KG: This week's Spotlight focuses on lawyer Megan Davis. Megan is the director of the Indigenous Law Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. She's currently completing her PhD and is a strong advocate for the rights of Indigenous people.

WHY LAW?

Megan Davis, Director of Indigenous Law Centre, UNSW: Growing up we learned about how Aboriginal people were excluded or are excluded and their rights were excluded from the Constitution. So I wanted to learn a little bit more about the ways in which you can reform our public institutions to better accommodate Aboriginal people and Aboriginal people's rights, because I think it's a great indictment on the nation that we aren't formally recognised or have a presence in a founding document like the Constitution.

UNITED NATIONS FELLOWSHIP...

Megan Davis: The Indigenous Fellowship, I think, is - I probably look back at it now as the pinnacle of my career. It was a very exciting time to go and work at the UN. You got to learn a new language - I got to learn and speak French. But I think the most important thing was the UN human rights training, so we got to learn the entire UN system and how Aboriginal people back in Australia or back in any country could learn how to use the UN to better advance the rights of your people back in your country.

RUDD'S APOLOGY:

Megan Davis: This was a day for the stolen generations. It wasn't about the Northern Territory intervention, it wasn't about any other Indigenous issues, it was about acknowledging a wrong that the federal government and state governments had committed against a group of people.

STOLEN GENERATION'S COMPENSATION...

Megan Davis: Macklin has said, "Well, we would rather put the money into closing the gap," which is a really important thing, but what Macklin is talking about there is citizenship rights. We are entitled to that money for our health by virtue of being Australian citizens. That is a different issue to the stolen generations. They deserve that money as reparation, but we also deserve the money for closing the gap because we're Australian citizens. They are citizenship rights and I don't think that she should conflate the two of them.

LABOR GOVERNMENT'S PRIORITIES?

Megan Davis: Probably they will have to review the Northern Territory intervention a bit sooner than in a year's time. I think that the information, the evidence-based information that we are getting from out of the NT is that it's not running as successfully as the government is implying, so I think it would be really important for them to review that sooner, because of the impact of that upon people's lives.