Yoorrook report oversteps mark

There is a fatal flaw in the Yoorrook Justice Commission’s final report to the Victorian government. “The past is the present,” the commissioners state, tying disadvantage now to the undoubted historical wrongs done to Indigenous Australians. It is the basis of their case for economic, political, social and cultural self-determination embedded at all levels of public service, led by an elected assembly and encapsulated in a treaty with the state government.

It will fail for the reason the voice to parliament was rejected by the Australian people at the 2023 referendum. A decisive majority demonstrated no appetite for denying, as the national anthem puts it, that “we are one and free”. As prime minister Kevin Rudd put it in the 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations, “profound grief, suffering and loss (were inflicted) on these our fellow Australians”.

There is also a sleight of hand in the report, making the case that the memory of the destruction of cultures weighs so hard on Indigenous Australians now that a parallel government is needed to lift their burden. The commission presents 100 recommendations, many focused on symbolism that will do nothing to reduce Indigenous imprisonment or improve health and housing, employment and education. Despite this, Rueben Berg, co-chairman of the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria, said on Tuesday: “When it comes to issues facing First Peoples, we need a different approach, one that draws on the expertise of First Peoples to design and deliver practical solutions to local challenges. That’s what treaty is all about.”

It is also exactly what the Coalition of Peaks is doing without a political assembly. The 80 or so grassroots community organisations that make up the Peaks work on the federal government’s Closing the Gap program and are “accountable to our communities, not governments … we know how to best advance our lives”. Ideologues who cannot accept the voice result may not like it, but the Peaks approach is politically practical while the Yoorrook commission’s call for “the transition to genuine nation-to-nation relationships” is not. As for those of its recommendations that call for specific improvements to the lives of Indigenous Australians, they are all matters for government now. Indigenous Australians in Victoria working to build careers and set their children up for long and happy lives are entitled to all the assistance government provides. They have a right to see their cultures respected and their histories acknowledged. And Premier Jacinta Allan knows it, responding with a back-covering “we share the Yoorrook Justice Commission’s goals of truth and justice and will carefully consider the commission’s final findings and recommendations”.

The history of settler society is far more nuanced than appears in the commission report; British governments were not indifferent to the rights of Indigenous Australians. It is incontestable that the arrival of 19th-century settlers was a calamity for millennia-old Australian economies and cultures. But the Yoorrook Justice Commission’s recommendations must be judged on how enacting them would improve the circumstances of disadvantaged Indigenous Australians now and in the future. Awareness, indeed anger, among Indigenous Australians today at what occurred in the past should be recognised – it was the point of Mr Rudd’s apology, which is still recognised in Sorry Day. But history cannot be undone; guilt is not hereditary. “Let the dead Past bury its dead,” as poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow put it.