Many of us were appalled by the sheer hypocrisy generated by that irksome modern phenomenon, the institutional apology. Generally, I don't believe in mass apologies; they have taken the place of personal moral culpability and cheapened contrition, even when an institutional policy needs to be abrogated.
Instead today's mass apologies use the sheer intimidatory power of political correctness as a way of forcing a single view. And that politically correct view allows no nuance. Witness what happened to Tony Abbott because the nuances of his speech were not "right".
Abbott's crime was that he tried to be fair to adoptive parents. His language merely acknowledged that adoptees have two sets of parents, their birth or genetic parents and the adoptive parents who nurture them and bring them up.
That was not good enough for the extremists of the anti-adoption lobby who want to use a strict terminology to put adoption in the same moral realm as child kidnapping. This has happened before with these politicised apologies. Remember Brendan Nelson's reply to Kevin Rudd's stolen children apology? Nelson tried to introduce a bit of nuance into the apology. The policy was misguided, but some children were removed for their own good.
However, political correctness gives no quarter. During his speech Nelson was booed and jeered and Labor staff watching in the parliament turned their backs on him, as did thousands of people watching screens in front of Parliament House, just as some turned their backs on John Howard at a reconciliation event when he was PM.
But the hypocrisy of last Thursday's apology went one step further. The PM said of the child victims of forced adoption: "You deserved the chance to know your mother and father." Why doesn't that apply equally to the children of same-sex and single surrogacy?
No one has bothered to point out that the PM's official apology about the rupture of the mother-child relationship, which she called a "sacred and primeval bond", leading to a conflict of identity, is all very well, but how do we get our heads around the hypocrisy of a society condemning altruistic adoption on the one hand and, on the other, going all gooey about two men or two women employing a baby maker or a sperm donor to get a child?
What of those children's sense of identity? What of their confusion? How long will it be before we have to apologise for yet another failed social experiment on the innocent? And of course it is politically not at all correct to point out that a child who has two women on his or her birth certificate cannot actually be the child of both these women, or that the two men who have paid an Indian woman to carry a baby are not the parents of their baby.
The irony here is that adoption of infants of single mothers in the past was encouraged purely so that they could grow up in a mother-father family. What is more, adoption practices were changed as far back as the 1970s precisely so children could settle questions of identity by finding their birth parents if they wished.
All this is being ignored by extremists who want to ban adoption. They are offering an insult to the adoptive parents who work and struggle to bring up their children. Perhaps the birth mothers ought to be thanking them.
Many of the adoptees of the past are people whose own emotional damage has blinkered them to the experiences of the majority who have had fulfilling lives.
Abbott should not be defensive about this. He should not bow to political correctness. Mass apologies don't change anything, good policy does. Does anyone remember Dean Shillingsworth, born into misery and thrown away in a suitcase, aged two? What a pity he wasn't "forcibly" adopted.
