There's more to Truth-telling than Truth-telling: Parliamentary Committee Inquiry

'Truth-telling processes are important mechanisms for all Australians to gain a better understanding and appreciation of the impact and effects of colonisation on this continent.' (Dr Harry Hobbs)

The Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs has continued its work on the Truth and Justice Commission Bill 2024. (Earlier post.) The Committee had a public hearing in Sydney on 18 February and the witnesses included Professor Megan Davis (one of Defending Country's distinguished Patrons), Professor Gabrielle Appleby, Dr Shireen Morris, and Karen Mundine, CEO of Reconciliation Australia.

From the wide-ranging evidence, we have extracted from the Proof Transcript some remarks about the nature of Truth-telling.

WEH Stanner, Australian anthropologist and 'the great Australian silence': we will do a separate post linking some remarks in the JSCATSIA hearing evidence to a recent article by Professor Bain Attwood of Monash University.

We urge readers to delve further into the submissions and evidence put to the Committee.

‍KAREN MUNDINE, CEO, Reconciliation Australia

'I think the flip side to truth-telling is truth listening and truth acting' (page 24, Proof Transcript).

'People are tired of telling their story with no outcome. People feel that they are not being heard or that things are not changing, and with that comes the time sensitivity of people who are passing, where those stories are being lost or those opportunities to tell their stories have been lost. (page 24)

'I think the point—and this is where truth-telling comes into it—is grounding this around place and people. Part of that also then becomes: Are we talking stolen generations? Are we talking about health outcomes? If you're talking about people and place, we touch on all of these things, because it's about people's lives, people's stories and people's history. That's what truth-telling can do: help to unlock those stories and help to unlock those pathways back into the socioeconomics, the lived experience, the health outcomes, the education outcomes and the workplace outcomes.' (page 26)

'I think any commission needs to define for itself what the scope of its work will be and define for itself what will be considered truth-telling. It can just be people's stories; it can be memorials; it can be a plaque; or it can be just an acknowledgement that, in the building of a company, a whole heap of Aboriginal people were displaced, which allowed that company to go on and become the bigger company it is. (page 27)

PROFESSOR HEIDI NORMAN, Research Professor and Director, Indigenous Land and Justice Research Group, University of New South Wales

Truth-telling is four things: justice, healing and reconciliation, history, and needs to be done in a particular way.

'The strong consensus emerging from our research participants was that truth-telling in Australia must be led by First Nations Peoples; engage with First Nations perspectives; recognise the ongoing impacts of the past and present; must be ongoing, not a one-off event; and aim to achieve change, whether that's attitudinal, institutional, or structural. Perhaps most importantly, truth-telling is as much about the future as it is about the past. While acknowledging the challenges involved in truth-telling, it's important to remain optimistic about the possibilities for change.' (page 30)

'[O]ne of the reasons we developed the scheme that says truth-telling is very much a part of our time is because not everything is truth-telling. For example—I'm just making up an example—a grievance that you might share about the operations of your Aboriginal Land Council is not truth-telling; it's a grievance. If there is a concern about expenditure, you might think about that as issues of fraud. Perhaps there is some movement into truth-telling. What we wanted to think about is that truth-telling occurs at different levels. There's a human rights approach, which is the justice dimension and there's truth-telling, healing and reconciliation, which is much more local and relationship based. It addresses a sense of hurt on the part of individuals or families. Then there are historical truths, which is thinking about history and a greater understanding of history to achieve change.' (page 31)

'The story of Australian history is one of contact history and is a dominant colonial story. In the last 50 years there's been a phenomenal amount of what is termed "Aboriginal history" in response to that provocation of the great Australian silence. There have been 50 years where you could say that the silences have been filled, Aboriginal history has been restored and there has been a renovation, of sorts, of the story of the nation. But we are reminded—say, in the Voice referendum—of the lack of awareness. We are also reminded when our students join Aboriginal studies or Aboriginal history and politics subjects. They continue to ask, "How come we didn't know this?" So there is something there about what is happening in our schools, in our universities and in the wider public about the level of awareness of Australian history as a shared history.' (page 32)

‍DR ANNE MAREE PAYNE, Senior Research Fellow, Indigenous Land and Justice Research Group, University of New South Wales

