Article by: Megan Davis AC

The public lament about the failure to implement the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in ­Custody ignores the one recommendation faithfully implemented for 35 years: reconciliation.

Recommendation 339 of 339 recommendations encouraged political leaders and parties to pursue “reconciliation” between the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities; a vague and ill-defined concept that matched what the Keating government had already committed to in its Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation bill.

National Reconciliation Week, which started on Wednesday, is a good opportunity to reflect on the past 35 years of Australian reconciliation since the Keating government introduced a formal legis­lated process in 1991.

Reconciliation was the thing Bob Hawke needed to cushion the blow for his failed promise of a treaty, and it was the hook the royal commission needed for the voluminous criminal justice recommendations it knew the states and territories could not afford to fund.

Reconciliation was and remains a finely executed get-out-of-jail free card.

Back then, in the ’90s, reconciliation was all the rage. The nascent movement that academics label “transitional justice” – developed during this period with post-conflict South African and Latin American countries, motivated by a desire to transition their societies from conflict and civil war, authoritarianism and dictatorship to peace – was conceiving of ways to do societal transition publicly, transparently and, more importantly, peacefully.

The truth-telling process was intended to transition perpetrators of crime, war or apartheid, and their victims, into a new society, living happily together under the rule of law.

The process aims to produce an official record of a war or civil conflict. The twin pillars of truth and justice meant that you tell your truth and justice follows. Yet four decades later, the evidence of the efficacy of these processes, despite the UN’s endorsement of “transitional justice”, remains thin.

Broken Promises

The Australian government adopted the language of reconciliation to manage disappointment from Aboriginal people after Hawke reneged on his promise. This promise was captured in the world-famous song by Yothu Yindi, Treaty.

That’s the genesis of Australian reconciliation: a broken promise.

The original title in the reconciliation bill was the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation and Justice, but the “and Justice” was deleted by bureaucrats concerned that it would raise expectations that a truth and justice process would lead to truth and justice.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart stands as an antidote to reconciliation. The level of community discomfort, concern and dis­agree­ment with the concept and framework of reconciliation was acute.

The Uluru Statement dialogues questioned the utility of reconciliation as an effective framework and there was visceral community resentment at having to sit on Reconciliation Action Plan committees (although everyone agreed, including me, we all feel obliged to do it). If you peer closely through the abundance of commodified reconciliation LinkedIn waffle you’ll find this sentiment about reconciliation commonly expressed.

The other notable takeaway of the constitutional dialogues is that delegates were not fixated on a standalone truth process or truth commission. Rather, the focus of plenary conversation was more pragmatic, about the teaching of Australian history in a way that is more inclusive of Aboriginal ­history.

Participants shared many histories from their regions. And they shared stories of local collaborations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities including descendants of frontier killers and commemorations of frontier massacres and other stories of cele­brating coexistence. Aboriginal groups spoke about their work with local councils and libraries and local historical groups.

This grassroots community work is rich and nuanced and quiet, far from the madding crowd. Many groups said they wanted control over their stories and they would happily share their stories with the nation, but when they choose. This is one of the major criticisms of “truth-telling” globally, that it is top down and elite driven and doesn’t engage properly with ordinary citizens and eventually people feel resentful at having told their story.

Truth-telling is one of those nauseatingly ubiquitous verbal nouns post-referendum, invoked so frequently and capaciously that it is now stripped of its substantive political content. There is a move, in the post-referendum environment, from those involved in sub-national truth processes, to persuade the Prime Minister to set up a standalone truth-telling process.

Truth-Telling

This demand for truth-telling is not universally supported by First Nations communities but of course there is no way of accurately gauging community sentiment as there is no voice; no federal representative entity that has legitimacy via a ballot box. Rather, in the post-referendum, players in Indigenous affairs have happily reverted to the status quo where those with access and proximity to power continue to position their own interests while purporting to speak on behalf of community.

