A test of political courage: Yoorrook’s final reports demand action, not amnesia

Australia’s colonial era may be formally over but its legacies of inequality, land dispossession and systemic racism continue to shape daily life for First Peoples.

Last week, the Victorian Yoorrook Justice Commission delivered its two final reports to the Victorian governor, concluding the most ambitious effort yet to reckon with these injustices.

The reports, Yoorrook for Transformation and Yoorrook Truth Be Told, contain 100 detailed recommendations across five volumes. They deliver a devastating account of dispossession, family separation, cultural erasure and structural racism, past and present.

Their scope is historic. But the question remains: will they change anything?

A bold innovation in truth-telling

Yoorrook is not just another inquiry.

Established in 2021, it is Australia’s first formal truth commission and the only one globally to be established alongside a Treaty process in a settler-colonial democracy.

It was designed by the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria and has been led and shaped by Aboriginal communities.

Its mandate is wide: to investigate both historical and ongoing injustices across all areas of life from land, law, health and education to housing, finance and child protection.

Over the past four years, Yoorrook has compelled testimony from ministers and senior bureaucrats, visited prisons and out-of-home care facilities, and travelled across the state to conduct on-country truth-telling with Elders.

In the words of one witness, Aunty Stephanie Charles:

Our Land, Our Language, Our Lore and Our Lives have been denied for far too long. In order to move forward these must be recognised an respected. This is Yoo-rrook.

Why truth commissions matter

Truth commissions emerged most famously in South Africa, where they were used to document atrocities during apartheid.

In recent years, however, they’ve also appeared in stable democracies grappling with colonial legacies: Canada’s commission on residential schools, Belgium’s commission on its African empire, and multiple United States commissions examining slavery, segregation and systemic racism.

In postcolonial states such as Australia, truth-telling is particularly powerful and necessary, because harm has not only been inflicted but denied.

As anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner put it in 1968, Australia has long maintained a “great Australian silence” – a wilful forgetting of how the nation was built on the dispossession of others.

Yoorrook challenges this silence. It has created an official record of Victoria’s colonial and ongoing harms, and opened a rare space for Indigenous people to define harm on their own terms, including what justice and healing should look like.

Structural injustice laid bare

The commission’s final reports lay out both stories and statistics. These include:

• in the past, Victoria explicitly authorised child removals on racial grounds and controlled every aspect of Aboriginal life under protectionist laws
• today, the state still removes Aboriginal children at more than 20 times the rate of non-Indigenous children
• Aboriginal people remain vastly over-represented in police custody, prison populations and cases of public housing exclusion.

Yoorrook is connecting these dots, showing how the injustices of colonisation did not end but evolved into contemporary legal and institutional forms.

Importantly, the commission has not shied away from naming these harms. It has condemned Victoria’s systemic racism – including alleged genocide – and called for radical change not just recognition.

Among its recommendations are calls to return land and water to Traditional Owners, to embed First Peoples’ control over education and child protection, and to establish reparations and shared governance structures across public institutions.

Will this lead to real change?

Yoorrook’s reports could be transformative if acted on – but this is far from guaranteed.

The Canadian experience is instructive. While its Truth and Reconciliation Commission garnered attention, many Canadians today are unfamiliar with its findings and progress on its recommendations has been slow.

In Australia, there’s a similar risk that Yoorrook may preach to the choir while political leaders move on. Despite a public apology in 2008, most recommendations of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody remain unfulfilled.

Since then, more than 500 additional Indigenous people have died in custody.

We must resist the cycle of “truth without justice.”

In recent hearings, Yoorrook commissioners pressed ministers to move beyond rhetoric. While several public apologies were made, including from Victoria’s attorney-general and the police minister, the commission rightly warned apologies without action are hollow.

Where to from here?

The failure of the Voice referendum in 2023 showed just how contested questions of history, race and recognition remain in Australia.

But it also underscored the need for renewed engagement with the truth, not just in parliaments but in homes, schools, workplaces and media.

Yoorrook’s challenge is not only to shape policy but to shift public consciousness. In this sense, it must speak to all Victorians.

Without broader buy-in, even the best-designed truth commission risks being forgotten.

A test of political courage

Yoorrook has done its part. It has listened to more than 1,500 voices. It has built the record. It has made the case for transformation.

Now, the Victorian government and indeed all of us must decide what to do with that truth. Will we confront it? Will we act on it? Or will we retreat once more into silence?

Yoorrook has narrowed the range of permissible lies in this country. But narrowing lies is not the same as achieving justice. That next step is ours to take.