How to run a bare minimum state apology

Giving an apology on behalf of the state is tricky business. Here’s Connie Buchanan with a summary of how to do the bare minimum.

 

Stay in your own house. Be where you make the rules and feel most at ease. Where there’s plenty of room for you, but limited space for others.

Invite a mere handful of the thousands of survivors who are owed the apology. Put these few in another room of your house. Give them time to respond to the apology that you haven’t yet delivered. Five minutes each. Do not, yourself, go and sit in that room. It was bad enough having to read their horrible stories in the very long report.

While they are responding to the things you haven’t said yet, get ready to deliver the apology. Wear your normal suit like it’s a normal work day. Stand in your normal spot, surrounded by your normal crew. When you’re ready, bring them in from the other room. Make them be quiet. Make them listen. Make them obey the rules of your house. Keep the rest of the thousands at bay on a one-way live stream.

Begin. Be serious, be sincere. Run to time. Put all the problems in the past and all the promises in the future.

When speaking about them, be personal and specific. Say “you” a lot. When speaking about yourself, be impersonal and non-specific. Say “not only this government, but all governments” a lot.

If you’re interrupted by one of them, maintain your dignity. Let someone else flap and panic and bleat for the police.

Distance yourself.

Do not, for example, say: “I am sorry that I, personally, did not prioritise fast-tracking the one thing you really wanted in this apology when I took office and made my action lists.”

Say things instead about how redress is very complex and is assigned to someone else in your team. Don’t get down in the weeds. Weeds are where bottom-feeders live.

Keep reading your words from your paper. Don’t mention boot camps or Section 7AA or anything else like that. Feel confident that you are coming across well. Reflect this feeling later in your social media posts, which begin: “Today I stood . . .” and not: “Today the survivors . . .”

Do not step outside your house. Do not take off your suit jacket and go inside their homes, their prison cells, their marae, their gang pads, their fale, their communities, their pain.

Do not offer yourself up to them as wrongdoer.

Do not allow them to take you somewhere unknown, put you inside, and make you stay there until everyone who wants to have a turn has done so.

Do not be uncomfortable. Don’t give up control. Do not waste your precious days, weeks, months. That’s time you’ll never get back.

Remind yourself that you’re doing the best you can. Plus it was “all governments”. Plus you’re a busy guy.

So keep it contained. Make it the work of a single morning. Give them kai and a cup of tea. Let them do another karakia. Do not ask your own God to forgive the specific things that you, yourself, personally, have done and are doing right now.

Move on. Go to Peru. Don’t be powerless.

 

Connie Buchanan is an E-Tangata writer and editor.