The final Yoorrook report delivers unapologetic truths

Victoria has been delivered a blunt message by its First Peoples: it’s time to ante up.

The final recommendations of the Yoorrook Justice Commission call for fundamental change across nearly every major area of public policy in this state.

Travis Lovett completes the Walk for Truth, which began on May 25 in Portland in south-west Victoria and ended at Parliament House on June 18.Credit: Justin McManus

From how the water and land is managed, to the administration and governance of critical services in health, education, criminal justice and family violence, and down to the number of houses built through existing government programs, the Yoorrook recommendations offer a radical blueprint for Aboriginal self-determination.

They also make clear this can only be done at a significant cost to the state, with unquantified money needed to redress past and ongoing injustices and fund Aboriginal control over their own affairs into the future.

The projected cost of redress includes economic loss and non-economic, cultural loss, plus interest owed on both. Given it is 174 years since Victoria was declared a colony, that will amount to quite a tidy sum.

To finance greater self-determination, including an expanded role for the First Peoples’ Assembly currently negotiating a series of treaties with the Allan government, the commissioners recommend the establishment of a new fund, taken as a share of land, water and natural resource-related revenues.

How much might such a fund hold?

Amid the bleak familiarity of statistics showing that Aboriginal people are nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer, three times as likely to die by suicide, 10 times more likely to access homeless services and far less likely to finish high school, another figure stands out.

The report notes that since 2010, the state has received $83 billion from water-related revenue and none of this money has flowed to traditional owners.

The commissioners further recommend that the Victorian government open its books to the First Peoples’ Assembly and other traditional owner groups so they can see what other revenue is collected by the state from freehold and Crown land and waterways, renewable resources and minerals, gas, petroleum, fisheries and forests.

Deep in the body of the full Yoorrook report, a document that runs beyond 450 pages, a single paragraph hints at a split that emerged within the commission.

It notes that three of the commissioners, deputy chair Sue-Anne Hunter, Maggie Walter and retired Federal Court judge Anthony North, “did not approve of the inclusion of the key findings in the final report”.

However, the five commissioners, led by chair Eleanor Bourke, unanimously backed the 100 recommendations, nearly all of which carry a 12 to 24-month deadline for the state government to meet.

Bourke outlined the case for reform in a short, elegant foreword to the report.

“Our lands were taken, and with them, something deeper: the essence of culture, and the ability to continue traditional practices and maintain identity,” she said. “Death, violence, disease, dispossession and government control changed the landscape.

“Real transformation must come from First Peoples leading the solutions and the decisions that affect our lives. Treaty and self-determination are essential for this.”

The report serves as the first, official history of Victoria since colonisation as told by First Peoples, and makes clear that the work of truth telling and treaty are unfinished business. Its first recommendation is for the government to provide the First Peoples’ Assembly funds to establish ongoing truth-telling to build on the public record chronicled by the commission.

The First Peoples’ Assembly, an elected body of traditional owners, also looms large in the report as a peak authority in Aboriginal affairs. One of the Yoorrook recommendations is for the Victorian government to establish a permanent First Peoples representative body “with powers at all levels of politics and decision-making”.

Given that Victoria’s Coalition parties are already publicly opposed to the idea of the First Peoples’ Assembly being given the kind of advisory role that the architects of the proposed Voice to federal parliament had in mind, any government move to concentrate power within the organisation will be fiercely contested.

But against these political realities, the final report of Yoorrook, Australia’s first formal truth-telling process established four years ago with the powers of a royal commission, is unapologetic in tone and demand.

“We don’t need permission to tell the truth,” the commissioners conclude. “And we don’t need to wait to imagine something better.

“Victoria has been presented with an opportunity to take the lessons from our past and apply them to a shared future: a new line of history where guilt and shame are not our concern, but what happens next is.”

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