Look , its little john again trying to get some indigenous points on the board before the election.

Koorie people arent in the least concerned about the preamble. Government effort needs to be directed at the education, health and welfare.

If Mr howard could say "sorry" then of course he would be admitting some past wrong done to the Koorie race on behalf of all Austrailan Gubbs. The last thing Koories want is a treaty, since a treaty means things are now settled and what ever happens in the past is now forgotten and forgiven.

No! Mr howard you cant get out of it that cheaply, fair compensation is long overdue.

If he was a real man he would put the Australian taxpayers money where his mouth is and also request the Queen to issue a formal written apology for the English invasion.

Dazza@PArra

I'm not Aboriginal, but like Darug Tribal Secretary Des Dyer, I found John Howard's "commitments" on the threshold of the election, offensive. Mentioning Aboriginal people in the Constitution's preamble would not have any legal authority and the PM knows this. After 11 long years of consistent acts to undermine Aboriginal peoples, he expects credit for this? No way, not until he does something really serious with an urgently needed massive funding boost for what Aboriginal peoples want to address land claims, and the enormous health, education, housing and employment disadvantage suffered by them. Why is it that in Howard's 700 pages of legislation to allow the NT Aboriginal land grab, the words "child abuse" don't appear once? Wasn't the intervention meant to prevent this? Why are Aboriginal benefits being taken from them again, when millions of dollars of stolen Aboriginal wages have still not been returned? Why not allow a Treaty or a decent Bill of Rights to make it law that Aboriginal peoples must have the same human rights as non-Indigenous people? The answer is that the Howard government doesn't really care for the disadvantaged, but it does care for the needs of the powerful and wealthy, who help to keep them in government.