I would like to add to Robert Manne's essay ("Sorry Business", March 2008) on the parliamentary apology to the Stolen Generations.

Taking collective responsibility for past wrongs is not just symbolism. Recognition of past wrongs is also a pre-condition of not repeating them. The scariest aspect of the Howard government's refusal to apologise was its propensity to repeat many of the practices that it would not apologise for, or even acknowledge.

The Northern Territory intervention is an example of this. For all its positive aspects, the intervention cannot be condoned because it lacks meaningful consultation with the people it most affects, and because of its selective removal of the rights of Indigenous people - to run their own communities, control who enters their communities and spend their social-security entitlements. This is a clear echo of the past, when white men gave themselves the power to control Aboriginal people's lives: where they lived; who they married; their religion, occupation ... The quarantining of social-security payments also harks back to the days of stolen wages: earnings being taken by white ‘protectors' or just disappearing into banks or government consolidated revenue.

The assumptions underlying land dispossession, stolen children, stolen wages and the intervention are the same: that Aboriginal people are inherently unable to look after their own lives, children or financial affairs; that they are therefore not entitled to same human rights as other people; and that the only way forward for them  is to become like the rest of us, by force if necessary. These assumptions were disastrously wrong in the nineteenth century, and they have no place in the twenty-first century. To acknowledge and apologise is also to say, never again.