Editorial
New map for justice

Occasionally a sentence will arrive and through its gentle, balanced clauses, through the patience of its metre, it will suggest a fresh reality. The words will not be new but their force will be. It is in language, often, that a country finds its soul.

The final report of the Yoorrook Justice Commission begins with such a sentence, words that follow each other down a hillside towards reckoning. “We walk on stolen land: a truth etched into the soil, in the rivers that have carried stories of a people for millennia, and in the skies that have witnessed it all.”

The report continues: “The scars of colonial invasion – its massacres, violence and relentless erasure – are not confined to the past. They reside in the present, shaping the lives of First Peoples in Victoria today … Colonial systems have shapeshifted but never relinquished their grip. From the first footsteps of invaders to the halls of contemporary power, the machinery of dispossession persists. Its imprint is visible in land stolen and sold, in laws that segregated and silenced, in families torn apart, and in systems that dehumanised and oppressed.”

It is impossible to overstate the importance of this report. Politicians will ignore it at their peril. This is a fracture in the colonial project. It is a template for change. It is a work of staggering grace and persistence, of difficult truth and unyielding clarity.

The final summary report details a history that is still living. It marks the mass killings and disease. It names the sexual violence, the exclusion and erasure, the taking of language and children, the attempts at assimilation. It notes “a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups”. In three stark words it says the ultimate truth: “This was genocide.”

More than 1300 submissions were made to the commission. Hearings were held in a building alongside The Saturday Paper’s and on the street before and afterwards it was possible to see the weight of what was being done. This was the heavy work of telling the truth, of recording centuries of grief.

The recommendations are clear and good. They include urgent reforms to the child protection system and to criminal justice. There are further reforms to housing, health and equity. There is an outline for redress that includes recognition of economic loss, plus interest, as well as compensation for cultural loss.

The First Peoples’ Assembly must be continued, along with Treaty processes. The government must support accountability mechanisms and give decision-making powers to First Peoples on the policies and programs that affect them. The models proposed are “self-determined, empowering and healing”.

Australia’s response to colonisation is a story of continuous betrayal. For every promise made, there is the same one broken. Prime ministers have cried white tears and done nothing. In its years of steady work, enumerated and precise, this commission offers a new map for justice. There is no excuse for failing it again.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 5, 2025 as "New map for justice".

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