law reform proposal as well as to win a leadership spill. Her apology further pushed Australian polity away from Aboriginal issues.