In October last year, at one of the new Queensland Premier’s first post-election media conferences, David Crisafulli confirmed the LNP’s pre-election promise to disband the Indigenous Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry, a reconciliation measure he had previously supported.
He said that following the failure of the national vote for a Voice to Parliament, overwhelming rejected in Queensland, he didn’t want any more division among Queenslanders that the inquiry would apparently engender.
Truth-telling inquiries were established in several states to examine the impact of colonialism on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. This was one of the proposals of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The aim of the inquiry was to give First Nations people the opportunity to tell their stories. Colonial policies still reverberate through the loss of inter-generational wealth and harm causing loss, poverty and grief, and many elders have raw memories of mistreatment and exploitation.
While there are reports and books written about the stolen children, stolen wages, high imprisonment rates, inter-generational poverty, etc., there has been no major attempt to put continuing Indigenous disadvantage in the context of colonialisation, a move that may have provided fresh insights.
The inquiry’s hearings to date have been positive and optimistic. There was nothing that suggested a desire of witnesses to allocate blame. Rather, witnesses wanted to explain what happened to them and their feelings of loss and grief and to point out that past policies were poorly considered, usually because Indigenous input was neither sought nor heard.
Who would consider this process divisive and why? And what will be the longer-term implications of its abandonment?
This decision so early in its tenure does not bode well for how the government will operate over the next four years. The aim and purpose of the Voice to Parliament is different from the aim and purpose of the truth-telling inquiry. The failure of the voice referendum may in part be attributable to a lack of understanding of the experiences of First Nations people under colonialism and is certainly attributable to strong political opposition, the reason for the demise of many a referendum. There was no such opposition to the truth-telling inquiry. In fact, there was bipartisan support for the legislation that established it in 2023.
The government has stated it has a mandate to abolish the inquiry because of its election win, despite the decision to end the inquiry getting little pre-election publicity.
Is the government concerned that division would result from:
- knowing the truth about our history?
- understanding how Indigenous people were affected, not just by dispossession in the 18th and 19th centuries, but by the more recent policies that confined them to reserves and exploited their labour and separated families and the continuing disadvantage they experience?
- being better able to develop new ways to combat Indigenous disadvantage in the future with greater understanding of the past – to reduce poverty, improve health outcomes, lower imprisonment rates and increase employment opportunities?
Rather than creating division, the inquiry is more likely to help bridge divides by explaining clearly what Indigenous people went through. We should not fear or turn away from the truth. Many non-Indigenous Queenslanders would be unaware of the often traumatic experiences of Indigenous people.
The new government could at least have allowed the inquiry to continue until it had spoken to the inquiry members, listened to the public and reviewed the legislation.
Of course, overcoming Indigenous disadvantage requires direct support and practical solutions as Premier Crisafulli argues. But the government must work with communities for any strategies to succeed, and his premature decision undermines the trust it needs from First Nations people to make this work. The decision once again exposes political ignorance of Indigenous concerns and makes evident the rationale for the Voice to Parliament.
Brisbane will be in the spotlight over the next eight years as it prepares for the 2032 Olympics. It sends a message to the international community that Indigenous Queenslanders not only experience worse social conditions than non-Indigenous Queenslanders, but that they are deprived of a formal opportunity to speak about their history.
Many Indigenous and non-Indigenous people have given so much to establish the inquiry and will be sorely frustrated by the decision which effectively stops expression of Queensland’s history because it might upset apparently sensitive non-Indigenous Queenslanders; government departments have done significant work in preparing and giving evidence of value to understanding past government policies; and many elders have appeared before it at considerable emotional distress. Many more people have expressed the strong desire to have their chance to speak, and once again, white politicians have destroyed this opportunity – another slap down.
Tony Woodyatt is a retired solicitor, who, from 1993, at Caxton Legal Centre, represented Lesley Williams in Supreme Court proceedings against the State of Queensland for breach of fiduciary duty. Aunty Lesley Williams led the campaign to claim ‘stolen wages’ and justice for Aboriginal workers and was the first public witness before the Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry in September 2024.
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