We are five years out from the end of the second version of Closing the Gap, which virtually all experts agree is failing. What should the focus of the nation’s energy and resources be on? More versions of the truth or access to health services, electricity and water and a safe home in Aboriginal communities? Most communities are in survival mode. Some will say this is a false dichotomy and that you can have both but we all know that big, state-run commissions of inquiry suck the energy and resources out of everything. Politically, with the cost of living, geopolitics and the rise of the far right, it does not seem like the right time for Australia to be inflaming the culture wars. And it will inflame those wars because history is always contested.

I’m sure Labor will legislate a truth process after the next election but in the meantime reconciliation endures. Reconciliation is politically attractive because there is no destination. It can be continually discussed and promoted without requiring governments to confront harder questions of power and accountability, and, fortunately for the current crop of politicians, the failed referendum is interpreted as an endorsement of less scrutiny and accountability of both the executive and parliament. Occasionally we hear noncommittal demands for an “audit” of funding and failing Closing the Gap programs, but it soon quietens because the proximity to the failed referendum is enough foil for scrutiny. They’re taking a bet no one cares.

In the constitutional regional dialogues of 2016-17, elders said “reconciliation” is the wrong word. Reconciliation is about the restoration of friendly relations after a dispute. They said, how can we be reconciling when we have never met? It is why the Uluru Statement from the Heart was written and issued to the Australian people, as an olive branch, a call to action, to meet with us, discuss our unresolved grievances and to “walk with us”. The Uluru Statement was not handed to a prime minister. It was an attempt to meet without politicians, without the interference of the state. It was about belonging and understanding and how we all fit in the story of Australia.

I spent the past few years at Harvard Law School as the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Chair in Australian Studies, studying the history of reconciliation, and where it has landed us as a ­nation. There’s a Harvard scholar who studied Australia’s unique ­reconciliation process, Charlotte Lloyd, who concluded that Australian-style reconciliation is unusual worldwide because it’s the only process that focuses on private action: voluntary gestures from private entities and private individuals. Her research found reconciliation Australian-style obscures the role the state can play because Australia’s version asks nothing of the state, and she concluded it has failed to educate the Australian nation about the role of “political and economic structures in ongoing racialised hierarchies and has constrained structural reform as a strategy for combating racialised injustice”.

This argument is endorsed by a 2026 Australian research paper, “Reconciliation or reputation: critical analysis of commercial sector commitments and framing in reconciliation action plans” by Petrina Leersen, Bronwyn Fredericks, Andrew D. Brown, Jennifer Browne and Yin Paradies, who analysed reconciliation and Reconciliation Action Plans in Australia and found that while RAPs can provide entry points for engagement with Indigenous issues, they reinforce existing power relations. The study found RAPs work as reputational shields for corporate social responsibility, permitting organisations to claim their investments in reconciliation while structural relations of power and profit remain intact.

This is a legacy of John Howard. His policies, whether I agree with them or not, have endured to this day. Howard took office 30 years ago, and when the statutory reconciliation process concluded he rejected the outputs entirely, especially the call for Indigenous rights and recognition. Howard introduced a false reconciliation dichotomy – between citizenship rights and Indigenous rights – that was critiqued at the time but everyone has now acculturated to. His preference was for citizenship rights. When Howard separated the two, the reconciliation movement followed Howard and that’s why Reconciliation Action Plans were invented.

Howard also saw off the notion of Indigenous political representation with the abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.

And on Thursday the Minister for Indigenous Australians, Malarndirri McCarthy, said her government had moved on from the voice – the right to self-determination – the first government since 1967 to disavow the importance of a federal representative entity as critical to the good quality of laws and policies. Instead, their preference is consultation with incorporated entities which they fund.

These nuanced and critical discussions about issues with reconciliation are, as ever, shielded from public view because communities still have no voice, and reconciliation is a framework that is adopted and championed by the most powerful and elite in society.

It is an irony that the only recommendation implemented from the maligned Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody is reconciliation. We know incarceration rates have soared and child removals continue apace because of the failure to implement the other 338 recommendations. Yet despite the appalling statistics, the elites call for more truth-telling.