The call for apology powerfully brought together the aspirations of the people who had experienced and suffered the denigration of removal and a more abstract analysis of how to institutionalize reparation for systematic human rights violations. From both perspectives, the apology seemed to take up the distinct level of damage to a social meaning, a dimension of reparation generally omitted in traditional modern (liberal) institutions of justice, despite its analytic centrality and subjective poignancy. Widening the lens, the last chapter illustrated how the apology also stepped onto the political stage at a moment when the country was ripe for this type of reorientation, both because its self-image had been battered by a decade of exposés of human rights violations, and because Australia was on the verge of a new century and the possibility of a new constitution. Yet the multifaceted meaning of apology, and in particular its personal and religious overtones, got in the way of its playing this role without contestation. Even as it gathered significant force in Australian political life, those who saw the apology as a contravention of equally important political and jurisprudential norms – most notably individual liberty and protection from crude collective blame – also fiercely resisted it.

The Australian debate displays several important broader themes concerning political apologies already developed through the previous two lenses. First, it illustrates the two key tensions in which political apologies are caught: between collective and individual responsibility, and between the public, collective trope of apology and the internalized, individual apology.