One of our first posts was about Australia’s National Day of Healing (aka Sorry Day). It happens every February 13, the anniversary of the Australian Parliament’s decision to apologize to the indigenous peoples they’d had screwed over and abused for so long. That apology, delivered by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2008, is a rare example of a superb political apology. There’s no weaselly dependence on the term “regret” instead of “sorry.” There is specificity: Rudd called the country’s longtime mistreatment of the aboriginal people a “blemished chapter in our nation’s history.” The address uses words like “suffering,” “injustice,” “indignity” and “degradation.” It doesn’t blame “political enemies” or that OTHER guy’s political party. It uses the term “successive generations,” making clear that racism is an ongoing — not eradicated — problem.

And in 2012, Queensland’s Premier apologized well for the country’s sad history of taking babies away from single mothers — Sumac covered that apology for SorryWatch.

Given Australia’s recent good apologies, it’s a huge bummer to have to report that these days Aussie citizens have taken to apologizing for their government.

Last week, people seeking political asylum were killed and injured in a riot in an Australian detention center. (It seems that the government hasn’t been entirely forthcoming about the circumstances under which 24-year-old Iranian asylum seeker Reza Barati died. But it seems to have involved being beaten to death with a piece of timber.) Yesterday, Indonesian officials said that Australian asylum seekers were being put into lifeboats and sent away, getting stranded at sea, even having their vessels blown up by Aussie troops. Over a thousand asylum seekers are currently being held in reputedly brutal conditions on an island in Papua, New Guinea. The government’s immigration minister insists on referring to asylum seekers as “illegals” and said in October, “I am not going to make any apologies for not using politically correct language to describe something that I am trying to stop.” Australians citizens are divided nearly in half as to whether asylum-seekers should be treated with even more severity.

Six days ago, an Australian social media consultant named Ryan Sheales started a tumblr called “Sorry Asylum Seekers.” People take pictures of themselves holding up homemade signs, saying that the Australian government is not acting in their name. (The associated Twitter hashtag is #notinmyname.) Sheales says that his blog doesn’t purport to answer political questions about how many newcomers Australia should accommodate or whether detention is appropriate. Instead, he says, he wants debate to occur “on a bedrock of humanity.” He writes:

Whatever your views on the Pacific, Malaysia or PNG solutions, surely we can all agree that basic human decency is a worthy objective?

However you assess Australia’s obligations under international law, surely we can all agree that as a rich country we should treat those in our care with respect?

The website is about saying sorry for harsh or inhumane treatment, which is entirely avoidable.

Australia has made mistakes in the past, and has tried to make amends. (And Americans certainly have no right to throw stones — no country is innocent of human rights abuses.) Here is another opportunity for a country to treat wronged people with decency and apologize for wronging them.

Finally: A nice thing about being a citizen in a democracy is being able to simultaneously apologize as an individual and petition your government to stand with you.