Only months out from a federal election, the challenge of truth-telling in Australia seems as daunting as ever. There is undeniable evidence that the nation has turned away from the three core principles of the Uluru statement from the heart: voice, treaty, truth.
Since the defeat of the voice referendum, the government has made it clear that it is walking back from the prime minister’s commitment to implement the Uluru statement “in full”, which he made explicit in his election victory speech. Labor has also withdrawn the $20m previously allocated in the federal budget for a Makarrata commission that would have overseen treaty making and a national truth-telling commission.
At the Garma festival, Anthony Albanese endorsed the “principle” of Makarrata but stopped short of backing a truth and justice commission. Nor would his government commit to a treaty. This is the stance he will take to the federal election this year.
Peter Dutton, meanwhile, has been even more explicit in his rejection of the Uluru statement, emboldened by the referendum result. Refusing to go to Garma, he told journalists in Perth: “Under a government I lead … there will be no Makarrata” [and] “there will be no revisiting of truth-telling. The $450m the government wasted in the voice was an outrage.”
From a federal perspective, the prospects of official, government-led truth-telling in coming years is exceedingly low. While the Coalition condemns treaty and truth-telling, Labor appears unwilling to expend any more political capital on either idea. Indigenous affairs has reverted to focusing primarily on “practical” issues, a much-vaunted position during the Howard era.
In the lead-up to the election, Dutton has sought to continue the divisive politics he used so successfully in the referendum, harping on the unifying importance of Anzac Day and Australia Day, both of which he prefers wrapped in uncontested commemoration and celebration.
Last week Dutton announced on Sky News that, if elected, he will not stand in front of the Aboriginal flag during press conferences. “I just don’t think that we can be a united nation and a unified nation without the thought of standing behind anything other than one flag.”
Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price immediately supported Dutton’s statement, reminding journalists that on the night of their victory in the 2023 referendum, she and Dutton deliberately chose to stand in front of one flag only – the Australian flag.
Given the vicissitudes of politics, Dutton and Price could both be absent from the national stage very shortly. But their political fate is beside the point. What matters is that their statements are calculated to appeal to a constituency that their parties’ internal polling suggests will win them votes, and this constituency will not disappear as quickly as Dutton or Price.
Aside from the well-worn culture war strategy, what’s significant about Dutton’s remarks is that he is willing to use First Nations Australians as objects of political advantage and division. As a vulnerable minority – even more so after the referendum defeat – his comments are designed to marginalise them further, while tarring his political opponents as weak and captive to “woke” sectional interests.
The truth is that Dutton’s vision of Australia rests on the disappearance of First Nations’ people – their invisibility becomes the currency of their inclusion in the nation. Any suggestion that they have a unique status as Australia’s First People is marked down as a threat to national unity. His comments on Australian history also betray a deep fear and resentment of truth-telling. He simply doesn’t want to talk about it. Instead, like the sections of the electorate to which his comments are directed, he looks ahead patriotically and pretends that the past is the past – unless it’s the Anzac legend, the virtues of Australia’s British heritage or heroic narratives of migrant farmers and tradies.
Now that the Albanese government has left the task of truth-telling and treaty making to the states and territories, the current state of affairs is mixed at best. Only in South Australia – where the state’s Voice to Parliament has been legislated and elected – and Victoria, where treaty legislation was passed in 2018 and the Yoorook Justice Commission has been tasked with conducting “the first formal truth-telling process into historical and ongoing injustices experienced by First Nations People”, has significant progress been made. By any measure, the path to truth-telling in Australia is thorny and long, forever prey to shifting political alignments.
Beyond the realm of politics there is some ground for hope, with countless local and regional truth-telling initiatives already in place. Churches, schools, hospitals, libraries, galleries, museums and universities – as the University of Melbourne’s recent publication Dhoombak Goobgoowana forcefully demonstrates – have also begun work on acknowledging their complicity in the oppression and dispossession of First Nations’ Australians.
Just days before the referendum, Noel Pearson reflected that Australia was a “hard country now” because it seemed that nothing could persuade non-Indigenous Australians that the constitution did not “entirely belong to them”. Given the undeniable extent of this hardness and its current purchase in Australian politics, it’s tempting to abandon the federal arena altogether when it comes to truth-telling and treaty. But this course of action isn’t viable.
We need only listen to the voices of Indigenous people recorded in the Uluru Dialogues to understand the importance of truth-telling for First Nations people. These demands will not go away. Nor will the broader challenges of truth-telling – not only to listen to First Nations’ voices but to ask other Australians to interrogate the reasons for their ignorance of their country’s history, and their complacency in not bothering to find out.
For all the impediments and flaws of the national political process, only a federal stage carries the capacity for lasting impact, as Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations demonstrated. The yet-to-be realised call for a National Resting Place in Canberra would be one powerful example of national truth-telling.
When Prof Marcia Langton joined Albanese and other Indigenous leaders in Canberra in March 2023 to announce the final constitutional amendment that would be put to referendum, she reflected on the meaning of truth for First Nations people. Her words shortly after the referendum remain a powerful reminder of the ongoing importance of truth-telling to Australia’s future:
“Galarrwuy Yunupingu ... taught me many years ago [that] you know when you’re being told the truth, because the truth burns. And truth is very much an Aboriginal value and the Torres Strait Islander value, across the country.”
Mark McKenna is a writer and historian. This is an edited extract of an essay that will appear in a forum on truth-telling in History Australia early next year