'One of the very strong findings from our research is that people didn't want truth-telling just to be a talkfest. They did want it to lead to some significant change. Whilst it's important to have the conversations—and I would call out and acknowledge the work that Reconciliation Australia is doing at that community level in building relationships, which I think are critical for changing hearts and minds and working for a better future at a local level—you do need systems and processes so that you can feed this important information into something.' (pages 31-32)

'Karen from Reconciliation Australia and other witnesses spoke earlier about truth-listening as being as important as truth-telling. Our research certainly identified a lack of understanding about truth-telling in the non-Indigenous respondents to the study, even though they saw themselves as being very knowledgeable and well informed about Aboriginal issues. They said they didn't know how to get involved in truth-telling, and they didn't understand what the role of non-Indigenous people in truth-telling was. So there's a huge amount of education and capacity-building work that we feel needs to go on to get that engagement from the broader community. We think that's going to be the game changer—getting that broader engagement and getting people involved to recognise the injustice of previous experiences and to want to see different outcomes in the future.' (page 32)

'[T]ruth-telling isn't an end in itself. Truth-telling in itself is not justice. It's a pathway or a process that leads to a more just future. Truth-telling is not just tying it up with a nice, neat bow and saying that it's done. It's a way to get to what comes next, if that makes sense. It's not an outcome in itself.'

BLAKE CANSDALE, National Director, Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (ANTAR)

'[I]t goes to truth readiness. This is a concept I mentioned just before to Senator Cox, and it's in our submission several times: truth listening and truth readiness. We talk almost entirely about truth-telling, and it is critically important to focus on the need of our people to tell our stories. The reality is, though, that if a story is told and there are no ears to receive that story, it potentially lacks substance, and it's missing a big part of the picture.

'Truth-telling alone does not lead to justice; it must be truly heard, reckoned with and acted upon. This is the essence of truth listening, which requires non-Indigenous Australians to confront how they continue to benefit from dispossession and systemic inequality. Without truth listening, truth-telling risks becoming performative, offering a sense of catharsis without real structural change and reinforcing the idea that the injustices of the past have already been reconciled.

'In our submission, we define truth listening as a deeply unsettling political practice that demands action. It requires reckoning with ongoing colonial harm and working towards redistributing power and resources in ways that support justice for self-determination for First Nations peoples. The burden of truth-telling cannot rest solely on our communities. Non-Indigenous Australians represent 97 per cent—give or take—of the population. Those individuals and wider Australia, as I mentioned before, are a critical component of the effectiveness of truth listening and any truth-telling commission. They must be in a position to genuinely listen and to respond to those truths that are told meaningfully and in a justice oriented manner. Without this, truth-telling risks being reduced to a symbolic exercise rather than the transformative process that it is intended to be and, indeed, needs to be for our people. This is why truth readiness is central to our proposed model.' (page 41)

JESSICA JOHNSTON, Research and Policy Officer, ANTAR

'How do you ready the 97 per cent to not only listen to the three per cent but be prepared to ask themselves really hard questions about the ways they benefit from dispossession, historical and ongoing, and what their responsibility is as a settler in dismantling those systems that continue to oppress? I think that's exactly what this work is. First of all, you can't be speaking if you're listening. If you want to cultivate truth listening among non-Indigenous people, non-Indigenous people need to stop talking so much and listen to create space and then do the hard—probably, in the beginning, largely internal—work of dismantling ways of thinking that are everywhere.' (page 43)

DR HARRY HOBBS, Private capacity

'Truth-telling processes are important mechanisms for all Australians to gain a better understanding and appreciation of the impact and effects of colonisation on this continent ... [T]ruth-telling must be done for a purpose, and two key points stand out. First, public processes of truth-telling need to be more than an idle historical exercise. They need to be directed in the here and now, drawing a bridge from the past to the present to identify and explain how processes of colonisation continue to reverberate today—that is, how the destruction of country and the displacement of community contributes to the socioeconomic gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

'Second, public processes of truth-telling must be geared towards action, rather than sitting books and reports on dusty shelves. As I'm sure you've heard today and in previous hearings, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples do not merely ask for the truth. They also ask that non-Indigenous Australians do something with that knowledge. Truth-telling is not merely about a historical record. It's about working together to build a better future.' (page 46)

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Picture credits: Senator Dorinda Cox, Greens WA (left), who introduced the Bill (WikimediaCommons/adendagostino/Creative Commons);
Senator Jana Stewart, ALP Vic, Chair of JSCATSIA (supplied)