allegation that Clark had been a Soviet agent. The Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC), in 1997, released its Bringing Them Home report on the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families. The report found that between 10 per cent and 33 per cent of Aboriginal children had been forcibly separated from their parents between 1910 and 1970. The authors of the report stated that the policy of forced removals amounted to genocide and called for an apology to, and compensation for, the victims. Prime minister Howard offered his personal regret for the forced removals but he refused to offer a parliamentary apology, arguing that it might prejudice future legal actions and no government should be expected to apologise for the actions of previous governments. The release of the report and the government's response sparked a heated political, media and public debate about the facts of forced removals and the appropriate political response. The anthropologist Ron Brunton published a paper in 1998 criticising the HREOC inquiry on various grounds including that the inquiry has not tested the claims of witnesses against the historical record. In 2000, the government claimed that a maximum of 10 per cent of Aboriginal children had been separated from their parents and that the policy was lawful and well-intentioned. A number of historians, including Janet McCalman and Anna Haebich, contributed to the political and academic debate. Keith Windschuttle published a series of articles in 2000 in which he argued that claims of frontier massacres and the Aboriginal death toll in frontier violence had been exaggerated by historians. In a subsequent book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002) Windschuttle argued that there had been no genocide of Aboriginal Tasmanians and that historians had systematically misrepresented evidence about the nature and extent of violence against Aboriginal Tasmanians for political reasons. Geoffrey Blainey praised the book and it sparked a widespread and often acrimonious academic, media and public debate about settler violence against Aboriginal people and about Windschuttle's criticisms of particular historians. A new battlefront in the history wars opened in 2000 when the council of the National Museum of Australia commissioned the historian Graeme Davison to review the explanatory labels for the museum's inaugural exhibition to determine whether they amounted to "the reworking of Australian history into political correctness." Davison found no political bias in the labels and the exhibition went ahead with the opening of