Generations of Aborigines taken forcibly from their parents under a century of assimilation policies are to receive a formal apology from the Australian Government in a landmark step towards reconciliation.

Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister, will deliver the apology to the “stolen generations” on the floor of Parliament on February 13. It will be the Labor Government’s first item of business.

“It’s building a bridge of respect which I think has been in some state of disrepair in recent decades,” Mr Rudd said. “But having crossed that bridge, the other part of it is all about practical business.”

The apology will come more than a decade after a government inquiry established that at least 100,000 children were removed from their parents between about 1869 and 1969. They were placed in orphanages run by churches or charities, or fostered out to socialise them with European culture. Some were brutalised or abused.

Their plight was illustrated in the 2002 film Rabbit-Proof Fence, based on the true story of young mixed-race Aboriginal girls fleeing a remote settlement in which they were placed.

Aborigines broadly welcomed Mr Rudd’s announcement. The final wording is crucial and consultations with Aboriginal groups continue.

Some are demanding the use of the word sorry, but Mr Rudd has shied away from it. “Well, ‘apology’, ‘sorry’, it’s the same thing,” he told an interviewer in November. Some aboriginal groups want the mea culpa to extend to much broader sufferings endured by indigenous Australians since the arrival of the first whites.

The Government is also facing increasingly strident calls for A$1 billion (£448 million) or more in financial compensation — which it is steadfastly refusing — or free private health and medical care for life for those taken from their families.

Michael Anderson, a spokesman for the 16 clans comprising the Gamilaroi nation of northwest New South Wales and southwest Queensland, said that for an apology to be meaningful, Mr Rudd needed to say why the Government was making it. “If Rudd and his Labor Government are serious, the detail of a sorry statement must include the true horror of the genocide that was planned against the Aboriginal peoples and what was carried out,” Mr Anderson, whose grandmother was taken from her family in 1914, said.

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